PREVIEW: FIA Formula 3 Championship – Zandvoort

Zandvoort plays host to the penultimate round of the FIA F3 championship this weekend, as only ten points separate the top five drivers in the standings.

After a disappointing week at Spa-Francorchamps for those fighting it out at the top of the championship, with Oliver Bearman being the only driver in the top four to score more than six points over the course of the weekend, the title favorites will be looking to redeem themselves in Zandvoort.

Arguably, the driver who faced the toughest weekend was ART’s, Victor Martins. The Frenchman went into the round joint top of the championship on one hundred and four points, and left Spa third in the championship, on the same points he entered with.

Martins is fully focused on the championship, and his own driving, as he expressed after an unfortunate qualifying session in Spa:  “I just want to be in front, winning races and getting pole positions and it’s like that that you will take the Championship, so I’m not focused on everyone else out there.”

The twenty-one-year-old will be incredibly keen to get back on the top step of the podium in Zandvoort, a position he hasn’t occupied since the feature race in round 3, at Barcelona.

Trident driver Roman Stanek has launched himself into the title fight, picking up twenty-seven points over the course of the weekend in Spa-Francorchamps, as he took second place in both Saturday’s sprint race and Sunday’s feature race. This leaves Stanek fifth in the standings, only trailing championship leader Isack Hadjar by ten points.

Credit: Dutch Photo Agency / Red Bull Content Pool

Stanek will be keen to carry his form from Spa into the penultimate FIA F3 race weekend of the year at Zandvoort, and potentially seek out his second F3 race win of the season.

At last year’s FIA F3 outing at Zandvoort, MP Motorsport’s Aleksandr Smolyar scored a feature race podium, finishing only behind current Formula 2 drivers Dennis Hauger and Clement Novalak. Smolyar currently sits eighth in the championship and will be eager to pick up a healthy haul of points this weekend if he wants to better his sixth-place finish in last season’s F3 standings.

Intermittent rain is predicted across the weekend, and this could throw caution to the wind for many teams and drivers as they prepare strategies going into the weekend.

After a seventy-one point haul in Spa, Trident has gone thirty-three points ahead of MP Motorsport in third but Prema still leads the way by a considerable margin, on two hundred and eighty-six points. However, if any of the teams sitting third to fifth were to have a monumental weekend in Zandvoort, the battle for second place in the constructors’ championship would be reignited again.