Lindblad starts Italian F4 test on top, Euroformula leader Leon in GP3 car

Photo: ACI Sport

European junior single-seater teams are testing at Mugello this week, and Tuesday’s action featured GP2, Formula Renault 3.5, Formula Regional and Formula 4 cars.

The 39 F4 drivers were put in their own sessions, while other machinery ran together. Each group got four sessions during the day.

Current FIA Formula 3 teams Jenzer Motorsport and Trident ran their old GP3 cars, and Euroformula points leader Noel Leon set the pace for the latter by 0.133 seconds over Jenzer’s Charlie Wurz. Recently Wurz made his debut in Euroformula, an F3-level series, and made the podium but has primarily been racing in FRegional with mixed results.

Fellow FRegional racers Laurens van Hoepen and Lorenzo Fluxa also got a taste of machinery at a higher level.

They were faster than drivers running in even faster cars, including Laura Villars – who usually drives a FRegional car in the Ultimate Cup Series – in a Jenzer-run GP2 car, Winfield Racing scholar Garrett Berry in another GP2 car and Juju Noda and Giovanni Maschio in ‘F2TR’ class vehicles.

The F4 action began with Kacper Sztuka leading the way, setting a 1m48.768s to top session one by 0.234 seconds over Akshay Bohra and 0.253s over Zachary David in a US Racing 1-2-3.

Prema’s Ugo Ugochukwu was fourth fastest, 0.524s behind, and the top 11 were covered by a second. Having made his Euro 4 debut with Prema last weekend, Freddie Slater was testing for Van Amersfoort Racing. There was seven cars on track run by Prema, and in one of those was believed to be Mercedes-AMG Formula 1 junior and recently crowned Champions of the Future karting champion Alex Powell who has just turned 16.

The pace was lowered only very slightly in session two, as Prema’s Arvid Lindblad set a 1m48.737s to top the timesheet by a slim 0.052s over both Ugochukwu and David. His Prema team-mate James Wharton was just 0.059s behind in fourth.

Sztuka returned US Racing to the top in session three by going 0.01s faster than Lindblad’s session two benchmark. David was his closest rival, 0.27s behind, and Bohra was third fastest.

All but seven drivers set their fastest laps in the fourth session, where Lindblad led the way by 0.095s over Wharton in a Prema lockout of the top four places. This time the top 16 were covered by less than a second on pace, and neither Sztuka or Bohra improved which left them down in fifth and 11th in the day’s combined timesheet.

Day one results