» F2: Leclerc breezes to Austrian win

PREMA’s Charles Leclerc has bagged his fourth win of the season after taking a dominant victory in Saturday’s feature race at the Red Bull Ring. The Monegasque drove a controlled race on the alternate strategy to extend his lead to 59 points in the drivers’ standings.

Leclerc started from pole and led away from team mate Fuoco as he ran a longer first stint on the Prime tyres, losing the lead for just one lap during the pit-stop phase to Nobuharu Matsushita after pitting for Options. He still ran comfortably on Options but his lead was shrunk at the latter stages of the race as he was hunted by Nicholas Latifi, eventually winning by only 1.3 seconds from the Canadian.

Latifi, who had started from eighth on the grid, got as high as fifth after the start and was the first driver on Option tyres to pit, with his team mate Oliver Rowland pitting just one lap later and emerging behind him. However, Latifi had no answer for Rowland’s pace as the Briton surged past him on Lap 13.

Rowland’s best efforts were undone as his tyres got away from him and he was passed by both Fuoco and Latifi, before the latter also passed Fuoco for second place and started pushing Leclerc in the lead but to no avail. Latifi eventually finished second while Fuoco secured his first podium in F2 and only his third points finish in third.

Rowland held on to finish fourth, losing further points from Leclerc while the ART pair of Albon and Matsushita ran an Option/Prime strategy to come home fifth and sixth.

Ralph Boschung took an impressive seventh ahead of Artem Markelov in eighth who starts Sunday’s Sprint Race from reversed-grid pole while Jordan King and Sean Gelael completed the top ten.

The sprint race starts on Sunday at 10:20 local time (GMT+2).

2017 FIA Formula 2 Championship Race of Austria – Feature Race Final Classification (40 laps)
	Driver	Team / Entry	Laps	Result
1.	Charles Leclerc	PREMA Racing	40	52:21.629
2.	Nicholas Latifi	DAMS	40	+ 1.345
3.	Antonio Fuoco	PREMA Racing	40	+ 5.160
4.	Oliver Rowland	DAMS	40	+ 5.682
5.	Alexander Albon	ART Grand Prix	40	+ 9.846
6.	Nobuharu Matsushita	ART Grand Prix	40	+ 12.179
7.	Ralph Boschung	Campos Racing	40	+ 19.400
8.	Artem Markelov	Russian Time	40	+ 20.385
9.	Jordan King	MP Motorsport	40	+ 30.481
10.	Sean Gelael	Pertamina Arden	40	+ 33.662
11.	Robert Vișoiu	Campos Racing	40	+ 35.636
12.	Gustav Malja	Racing Engineering	40	+ 36.011
13.	Nyck de Vries	Rapax	40	+ 44.145
14.	Luca Ghiotto	Russian Time	40	+ 46.896
15.	Sergio Canamasas	Rapax	40	+ 48.883
16.	Sergio Sette Câmara	MP Motorsport	40	+ 50.940
17.	Louis Delétraz	Racing Engineering	40	+ 53.423
18.	Nabil Jeffri	Trident	40	+ 56.881
19.	Raffaele Marciello	Trident	39	1 lap behind
	Not Classified	Team / Entry	Laps	Result
DNF.	Norman Nato	Pertamina Arden	6	Mechanical