Trident drivers finish far from the points zone

The FIA Formula 2 Championship’s fourteenth round of the season opened at Yas Marina, on the outskirts of the capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi. Today saw the drivers of the second category compete in the Sprint Race. In the qualifying session, Trident Motorsport drivers Max Esterson and Christian Mansell set the eighteenth and twentieth times respectively.

For both, a complicated recovery race was to be expected. At the start, the two Trident Motorsport single-seaters stayed away from unjustified risks and finished the first lap in the back positions. Esterson moved up to seventeenth place, while Mansell was nineteenth. From that moment on, the race continued at a regular pace and there were no incidents or events that could accelerate the recovery of the two Trident Motorsport drivers.

Max Esterson finished in fifteenth place, two places ahead of his Australian teammate. The Trident Motorsport drivers will now analyse the data collected in the Sprint Race together with the technical staff in preparation for the Feature Race, scheduled for tomorrow at 13:25 local time, three hours ahead of CET. The Feature Race, which includes a mandatory tyre change, will also allow the technical staff to play the strategy card to regain the points zone.

Giacomo Ricci, Team Manager:“Our drivers did not have a good qualifying session. As a result, today they were looking forward to a difficult recovery race, which could only have given them the chance to move up in the field in case of exceptional situations. Both drivers were attentive in the confusion of the first few metres of the race. However, their pace was in line with that of their direct rivals and they had no chance of recovering beyond fifteenth place with Esterson and seventeenth with Mansell”.