MEDIA RELEASE/F4 UAE - Photos: supplied The Formula 4 United Arab Emirates Championship Certified by…

SLATER AND OLIVIERI TAKE CHAMPIONSHIP LEAD AFTER FME SEASON OPENER
MEDIA RELEASE/Formula Middle East – Photos: supplied
The first round is in the books for the Formula Middle East season, and just as in the opening races on Saturday, it was Freddie Slater and Emanuele Olivieri who ended the weekend at Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Circuit triumphant by taking their second victories in the Formula Regional Middle East and Formula 4 Middle East Championships respectively.
Slater was the driver to beat as he begins his first season in Formula Regional. The 16-year-old Briton topped both qualifying positions with the Prema-operated Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited. Just as he had on Saturday, he led the final race from lights to flag, this time ahead of ART Grand Prix’s French talent Evan Giltaire. That completed a good day for ART, because it was the team’s Japanese contender Kanato Le who won an eventful race two.
Olivieri, meanwhile, triumphed in an absolute thriller of an F4 finale. The 16-year-old Italian looked to have the race in the bag with his R-ace GP car, but a lengthy safety car period set up a last-lap shootout in which he narrowly pipped Mumbai Falcons pair Kean Nakamura-Berta and Tomass Štolcermanis to the chequered flag. In something of a bounceback from his fortunes on day one, Štolcermanis had earlier taken honours in the dramatic second race.
In Formula Regional, Slater heads into the imminent second round – once again at Yas Marina this Wednesday and Thursday – with a 26-point lead over Giltaire, with Théophile Naël a further five points adrift in third. Slater also tops the Rookie standings after taking a perfect three class wins across the trio of races.
Olivieri leads the Formula 4 standings by 14 points over Nakamura-Berta, who was second in all three races this weekend, with Štolcermanis 26 off the summit in third. The Rookie wins were shared out more evenly in this category – after Salim Hanna’s victory on Saturday, Yuta Suzuki triumphed in race two, and Chi Zhenrui prevailed in the final race so that the Chinese racer heads the points.
Formula Regional Middle East
Race 2
1st Kanato Le/ART Grand Prix
2nd Theophile Nael/Sainteloc Racing
3rd Enzo Deligny/R-ace GP
Race 3
1st Freddie Slater/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited
2nd Evan Giltaire/ART Grand Prix
3rd Jesse Carrasquedo/Pinnacle Motorsport
Formula 4 Middle East
Race 2
1st Tomass Stolcermanis/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited
2nd Kean Nakamura-Berta/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited
3rd Emanuele Olivieri/R-ace GP
Race 3
1st Emanuele Olivieri/R-ace GP
2nd Kean Nakamura-Berta/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited
3rd Tomass Stolcermanis/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited
Formula Regional Middle East
Race 2
Kanato Le made the most of his reversed-grid pole position to get away in front at the start from Théophile Naël and Enzo Deligny, while Taito Kato, from fourth on the grid, appeared to stall and was almost at the back of the field by the time he was moving.
No sooner had the race got going when Akshay Bohra was stranded at Turn 12 following a collision with Liu Ruiqi, and the safety car was called for the first time. After a quick retrieval of Bohra’s car, the race settled down once more with ART Grand Prix driver Le leading from the Saintéloc Racing car of Naël, and R-ace GP pair Deligny and Ugo Ugochukwu. Then, on the fifth lap, the safety car emerged once again. This time an incident between Jack Beeton, the highly rated Australian who was suffering all weekend from illness, and Finley Green had left both cars in a precarious position. Green, like Liu, was decided to be at fault and issued with a grid penalty for race three.
The safety car returned to the pits with enough time remaining for seven more laps of racing, and Le led a ragged restart as he attempted to cement his first race win in Formula Regional. Naël had no answer to the Japanese driver, who soon pulled out a one-second margin and eventually took the chequered flag with a 1.047s advantage. Behind Naël, his fellow Frenchman Deligny clung on to take third after a race-long challenge from American McLaren F1 protégé Ugochukwu.
