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Baku Feature Race - podium for Lello

06/18/2016

Baku Feature Race - podium for Lello

Raffaele Marciello maintained his 100% 2016 point-scoring record with a fine third place in the inaugural Baku feature race. An incident-packed event saw four safety car interventions, one of them for a collision with Arthur Pic for Artem Markelov, who was driving an impressive race.

Marciello led the race for 17 of the time-limited 26 laps after an early battle with Nobuhiro Matsushita, but had to cede to the pace of Prema's pole position man and race winner Antonio Giovinazzi. He then lost second place on the final lap to a slipstream pass by Sergey Sirotkin, who Markelov had just passed before being taken out of the race.

Raffaele Marciello: I had a good start and led the race but Giovinazzi passed me. I was not too impressed by the stop/start tactics at the final restart, which felt a bit dangerous, but it was great to score more points, take a feature race podium and move into the championship top three.

Artem Markelov: I'm hugely frustrated! I narrowly avoided the first lap chaos in Turn 1 and then was up five places by the second lap when I passed Sirotkin, who eventually finished second. I was alongside Pic going into Turn 4 and he seemed to behave as if I wasn't there and drove me into the wall. There was nothing I could do.

Svetlana Strelnikova (Team principal): Congratulations to Raffaele on his first feature race podium for Russian Time, which increased our championship lead to 26 points. As expected, there was a lot of incident on this exciting new street circuit and unfortunately Artem fell victim to a collision when he was working his way right into contention. The positive is that he remains just a point from the championship lead.




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