AT BRANDS HATCH F3 FINALE

with a dominant performance around the Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit

Max brought his Cooper Tires British F3 International Series career to an impressive conclusion, leading the championship’s final round from start to finish in his Carlin Motorsport run Dallara Volkswagen. The win sealed 4th place overall in this year’s championship for the 18 year-old.

After a fantastic start, Max pulled out an impressive lead over the early laps, only to see his advantage wiped out by a safety car period. He nailed the restart and again built a healthy lead to come home a comfortable winner;

“That meant a lot for me,” he said, “because my win in Portugal wasn’t an outright victory and didn’t make the headlines. This will, and that’s a big relief. I loved every minute of it. It was a pretty standard F3 race around here: try to make places up at the start and, once I had done that, I knew it would be hard for anyone to pass me. The safety car was a bit of a worry but I managed to pull out a good lead after that as well.”

Max also set the race’s fastest lap and was additionally awarded the Sunoco Driver of the Weekend award for his performance.

This followed a strong 2nd place finish in the day’s earlier race which clinched the Mirror.co.uk Challenge Cup as the championship’s leading British driver.

However, as they formed up on the grid for the start, there was drama as Max’s brakes caught fire, forcing the marshals to intervene and delaying the start. When eventually they did get underway, Max was full of uncertainty as to how his car may have been affected as he explained;

“When we did another green flag lap I had no brakes at all for the first half of the lap, then they started to work a little, but as the lights went out I really didn’t know what to expect. I took it carefully on the opening laps and in the end it was OK.”

His caution in the early laps had let Ricciardo get away and open up a big lead so Max couldn’t do anything about him. Instead his attention was on Riki Christodoulou behind who was starting to put him under pressure. Max kept cool and didn’t give any chances to his pursuers and came home a fairly comfortable 2nd.

Max and his championship winning Carlin team mate Dan Ricciardo had dominated practice and qualifying and the Volkswagen powered pair locked out the front row in both of Saturday’s sessions. In the second of the two, they were seven tenths of a second quicker than their nearest rivals with Max losing out to Dan by just 45 hundredths of a second. This performance meant Max has started half of this season’s races from the front row of the grid – an amazing achievement.

With the championship season concluded, Max is looking forward to the annual end-of-season Macau Grand Prix, where he will drive for Carlin again and will be amongst the fancied runners to win one of motorsport’s most prestigious events. This takes place around the streets of the Chinese principality on 22nd November