Ticktum grabs Euro F3 points lead
Three years ago at Silverstone Dan Ticktum became the bad boy of British motorsport. Now he’s the F3 European Championship leader
Dan Ticktum is down in third or fourth place in the Formula 3 European Championship in any other year, and in some seasons he’s over 100 points off the top. OK, OK, he’s leading this year, but his points tally after 18 races would put him way off the pace at an identical stage of the 2013-17 campaigns. Such is F3 2018-style. Ticktum won at Silverstone last weekend but, as we now expect, this was a rollercoaster weekend for most of the title protagonists.
Ticktum’s win came in a thrilling opening race, one where the Red Bull Junior hunted down his Renault counterpart Sacha Fenestraz and pulled off a superb manoeuvre at Stowe Corner with four laps remaining. And it came on a weekend where Ticktum’s Motopark team had stolen a march on the opposition. It also gave the Briton the championship lead over Marcus Armstrong, an advantage he’d extended by the time the trucks were packed away and sent en route to Misano for next weekend’s action.
But as usual it wasn’t plain sailing for Ticktum. In fact, this was an entirely typical weekend in his F3 career to date: there was super-fast driving, overtaking brilliance, moments of fury, stewards decisions that went against him, and collisions. No wonder Red Bull boss Helmut Marko loves him.
Free practice was a tour de force. Silverstone has been resurfaced since last season, and the relatively warm conditions of August – compared to F3’s usual ice-cold April World Endurance support slot – combined with the high-speed corners meant there was massive tyre degradation. But Motopark had everything just right. Ticktum was more than 0.4s clear of Fenestraz in FP1, and almost 0.4s clear of the Frenchman in FP2. Come first qualifying, that advantage was nullified.
Carlin went for a bold strategy – bearing in mind this session decided the grid for just the opening race, whereas the later qualifying determined the starting order for races two and three – of using two brand-new sets of Hankook tyres for all five drivers from the weekend allocation of three new sets. Fenestraz, his season dismal since his win at the Pau opening round, made the most of that and grabbed pole from Prema Powerteam’s Guan Yu Zhou, with Ticktum third.
In Q2, Motopark emulated Carlin’s earlier tactic and it was the team’s Fabio Scherer and Juri Vips who earned the two poles. Prema had kept its powder dry, saving four new tyres for each of its drivers for use across the races, but that frugality would fall flat (see panel, far right)…
Ticktum felt that “I didn’t really put it together” in the first session. “The car wasn’t in the sweet spot and I didn’t really push enough. If I put the sectors together it would be pole by two tenths.” After Q2, meanwhile, he was furious. Relations between Motopark and Prema have nosedived this summer, and Ticktum found himself circulating with the Italian team’s Armstrong and Zhou. On one push lap, he said he got caught in Armstrong’s dirty air at Stowe; on the other, he claimed Zhou stopped in front of him at Club. The stewards investigated both incidents, and found no wrongdoing, but again, that was two poles Ticktum reckoned he should have had. Instead, he and Armstrong would start race two alongside each other on the fourth row.
Fortunately, after sleeping on it he was on fire on Saturday morning. His move to take Zhou around the outside of Luffield and grab second place on lap one of the opening race was breathtaking. Then he set to work on Fenestraz. This was a measured drive, one that illustrated a new dimension to a driver you’d often expect to just go for a lunge – and deal with the consequences later. When the pass came it was exquisite, and credit to Fenestraz for giving him enough room.
“I struggled a lot with the tyres,” explained Fenestraz, “and Dan managed them a little bit better at the beginning of the race. I had to push but I pushed too much, and towards the end the rears were getting worse.”
At the start of race two, Ticktum reckoned he was “edged wide by two Prema cars
[which would have been Armstrong and Zhou] – nothing malicious though” and his eighth on the grid was converted to an early 12th. While Mick Schumacher led throughout, the focus was on Ticktum’s progress as he passed first Alex Palou, then Ralf Aron, then Robert Shwartzman and finally Fenestraz as he recovered to seventh. But the penultimate-lap move on Fenestraz came under investigation, Ticktum having gone around the outside at Stowe before diving down the inside at Club. Finally, the stewards gave him a 1.5s penalty because he was off-track, but then again, so was Fenestraz! Interestingly, in Sunday’s final race, Shwartzman passed Scherer at Stowe with both cars off track, and there was no stewards’ investigation. Sometimes you get the impression that the officials would look into Ticktum buttering his toast in an unsafe fashion in the hotel breakfast room.
