JEWISS BEMOANS TWO LOST WINS FROM POLE
“Up to now I would have said two second places would have been excellent. But to get pole and do the hard work to get there, to lose it off the line twice is not acceptable from my side and not good enough. I cost the team two victories this weekend.”
Douglas Motorsports’ Kiern Jewiss may be the kind of driver who beats himself up when not achieving his best, but it was hard to disagree with his ‘what could have been’ assessment of the Silverstone BRDC British Formula 3 weekend having lost two race wins from pole.
In race one he lost out to Hillspeed’s Sasakorn Chaimongkol into Copse – the second-year Thai driver making it a 12th different winner this year.
Jewiss seemed to have only one opportunity to try and get back past, that being a sneaky shuffle up the inside of Luffield to get almost entirely alongside, but couldn’t match the corner exit speed of ‘Cutter’. Instead Jewiss had to make do with defending from title contender Johnathan Hoggard in third, a feat he successfully managed.
Race three represented a second chance though, but again Jewiss fell behind the faster Ayrton Simmons alongside into Copse.
This time, Jewiss seemed to have better speed, inching closer to his 2018 F4-sparring partner by a tenth a lap until one wobble at Brooklands put paid to that surge, and he had to settle for second again.
The timesheets may have recorded a solitary podium for Carlin’s Clement Novalak, but extending his 40-point lead in the standings to 52 from Hoggard represented a good weekend’s work.
Two fourth row starts in races one and three weren’t ideal, neither was his seventh place at the end of the opener. But ninth to third in just four laps for the damp second race banked more important ‘passing points’, followed up with a seventh-to-fourth run in race three.
Other than the first race podium, Hoggard’s weekend was a struggle. In race two, a light touch between Hoggard and Neil Verhagen at Club spun both around and, while able to continue, he found the pace hard to come by. That was followed by fifth in race three with no real chance to pounce on Novalak.
But as befitting a series which has a knack of finding new winners, race two unearthed the season’s 13th victor from the 17-car grid. Manuel Maldonado finished at the back in race one, but crucially kept going despite wing damage to start the damp-but-drying second race up front.
He kept the car planted through the slippery surface – even though he was the first to encounter the trouble spots, managing the conditions deftly to claim his first 2019 victory.
“Even though that’s not the way we want to do it in the reversed grid, we made sure in tricky conditions we got off the line well, built a gap up and stayed there,” the Fortec driver said.
The 41-second winning margin for the supersoft-shod Ashley Dibden in the second Monoposto race was not nearly as dominant as it seemed. Michael Watton – third in race one – actually had the best grip in the greasy conditions in his 2002 Jedi MR6, reeling in Dibden with the aid of a few backmarkers. The pass was made with only a few minutes to go, but just one lap later Watton stopped at Brooklands with an issue, allowing Dibden back into the lead. Alex Fores won the opener by a much smaller 4s margin over Dibden.
Cian Carey was unlucky that a safety car in the F3 Cup shortened his chance of challenging George Line for the win.
Carey in second pumped in a series of purple laps to reduce the 7.3s gap to just 1.3s in five tours when the safety car for David Gillett’s off came out. The green flag flew with one to go and, despite a last gasp sideby-side duel at Brooklands and Luffield, Line was able to hold by just a tenth.
A creeping start for Carey in race two threatened his chances, but he built a lead of more than 10s to negate the inevitable time penalty and hold the victory.
Dominik Jackson took the lead on lap one for the Radical Challenge finale from ex-ginetta driver Jac Constable, who dropped to fourth behind Marcus Clutton and Joe Stables.
But the undercut worked for Clutton and Stables, who pitted on laps 11 and 12 respectively, and by the time leaders Jackson and Constable dived in for their mandatory stops on lap 14 of the 22, Stables and Clutton had made the necessary time up on track to launch themselves into the lead.
Squabbling between Constable and Jackson allowed race one winner Jerome de Sadeleer to ease through for third.