Round five of the 2026 Formula 3 season once again proved how unpredictable this series can be, with its most dominant win in history in the sprint race followed by one of its most bizarre in the feature race. Feeder Series reveals the five things we learned from the past weekend at Silverstone.

By Daniele Spadi

Trident were on top form right from the beginning: Matteo De Palo set the second fastest time in practice behind Campos Racing’s Ernesto Rivera, before Freddie Slater took his maiden pole position in the series on home turf. However, it was Campos Racing and ART Grand Prix who shared the winning spoils during the weekend.

On Saturday, Ugo Ugochukwu won the sprint with the biggest gap over second place in FIA Formula 3 history, with Yevan David taking a historic result for his home country of Sri Lanka with his maiden podium ahead of Théophile Naël. A feature race full of twists and turns saw Matteo De Palo cross the finish line in first, though the Italian was later disqualified for a technical infringement. That, plus additional post-race penalties, handed the victory to Maciej Gładysz, who won for the first time ahead of championship hopefuls Slater and Ugochukwu.

• Pre-weekend roundtable: Naël: Tough Austria qualifying a case of ‘wrong place at the wrong time’
• Qualifying report and quotes: Slater storms to maiden F3 pole on home turf at Silverstone
• Sprint race report and quotes: Ugochukwu delivers F3’s most dominant win ever in superb Silverstone sprint 
• Feature race report and quotes: Gładysz inherits shock F3 win in Silverstone after De Palo disqualified, Rivera penalised

1. De Palo roars back – even if the results don’t show it

To say Matteo de Palo’s rookie F3 campaign had been troublesome would be putting it mildly. A crash in the opening qualifying of the season in Melbourne left him effectively out of contention for the points in the first two races, and he struggled to bounce back after the unexpectedly long three-month break that followed.

De Palo, the 2025 FRegional runner-up who challenged Slater all year for the title, naturally faced high expectations as he prepared for his F3 debut with frontrunners Trident in 2026. Instead, he ended up having the worst start to a season for any Trident F3 driver in the team’s history – two 14th-place finishes being his best results. 

Silverstone offered a chance to right those wrongs. De Palo had never raced at the 5.891-kilometre track that Slater calls home, but novelty proved no obstacle to renaissance. After an inspired sprint race in which he only lost out on a podium at the very last corner, the Italian was the standout performer of Sunday’s feature.

Starting from fifth, he quickly found himself in the lead by the end of lap four, and though Slater retook first place three laps later, the Italian’s focus didn’t waver. Instead, De Palo roared back, overtaking his teammate on lap 12 and fending him off in a thrilling last-lap shootout for what looked like his maiden win at the time.

“It’s been a really hard start of the season, obviously not getting the results for things out of my control,” he told Feeder Series afterwards. “It was not easy, also mentally, but I managed to always keep focusing on myself and believing in myself, and that was the most important thing for me.”

In the end, the Italian was disqualified after his diffuser was found to be below the minimum height by 3 millimetres. The post-race disqualification may have slashed his points haul, but De Palo proved he could shine when it counted. A redemption victory may feel even more special than the one he lost today.

2. Gładysz stays out of trouble and wins

Before the start of his rookie campaign, Maciej Gładysz had flown under the radar for many. In our pre-season poll, only 38 per cent of voters thought he would be the top ART Grand Prix driver at the end of the season. Yet he leads the trio after the first half of 2026 having shown both speed and maturity in his first race weekends as an F3 driver – and when the two combined in Silverstone, he struck gold.

The Pole lined up in eighth place for the feature race but quickly showed that his pace was worth more than that when he climbed up to sixth by the end of lap five. Throughout the race, he made hard but fair moves, always leaving space for his opponents to defend.

Ultimately, this turned out to be the key to victory. Following Naël’s 10-second penalty and Slater’s struggles on the final lap, Gładysz found himself in third place by the end of the feature. Ernesto Rivera’s five-second penalty and De Palo’s late disqualification then promoted him to an unlikely race win – his first since the opening round of the 2025 Eurocup-3 season.

Gładysz has now jumped up to sixth in the drivers’ standings with 44 points. Not only that, the 18-year-old’s win is a reminder that sometimes, a calm and collected performance is the perfect answer to the chaotic world of Formula 3.

