A stunning Coletti gets the podium on Race 1 at Nurburgring
The photo-finish finale awarded the Rapax driver that obtained his seventh podium of the season, behind winner Marcus Ericsson (Dams) and James Calado (ART Grand Prix).
Photo by: GP2 Media Service
The Feature Race of Nuburgring, valid for the sixth round of the GP2 Series 2013, awarded today very strong emotions from lights to flag with Stefano Coletti playing the role of the absolute championship protagonist after the unlucky break of Silverstone one week ago.
At the restart, Coletti - thirteenth yesterday in qualifying - drove very carefully to save tyres to get the most from the strategy devised with Team Rapax engineers which was based on a long first stint on medium tyres followed by the last fraction on super-soft rubber.
The Monegasque got the lead of the race at lap seventeen during the pit-stops phase to stop two laps later for his pit-stop rejoining in the points zone.
The classification leader has been unstoppable in the final stages thanks to a stunning progression and a string of overtaking that allowed him to get close to Robin Frijns (Hilmer Motorsport) and fight for the podium. The last laps of the race have been really exciting with Frijns, Coletti and Richelmi (Dams) fighting wheel to wheel for the third place until the last corner.
The photo-finish finale awarded the Rapax driver that obtained his seventh podium of the season, behind winner Marcus Ericsson (Dams) and James Calado (ART Grand Prix).
Coletti strengthened his classification leadership with 135 points. Second is Nasr (ninth today) at 100, followed by Bird at 89, that was thirteenth today.
Stefano Coletti: "This has been one of the nicest races of the season and perhaps one of the strongest in the last few years, one in which everything went according to plan.
Qualifying yesterday was not particularly good to us but we did not give up: we knew we had a good race pace and we decided to place our bet on a strategy that in the final stages could have made the difference.
The last few laps have been amazing: I strongly wanted a podium finish both for the classification and to pay back all the great efforts of the whole team, getting it in the last few meters has been really exciting".
The weekend's programme will reach its conclusion tomorrow with the Sprint Race that will start at 10.30 (GMT+1).
Stefano Coletti
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