Campos Racing’s Ernesto Rivera scored his first Formula 3 feature race win and his second of the 2026 season at the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps, leading home Van Amersfoort Racing’s Hiyu Yamakoshi and Trident polesitter Freddie Slater en route to victory as points leader Ugo Ugochukwu failed to score for the second race in succession. 

By Tori Turner

For a moment, from the composure he showed as he made the race-winning pass, it seemed as though Ernesto Rivera had done it all before.

A year ago, Rivera was a rookie in Eurocup-3, which held its own sixth round of the season at Spa. Starting the second race of the weekend from the second row of the grid in third, Rivera quickly moved through the pack and sparred with rival Jesse Carrasquedo for the race lead. The decisive move for the lead on the Red Bull junior’s part came four laps from the end, when he swooped past as the pair snaked down the Kemmel Straight. 

That he won again in similar fashion in F3 – by starting race two of the weekend from the second row but sealing victory with a pass for the lead four laps from the end at the legendary 7.004-kilometre circuit – proved more than mere coincidence or even pedigree. It was a statement that Rivera was back at his fighting best after a pre-season back injury left him sidelined from the opening round and having to play catch-up to his more experienced Campos teammates in previous rounds this season.

At first, Rivera wasn’t in the immediate conversation for victory. He had lost fourth place on the opening lap to fellow Red Bull junior Mattia Colnaghi, but that went largely unnoticed amidst the sequence of events that followed polesitter Slater’s sluggish start. The polesitting Audi junior was instantly swallowed up by Tuukka Taponen and Yamakoshi, with the former taking the lead of the race.

As they headed down the Kemmel Straight, the trio closed up again and ended up three-wide by the approach to Les Combes, where Yamakoshi passed Taponen for first around the outside. 

Further back, Théophile Naël clipped the back of Taito Kato’s car, sustaining front wing damage, before he later touched Campos teammate Ugochukwu and forced him off track at Malmedy. Behind them, Yevan David slowed and stopped in the gravel following a separate incident, triggering an appearance of the safety car.

When racing resumed at the end of lap three, Yamakoshi ran wide heading out of the final chicane, and Taponen and Slater closed up to his tail down the start-finish straight. Behind them, Mattia Colnaghi and Rivera scrapped for fourth, with Rivera making the move down the Kemmel Straight at the first opportunity.

On lap six, Ugochukwu passed Christian Ho for ninth around the outside of the Kemmel straight. That offered him a one-point boost in the championship battle with Slater as it stood, but the Briton soon responded on lap seven by passing Taponen for second as they headed into Les Combes. A lap later, Slater was right behind Yamakoshi and lined up an overtake down the inside of Les Combes, moving into the lead of the race.

Taponen dropped out of the podium positions on lap nine when Rivera passed him down the inside of Les Combes. On the next lap, the Ferrari junior ran wide at La Source, handing fourth to Colnaghi, who passed him down the inside on the run to Eau Rouge.

At the same time, Rivera made another step towards the lead by overtaking Yamakoshi at Les Combes to take second. He had clipped his front wing on the Japanese driver’s car on the previous lap while passing Taponen, but that seemed to make little difference to the charging 17-year-old, who just as quickly pulled away from his Van Amersfoort Racing counterpart.

On lap 11, the Mexican lined up a move on Slater around the outside of Les Combes but did not succeed. The overtake for the lead then came a lap later, when he switched to the inside, moving up into first that time. From there, he sailed off into the distance, already eking out a gap of 1.3 seconds by the start of lap 13 to break free of DRS.

On lap 13, Yamakoshi passed Slater for the second time down the inside of Les Combes, sealing a second-place finish. That left the Briton vulnerable to the pressure of Colnaghi and Maciej Gładysz, but he held on for two more laps to secure the final podium position. 

Rivera crossed the finish line 1.685s ahead of Yamakoshi to secure his first feature race win in F3, having taken his maiden race win in the Austria sprint race two rounds ago. His win made him the third driver in a row across F2 and F3 to win from fourth on the grid this weekend, with F3 sprint race winner Jin Nakamura starting in the same position yesterday after a penalty and Joshua Dürksen also lining up in the quaternary spot before winning the F2 sprint.

Yamakoshi matched his career-best F2 finish from the Barcelona feature race with another second place, while Slater finished third, extending his streak of finishing on the podium at every round this season but missing out on the race win yet again. Colnaghi finished fourth ahead of Gładysz, who made a bold move on Noah Strømsted at Malmedy on lap 10 before snatching fifth from Taponen down the Kemmel Straight a lap later. 

Kato, who started 12th, ended up sixth and scored a bonus point for setting the fastest lap, a 2:07.055, among the top 10 finishers, while Taponen sank to seventh despite taking the lead at the start of the race. Nakamura made a late charge to rise from 12th to eighth in the final four laps, with Alessandro Giusti and Brando Badoer rounding out the points scorers. 

Though Rivera helped extend Campos’ lead from 49 to 57 points in the teams’ championship with his victory, he was also notably the only driver from the Spanish team to score points today. Ugochukwu, who started 13th, ran as high as ninth after passing Ho and setting the overall fastest lap with a 2:06.762 that same tour, but it all came undone for him in the final laps. He dropped out of the points when Badoer passed him for 10th on lap 11, and the American then tumbled down the order in the remaining laps, losing several seconds per lap and finishing the race 21st.

After his front wing change, Naël finished the race 16th. With neither he nor Ugochukwu scoring points, the Campos pair remain separated by 39 points in the standings – the total amount available to score in a standard race weekend – though Slater on 103 is now just one point behind points leader Ugochukwu. Strømsted, who finished the race 11th, remains fourth on 58 points and leads a hotly contested battle for the position, with Rivera, Gładysz, Yamakoshi, Badoer, Bruno Del Pino and Pedro Clerot all within 10 points of the Dane entering next weekend’s round at the Hungaroring.

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency