Nicolai Kjaergaard took the spoils in British F3’s Saturday race at Donington Park for Carlin Motorsport, while teammate and polesitter Billy Monger hit strife early in the race.
Jamie Caroline was second ahead of Double R’s Krish Mahadik, while Monger battled back to claim fourth from Kush Maini and Ayrton Simmons.
Manuel Maldonado was seventh ahead of series leader Linus Lundqvist, who climbed from a lowly 14th on the grid.
Kjaergaard says that all he can do is keep taking points away from Lundqvist, starting with Race two tomorrow and praised the speed of his Carlin team.
“It is certainly the best I can do, the start went to plan and we led from start to finish. We have shown all weekend we have the pace, it was mega in the race with me and Caroline (Jamie) being really fast compared to the field. That shows how good the Carlin car is and it’s promising for Sunday.
The race was run in greasy conditions with the elements having been changeable all weekend, tomorrow’s forecast is similarly as uncertain. That does not faze the Dane
“We’ll see how the track conditions are tomorrow but we have shown that we are fast in the dry and the wet. If it is wet then it will make race two really interesting. We’ll see what happens in Race Two but I am aiming for another win tomorrow.
“It was a drying track so it was hard to know where to go. You had to keep going and keep pushing as there was more and more grip throughout the session. That was the difficult part because when you’re leading you don’t want to push too hard and go off so you have feel your way forward, whereas Jamie had a bit of a gauge because he could see where I was and whether there was more grip or not.”
With Lundqvist having held a seemingly unassailable 111-point lead coming into the weekend, Kjaergaard has cut the deficit by 22 points to 89 and hasn’t given up on the title with five rounds to go.
“We can only keep going like this and hopefully Linus won’t be too close to us, so let’s see how far we can push the championship. I want to at least postpone it until Silverstone.”