Race Incident

The Northen European Formula Renault 2.0 Cup started its fourth season this weekend at Zandvoort. The championship has so been won every year by the German Motopark team with Filipe Albuquerque in 2006, Frank Kechele in 2007 and Valtteri Bottas last year. This year will most likely see yet another Motopark driver as champion as the team lined up with eight cars on the Zandvoort grid.

After the qualifying sesson was over the Motopark drivers occupied the top five positions with British driver Adrian Quaife-Hobbs grabbing the pole position, 3 tenths ahead of Antonio Felix da Costa from Portugal. Best non-Motopark driver in qualifying was Daniel Aho for Koiranen Bros who ended up in seventh of the grid, but no less than 1.681 seconds off the pace of the pole sitter.

21 cars line up for race one and it ended up being a lights to flag victory for Quaife-Hobbs who was 8 seconds ahead of Felix da Costa in second and Kevin Magnussen in third after the 16 laps were completed.

The second race of the weekend had more drama as the top eight from race one started in reversed order on the grid. Race one winner Quaife-Hobbs misjudged the early braking of the slightly slower cars ahead of him and ran into the back of his team mate Kevin Magnussen in the first corner damaging his front wing and dropping to ninth. Depsite a lack of downforce from the damaged wing he fought his way up to fifth before a tyre burst and forced a pitstop for a new tyre and a new nose. At the front it was last year’s championship runner up Antonio Felix da Costa who took the win in front of the two Danes Kevin Magnussen and Marco Sørensen.

Antonio Felix da Costa leads the championship after the Zandvoort round ahead of Kevin Magnussen, Marco Sørensen, Adrian Quaife-Hobbs and Toomas Heikkinen.

The next two races are at Hockenheim at the end of April.