3. Slater loses another tense battle

After the series of penalties that came through after the feature race, Freddie Slater was promoted back to second place, a position he had occupied for most of the race.

However, the Briton’s fourth feature race podium out of five tries does not erase the fact he had lost a pivotal wheel-to-wheel battle in the dying stages of a race for the second round in a row.

In a thrilling last-lap battle with De Palo that included contact on multiple occasions, Slater went off the ideal racing line entering Copse, costing him valuable ground and dropping him to what was sixth place on track. After Rivera, James Wharton and Théophile Naël were hit with time penalties and De Palo was disqualified, he did jump back up to second, but the on-track fight had been lost.

A similar situation unfolded in Austria, where Slater fought tooth and nail with championship leader Ugo Ugochukwu before the latter got the better of the Briton on the final lap. With Slater quickly emerging as a title contender and one of the fastest racers on the grid, he will want to tidy up his wheel-to-wheel game if he wants to start getting the upper hand over his rivals consistently – and take his maiden F3 win in the process.

4. A historic day for Sri Lanka

Throughout his career, Yevan David has always been very vocal about the importance of racing under the flag of Sri Lanka. Though he was born in London, England, the 18-year-old has always felt a strong connection with the land his parents are from.

His love for his home country was evident at the 2024 FIA Motorsport Games, when he took pole in the F4 Cup before finishing third in the qualifying race and 11th in the main race.

In 2026, the reigning Euroformula Open runner-up had struggled to get up to speed with his AIX, never finishing higher than 19th place in any of the first eight races. Then a strong performance in qualifying at Silverstone – the closest he will have to a home race – put him in 11th overall and on the front row for the reverse-grid sprint race.

Though his AIX Racing car clearly lacked the pace compared with the likes of Campos Racing, Prema Racing and Trident, David went above and beyond to defend second position in the sprint, especially in the final laps. As he succeeded in his quest, he was able to achieve what looked to be a near-impossible feat earlier this season: to bring Sri Lanka to the F3 podium.

5. What happened to Van Amersfoort Racing?

Up until Silverstone, Van Amersfoort Racing had been one of the best-performing teams of the season. A one-two finish to start off the season in the Melbourne sprint and two additional podiums across Monaco and Barcelona left the Dutch outfit in second position in the teams’ standings after the first three rounds, just 27 points off leaders Campos Racing.

The team started round four at the Red Bull Ring in emphatic fashion, with an in-form Hiyu Yamakoshi taking his maiden pole in the series. However, things have gone awry since then.

The team managed to score just eight points across both Styrian races, with Yamakoshi falling down from first to eighth in the feature. In Silverstone, the team faced even more adversity, scoring just four points across the entire weekend, courtesy of the Japanese driver once more.

In total, Bruno Del Pino, the sole driver on the grid to score points in all of the first seven races, has gone scoreless since the seventh race of the season; Yamakoshi has racked up just nine points since taking pole in Austria; and Enzo Deligny hasn’t scored since the Barcelona feature race. Because of this, Van Amersfoort Racing have dropped to third in the teams’ standings, with their gap to Campos now at 79 points – 52 of which have been lost in the past two rounds alone.

Results and standings after round 5 at Silverstone

Results	P1	P2	P3
Qualifying	Freddie Slater, 1:45.620	Théophile Naël, +0.260s	Louis Sharp, +0.261s
Sprint race (18 laps)	Ugo Ugochukwu, 32:51.225	Yevan David, +17.023s	Théophile Naël, +17.620
Feature race (21 laps)	Maciej Gładysz, 40:51.625	Freddie Slater, +0.908s	Ugo Ugochukwu, +1.160s

Standings	Drivers	Teams
P1	Ugo Ugochukwu, 104	Campos Racing, 192
P2	Freddie Slater, 86	Trident, 150
P3	Théophile Naël, 60	Van Amersfoort Racing, 113
P4	Noah Strømsted, 57	ART Grand Prix, 85
P5	Bruno Del Pino, 49	Rodin Motorsport, 81
P6	Maciej Gładysz, 44	Prema Racing, 37
P7	Brando Badoer, 41	MP Motorsport, 32
P8	Pedro Clerot, 40	Hitech, 26
P9	Hiyu Yamakoshi, 36	DAMS, 22
P10	Taito Kato, 30	AIX Racing, 21

Read our takeaways from the previous round here.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency