Luke Browning claimed his second win of the day at Spa-Francorchamps this afternoon, while he was joined on the podium once more by Joel Granfors, with Max Esterson third. Here’s how each driver reacted at the end of the contest.
Winner, Luke Browning, Hitech GP:
“What a dream! It’s phenomenal, the team has done an amazing job, and it shows with all three drivers up there in qualifying. The car has been absolutely phenomenal to drive today, it really felt special.
“It was very close at the start, but that’s the nature of this track, it’s going to happen on the long straight before Les Combes. Luckily I just managed to get out unscathed, it was close, but regardless it’s a good result, a nice day and I’m looking forward to going home and celebrating with the team.
“I knew Joel was on new tyres coming into the race, so I had slightly worse tyres than him going into it, so I thought he’d be a bit closer to me, which he was. I thought maybe when he got in front it may be difficult for me to overtake, but the nature of it round here with the tow, I was able to come back at him and we seemed to be good enough in the second sector to hold him off.”
Second, Joel Granfors, Fortec Motorsport:
“We were three wide on the Kemmel Straight and I don’t know how I survived it as [Branden] Oxley came back on the track. I guess there isn’t much grip off the track down there so I don’t know what happened to him, but I guess he lost it or something and just came back on the track and hit me. I’m very fortunate to finish the race though because if his front tyre had hit me on the sidepod and then my rear tyre I would have been gone like Donington.
“But I’ll take P2 now, and in the last race it’ll be possible to overtake around here too like we saw now. I didn’t have the pace to Browning, he was just a bit too quick, especially in the beginning. Towards the end it kind of stabilised between us, and hopefully we can do a good result in the last race.
“It’ll be a lot of fun [tomorrow] of course, we can hopefully keep it out of the chaos as I expect a lot of chaos in the last race, especially around here at Spa where we can overtake. I expect a lot of side by side action tomorrow.”
Third, Max Esterson, Douglas Motorsport:
“It was a tricky one and I nearly got caught up in the wreck on lap one. After I made it through that I tried to look forward. The pack behind was closing in and on lap three I had two people on my outside on the straight, and I held them off which is good. I think there was a bit of chaos behind so I had a bit of a gap, and I just tried to manage the tyres and manage the track limits for the rest of the race, and just cruise to a third.
“It’s more good points, which is always the aim. We start third to last in race three so we’ll see what we can do. There could be a bit of chaos so we just need to keep clean and pick up more points.”