Brando Badoer claimed fifth for PHM Racing, the Italian coming under pressure in the early stages from Freddie Slater, after the winner of the first race quickly rose from 10th on the grid. But following the safety car, Slater had to turn his attentions to fending off Evan Giltaire before claiming sixth, and a second victory in the Rookie class.
Second rookie on the road, in eighth overall, was Pinnacle Motorsport’s Mexican Red Bull Junior Ernesto Rivera. But Rivera was penalised five seconds for contact with Giltaire at the second restart, dropping him outside the points to 13th.
The closest action came in the next battle. A bold – but in vain – move early on around the outside of Turn 12 from Jesse Carrasquedo on Rashid Al Dhaheri instead left the Mexican vulnerable to attack from Jin Nakamura, and they had a very tight battle down the start-finish straight. A lap later, Carrasquedo’s bid to repass Nakamura at Turn 9 led to contact and Carrasquedo dropping more places.
Local Mumbai Falcons driver Al Dhaheri therefore took eighth with Rivera’s penalty, and second in the Rookie class. R-ace-run Japanese Nakamura was ninth and Carrasquedo brought his Pinnacle car home in 10th. Honda-supported Japanese ace Kato recovered from his disastrous start to finish 12th in his ART machine, but he was another to be penalised five seconds, in his case for a late pass on Aaron Cameron that exceeded track limits. The Australian therefore moved up to 11th for Evans GP, with Reza Seewooruthun 12th – the Mumbai Falcons-run Briton also completed the Rookie top three behind team-mates Slater and Al Dhaheri.
Race 3
Just as in Saturday’s first race, it was another pole position for Freddie Slater, and once again Evan Giltaire lined up alongside him under the floodlights on the front row. Slater converted his starting advantage beautifully to lead from Giltaire, while from the all-Mexican second row Ernesto Rivera got away in third place, and Jesse Carrasquedo did not make the best of getaways. This turned out not to cost Carrasquedo at all; Ugo Ugochukwu inadvertently clipped Rashid Al Dhaheri, giving Al Dhaheri a puncture and causing substantial damage to Ugochukwu’s front wing, gifting Carrasquedo back his fourth position.
With Everett Stack’s stricken car needing retrieval from the W Hotel complex, the safety car was called, allowing both Al Dhaheri and Carrasquedo to pit for repairs and to latch onto the back of the pack. They engaged in battle again in their attempts to fight back, before Al Dhaheri lost further time in a tangle with Lorenzo Castillo at Turn 13, and Ugochukwu retired to the pits. No points for either of these likely front-runners.
Up front, Slater set about building a margin over Giltaire, who likewise was pulling away from Rivera and Carrasquedo. Bit by bit Slater built upon his advantage, and by the chequered flag he was 3.437 seconds clear of Giltaire for his second win of the weekend. Giltaire was similarly untroubled, but it was now Carrasquedo behind the Frenchman after he had passed Rivera for third position at the Turns 6/7 chicane at half-distance.
While the leading trio were relatively untroubled, the rest of the field engaged in thrilling battles. After the safety car, there were 14 laps of green-flag racing and a fascinating convergence between those who had gone all-out early on and whose tyres were fading, and those who had kept their powder dry and came on strong later.
One of the those on the move was Théophile Naël. First he pulled off a wonderful move on Jin Nakamura around the outside of Turn 6, giving him the inside line for Turn 7 and sixth place. One lap later he completed an identical manoeuvre on Reza Seewooruthun for fifth. Two laps further on, Naël divebombed Rivera at the same spot to take his eventual fourth position. Rivera was now fading fast, and in the closing stages found Brando Badoer charging onto his tail. But the Mexican youngster’s stoicism not only foiled Badoer, but brought Taito Kato looming into their midst. A final bid at the Turns 6/7 chicane left Rivera just about able to claim fifth, while Badoer pipped Kato to sixth by 0.016s. Kato completed the Rookie podium behind Slater and Rivera.
