The GP3 Series was back after what felt like a very long summer break, and Round 6 was at Spa-Francorchamps in glorious weather conditions. After a very difficult qualifying session, the team lined up in the grid with Jake Dennis in 13th, Jack Aitken in 14th and Tatiana Calderon in 22nd.
As the lights went out, there was an incident at Turn 1 causing the safety car to be deployed. The race was run under safety car for 4 laps, and resumed on lap 5 where Dennis had climbed up into 4th place. Aitken was fighting hard in 11th, climbing positions lap by lap.
By lap 13 Dennis was storming through the pack -passing Fuoco into 3rd, then one lap later he passed De Vries for 2nd place. With Leclerc in his sights, Dennis closed the gap to just over 2s ahead of De Vries and Fuoco.
On the final lap, a majority of the grid began to suffer with tyre degradation, but Aitken managed his tyres perfectly and moved into 5th. Dennis’s earlier tyre management enabled him to cut Leclerc’s lead to 2.3 seconds before he ran out of laps to challenge for the race victroy.
The chequered flag dropped, seeing Dennis clinch another podium and achieved his GP3 career best in 2nd. Aitken came over the line in 5th, and Calderon in 12th.
Jake Dennis “It worked out nicely up the inside at the start, especially since I started on new tyres as I didn’t run any in practice, so we had the advantage to those ahead
Fuoco ahead was going at decent pace so I kept behind to keep as much life in my tyres. I saw he started to struggle with five laps left and timed it perfectly but just ran out of laps to chase down Leclerc.”