He wasn’t finished yet. In the finale, Ticktum got briefly up to fourth on the opening lap by somehow passing Enaam Ahmed in the Becketts complex, but he lost momentum onto the Hangar Straight and Ahmed got back past. Ticktum went down the inside at Club, but was forced onto the sausage kerb and launched onto two wheels. Schumacher went through too and, with two contacts on the opening lap and damage to his car, Ticktum finished sixth.
Instead, his team-mates starred. Scherer had been ecstatic to take pole for race two – the first-ever pole in car racing for this amiable Swiss, a graduate of German Formula 4. Furthermore, he hadn’t even seen Silverstone until free practice began on Friday. He lost the start to Schumacher, and then there was minor contact with
Vips at Abbey as the Estonian tried to zap his team-mate too.
Scherer clung on to second from Vips, without ever letting Schumacher get beyond a 2s advantage, but it was clear that Vips was quicker. Scherer, a totally reactive driver who is brilliant to watch but takes a lot out of his tyres, explained: “My speed in the race is always limited because it’s a difficult track for my driving style – it works really well for one lap, but for the race the tyres were limited.” Vips finally got through at Stowe, but it was too late to catch Schumacher, who shrugged off pre-race worries over tyres after Prema’s spate of punctures in race one.
Scherer lost his third place when a wiring loom on the gearshift broke, and this promoted another Motopark driver, Jonathan Aberdein, to his maiden podium – a couple of hours after he should have scored his first. The South African had been running third in the opener when he lost out at the restart following a late full-course yellow, allowing Ahmed into third and Vips – who had clawed his way from 10th on the grid – up to fourth. “It was the timing of the buttons,” explained Aberdein. “I think it was just driver error to be honest – I engaged it a little bit late.”
Aberdein would double up with another podium on Sunday, but this race was all about Vips after a nervous first lap. Vips, the reigning German F4 champion, had a superb weekend at Silverstone and is now up to third in the points behind Ticktum and Armstrong. If Scherer is the F3 driver you’d put money on making it to the end of an unrecced rally stage quicker than anyone else (unless he shunted), Vips is the one you’d gamble on if they had pacenotes: he’s massively spectacular with great car control, but he can also manage a race.
First he had a scare at Abbey when
front-row partner Aberdein came down the inside – but Aberdein backed off to avoid a collision, and dropped to third. Then Vips found Fenestraz inching slightly ahead down the Wellington Straight, before braking late on the inside of Brooklands to cling on in front. “I braked really late and he braked later,” acknowledged Fenestraz admiringly. “We were lucky to make the corner.”
Vips did find his rear tyres going off, particularly towards the end of the race, but Fenestraz was never able to get close enough to move into a position to overtake. Now Vips is just 33 points behind Ticktum, and you have to say he’s a dark horse for the title…
Ahmed was the other to have a superb weekend. The reigning BRDC British F3 champion continues to see off highly rated Hitech GP team-mate Alex Palou, and came away from Silverstone with a third and two fourths, even though he didn’t quite have the pace of the top runners. “Prema, Motopark and Carlin had made a step forward, and we’d been lacking pace, so I’ve been spending a lot of time down here at Silverstone with the team [which is based opposite the circuit entrance],” he said after the first race. “I expected just to survive this race [from eighth on the grid] but the opportunities came up.”
But few had any answer to the forest of cars from Oschersleben. “They’re all rookies in this team except Marino [Sato],” said Motopark technical director Andy Kohler. “From their level of experience, it’s step by step and putting it together. We just had good preparation for the drivers. Our starts are solid now – we’ve done work on that since the start of the season – and that brings everything up. Juri did a f*cking good job, Jonathan did a really good job, Fabio was unlucky. But Dan was unluckiest of all – without being impeded in Q2, he’d have been on pole easily by one and a half tenths.”
But such things are what make F3 2018-style so fascinating.