Nakamura dropped to eighth and, such was his distance over the cars behind, he kept his position despite a post-race five-second penalty for short-cutting Turn 7 in his fight with Kato. Seewooruthun was another to fall down the order in the second half of the race, and finished ninth. With one lap remaining Seewooruthun had Aaron Cameron and Kanato Le on his tail into Turn 6, but Cameron inadvertently tapped Le into a spin and broke his own front wing, letting Seewooruthun off the hook and earning Cameron a grid penalty for the next race. Australian Jack Beeton (Mumbai Falcons) finally seemed to have gained some reward for plugging on in a battle against his illness to take 10th, but he also earned a penalty, for forcing Enzo Deligny off the track, and dropped to 14th. Deligny, Briton Aditya Kulkarni (AKCEL GP/PHM Racing) and Cameron were therefore the final points scorers.
Formula 4 Middle East
Race 2
With the top 10 finishers from the opening race lined up on the grid in reverse order, it was Cole Hewetson on pole position with Adam Al Azhari alongside him. As the lights went out, both Al Azhari and third-place starter Tomass Štolcermanis got the jump on Hewetson, with Dubai racer Al Azhari hanging on at the first corner to take the lead.
Al Azhari clearly had his work cut out keeping his Yas Heat Racing Academy car ahead of Mumbai Falcons Racing talent Štolcermanis, and on the second lap the Latvian snuck through on the sequence of corners around the W Hotel to snatch the lead. Al Azhari pursued him until the fifth lap, when the safety car emerged. In the battle on the edge of the points-scoring positions, an incident between Arjun Chheda and Tiago Rodrigues had stranded Chheda at Turn 7, while Rodrigues headed to the pits under the safety car to have a damaged front wing replaced. The stewards found Chheda at fault, the Indian driver given a three-place grid penalty for the final race.
Quick work from the marshals meant the race went green one lap later, with Štolcermanis leading from Al Azhari and Reno Francot. But Dutchman Francot, driving for AKCEL GP/PHM Racing, was under serious pressure from the leading duo from race one: Kean Nakamura-Berta and Emanuele Olivieri had made superb progress from the fifth row of the grid to run fourth and fifth by the time the safety car was called, and they wanted more. On the first lap of the restart, British-born Japanese-Slovakian Nakamura-Berta tucked his Mumbai Falcons car into Francot’s slipstream on the long straight to Turn 6, and R-ace GP starlet Olivieri in turn got into the tow, with both demoting Francot to fifth as they reached the corner.
Next they homed in on Al Azhari. With five of the 15 laps remaining, Nakamura-Berta dived down the inside of the Yas Heat car at Turn 6 to grab second place. Then Olivieri swept around the outside of Al Azhari at Turn 9 to move into third. From here on, the frenetic, place-swapping battle between Alpine F1 junior Nakamura-Berta and Olivieri raged to the finish, allowing Štolcermanis to maintain his winning gap at just over two seconds for his first victory in F4. Eventually, Nakamura-Berta just got the verdict over Olivieri to complete a 1-2 for Mumbai Falcons.
If the leading duo from race one had made excellent progress, then that of Alex Powell was extraordinary. R-ace GP’s American-Jamaican Mercedes F1 protégé started 26th owing to his exit from the first race, and he was already seventh by the time the safety car appeared. Powell continued his storm up the pack afterwards, passing Hewetson, then Francot and finally Al Azhari to take a stunning fourth place. Al Azhari narrowly held on to successfully defend fifth position from Francot.
Creeping up on this pair by the finish was Sebastian Wheldon, who drove his Prema Racing machine to seventh ahead of R-ace GP-run Ukrainian Oleksandr Savinkov.
