NEWS - 06. March 2023

crappy weekend!

Sometimes you are simply at a loss for words. This applies to this last weekend for Frederik Vesti in F2. First weekend of the year in the season.

Full of anticipation Vesti went to Bahrain. But he left again with a feeling of major disappointment. What could have turned out to be a promising start of the season instead turned out to be downright miserable!

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Qualifying was good. My former team-mate was out of reach by a margin of nearly 7/10 of a sec to the rest of us, who were closest. I finished 5th fastest, but with three of us drivers within 1/100 of a sec, of course I would have liked to come in 3rd. Unfortunately I was penalized 3 positions on the grid for Saturday's sprint race because I accidentally blocked a driver in turn 4 where I struggled with my brakes.

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Vesti's team from the previous two years was more than flying. Théo Pourchaire won the feature race with more than 15 seconds ahead of P2. Pretty unheard of in F2. The picture for Vesti was quite another. His feature race starting P5 ended before it had almost begun. A lot of trouble on track caused by the F3 champion Victor Martins, forced Frederik far out into turn 4. When he "re-entered" the track again, he made contact with a competitor, Richard Verschoor. That was the end of the race.

Saturday's sprint race - with the reverse starting grid among the 10 best qualified drivers and with a 3 positions penalty, meant starting P9. With a wrong choice of differential for the car, you didn't see much of Vesti.

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The weekend couldn't really have been much worse for me, and especially not considering the importance of getting off to a strong start in the first race weekend of the 2023 season. Of course one should never rejoice in the misfortunes or poor performances among one's competitors. You must win because you yourself are the best. But I can conclude that the drivers I'm competing with and measuring myself up against in the championship also did poorly. Only one got away - Théo. This bad weekend makes me defiant and mad. It's something that sets me up for Jeddah. My team, Prema Racing, did a strong job for me over the weekend. I'm exactly in the right place on that front. And there is always something positive to take away - even when things go against you. These are all the things we as a team keep to ourselves ;-) Thanks to everyone and sorry guys!!

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