Great recovery for Coletti in Monaco's feature race

Monaco's Feature Race started the fourth round of the GP2 Series with some eventful track action ending up in quite an unpredictable result.

Turn one has once again been a treacherous funnel as it staged an incident involving more than ten drivers. Fabio Leimer (Racing Engineering) and Marcus Ericsson (Dams) had the worst of it and were forced to the retirement after just a few hundredths of meters, while Stefano Coletti managed to get out of turn one with only some damage to the front wing that was fixed on the grid during the red flag time.

At the restart - under safety car regime - the Monegasque of Team Rapax was eleventh and decided to pit early to avoid being stuck in traffic.

In the following laps his recover got into shape with a string of very quick laps (1:23.665 the best time), that allowed Coletti to gain precious ground on the rivals.

At the end of the round of pit-stops Coletti was sixth and he afterwards kept the position until the chequered flag that will allow him to start tomorrow's Sprint Race from the second row of the grid. The race was won by Sam Bird (Russian Time), followed by Kevin Ceccon (Trident) and Mitch Evans (Arden).

Thanks also to the points obtained due to the fastest lap of the race, Coletti keeps the classification lead with 103 points, followed by Nasr at 88 and Bird at 58.

Stefano Coletti: "The first passage at Saint Devote is always crucial in Monaco. I tried to avoid the cars stalled in front of me swerving to the right and even if I did not manage to avoid them all the damage on my car were minor. We based our strategy on an early pit-stop and I pushed hard on the new tyres to get the most out of clear track.

I could gain several positions in this way and from halfway through I managed the situation pushing only when necessary. I would have enjoyed being on the podium in front of my supporters but classification-wise things are fine the way they are, while we wait to have another go at it tomorrow in the Sprint Race".

The weekend will reach its conclusion tomorrow with the Sprint Race scheduled for 16.10 (GMT+2).

Stefano Coletti