Hewetson had been involved in an incident with Chi Zhenrui at Turn 1 on the opening lap from which the Chinese spun out, then a collision with Salim Hanna at Turn 6 that sent the Colombian to the pits for a new front wing, but the South African finally took ninth on the road for Xcel Motorsport and appeared to have claimed the Rookie class. Hewetson held on at the head of a large train of cars in front of Hungarian Martin Molnár (Evans GP), Chinese Fu Yuhao (Xcel) and Yuta Suzuki of Japan (Pinnacle Motorsport). But a 10-second penalty applied to Hewetson for the contact with Chi dropped him to 18th and elevated Molnár, Fu and Suzuki to ninth, 10th and 11th respectively, with AKCEL/PHM’s Romanian car-racing debutant David Cosma claiming the final point for 12th. The penalty also cost Hewetson victory in the Rookie class, with Suzuki claiming the spoils from Cosma and the recovering Chi.
Race 3
Alex Powell sat on pole position for the final F4 race of the weekend, with R-ace GP team-mate Emanuele Olivieri alongside. But yet again there was dreadful luck for Powell. On Saturday, Powell had got stuck in second gear at the start; this time, he had to wait for the entire field to pass by before finally firing it into action.
Kean Nakamura-Berta, third on the grid, was also unfortunate. Because the stranded car of Powell was directly in front of him, he had to veer across in avoidance, so it was fourth-starter Tomass Štolcermanis who vaulted to second place, ahead of Nakamura-Berta and Salim Hanna. Soon, however, the safety car appeared for the first time because of a collision at Turn 14 between Arjun Chheda and August Raber, with both cars needing to be recovered.
At the restart, Olivieri darted away and began to build a substantial advantage over the dueling Mumbai Falcons cars behind. When Štolcermanis made a mistake on the brakes into the Turns 6/7 chicane, Nakamura-Berta got momentum onto the start-finish straight and sailed through into the runner-up spot. But that looked as far as he could get, because Olivieri was 2.5 seconds in front when the safety car emerged again after Taha Hassiba and Abdullah Ayman Kamel tangled at Turn 6, both cars stuck in the middle of the track.
The race was just about to go green again when the unlucky Hanna coasted to a halt in the Turns 2/3 region with an issue, meaning another car that needed retrieval and the end of what appeared to be a likely run to Rookie class victory as well as fourth overall.
The restart was finally given with one lap to go, and Nakamura-Berta instantly sprang into action, probing Olivieri all the way around the Yas Marina Circuit, with the two cars running side by side. Nakamura-Berta’s bid around the outside of Turn 6, which became the inside of Turn 7, sent Olivieri wide and the Italian just held on in a photo finish – just 0.071s separated him from Nakamura-Berta, and Štolcermanis was a mere 0.138s down in third.
It was close behind too. Reno Francot seemed set for fourth place, but only just fended off Sebastian Wheldon in the sprint for the finish, the two cars overlapping across the finish line. Adam Al Azhari passed Chi Zhenrui on the final lap for sixth, although consolation came for Prema Racing ace Chi with Rookie class honours. Another to move up was Martin Molnár, who grabbed eighth position from the Rookie runner-up, South Korean Kyuho Lee (Pinnacle Motorsport), on that thrilling final tour. Oleksandr Savinkov made it home in 10th, while fellow Ukrainian Oleksandr Bondarev (Prema) pipped Powell to 11th – Powell had somehow stormed his way back from 25th position at the end of lap one, in just five laps of green-flag racing, and starred by passing three cars in one fell swoop at Turn 6.
Drivers’ championship standings after Round 1 (top 5)
Formula Regional Middle East
1st Freddie Slater/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited/74 points
2nd Evan Giltaire/ART Grand Prix/48 points
3rd Theophile Nael/Sainteloc Racing/43 points
4th Brando Badoer/PHM Racing/37 points
5th Kanato Le/ART Grand Prix/34 points
Formula 4 Middle East
1st Emanuele Olivieri/R-ace GP/80 points
2nd Kean Nakamura-Berta/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited/66 points
3rd Tomass Stolcermanis/Mumbai Falcons Racing Limited/54 points
4th Sebastian Wheldon/Prema Racing/38 points
5th Reno Francot/AKCEL GP/PHM Racing/35 points
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