Mini fastest on first afternoon of FIA F3’s post-season Jerez test

Photo: Formula Motorsport Ltd

Prema’s Gabriele Mini set the fastest lap in the afternoon session on the first day of FIA Formula 3 post-season testing at Jerez.

Van Amersfoort Racing’s Sophia Floersch was the pacesetter at first in the three-hour session with a 1m33.195s lap, but soon Mini lowered the pace to 1m31.841s.

The scale of improvement from when that lap was set, 12 minutes in, to the end of the day’s action was quite small and the laptimes at the top did not beat what had been set in the morning.

Mini improved to 1m31.750s after 17 minutes to lead a Prema one-two, with he and his team-mates being far more active after basically being no-shows through the morning session.

MP Motorsport’s Tim Tramnitz became his closest rival 29 minutes in, setting a 1m32.319s, and 24 minutes later Dino Beganovic moved past Prema team-mate Arvid Lindblad into third place.

Beganovic gained another spot 1h12m in as he got within 0.553 seconds of Mini’s pace, then a few minutes into the final hour he cut the gap to a tiny 0.081s.

In the meantime Hitech GP’s Luke Browning had gone fourth fastest halfway through the session, shuffling Lindblad down to fifth.

Trident’s Leonardo Fornaroli rose to sixth place with 33 minutes to go, on a mostly empty track, and five minutes later Campos Racing’s Mari Boya set a 1m31.923s to go third fastest. His team-mate Oliver Goethe went a thousandth of a second slower than him a minute later and jumped to fourth, but the pair were not going to repeat their session-topping performance from the morning.

Prema sent its drivers back out with 15 minutes left on the clock, and Beganovic bettered Mini by 0.124s only for Mini to cross the line an go 0.265s faster than him to reclaim first place. They stayed out after setting those times, as Hitech’s Martinius Stenshorne went fifth fastest. He was 0.87s off the pace, with the top seven covered by 0.981s going into the final 10 minutes.

Lindblad soon made that a top eight as he slotted into seventh, but was then was knocked down to eighth as Browning became Mini’s closest rival with a lap 0.201s off the Sicilian’s benchmark.

The track got busier in the last five minutes, and Jenzer Motorsport’s Charlie Wurz went sixth fastest. Boya improved his pace but stayed in fourth, and Sebastian Montoya (Campos) and Laurens van Hoepen (ART Grand Prix) jumped up to seventh and eighth on the timesheet.

Goethe got into fourth on his final lap, and Trident’s Sami Meguetounif jumped from 20th to 10th with his last effort.

Afternoon session results