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The weather was much cooler for Sunday’s 21 lap Sprint Race with air and track temperatures of 25° and 28° respectively and there were grey clouds overhead with a possibility of rain. Fabio Leimer was starting from 8th on the grid following his superb win in Saturday’s Feature Race and Julian Leal was in 4th spot after finishing 5th. All but two of the cars on the grid were starting on the harder Pirelli compound as there would be no pitstops unless the rain came.
Julián made a great start from the second row of the grid and as the cars braked for the first corner he moved into second place and as the cars finished their opening lap he was 1.1 seconds behind Quaife-Hobbs and 0.5 seconds ahead of Bird. Over the next five laps the Racing Enganeering car dropped away a little from the leader as he became involved in an intense battle with Bird, Rossi and Dillmann but on lap 7 he set the fastest lap of the race so far with a time of 1:33.365s and closed the gap to the leader again.
On lap 8 light rain began to fall and many of the teams brought out their wet tyres as it seemed that a pitstop would be likely and Julian lost a place to Rossi as the track became slippery but it was not wet enough yet to change to wet tyres and the rain was predicted to quickly clear. On lap 11, the half-way point, the young Colombian was 0.8s behind Rossi and 0.6s ahead of Bird and the top four cars were separated by just 3.6 seconds.
As the race entered the final 5 laps Julián had fallen back from Rossi as his race long battle with Bird continued and the Racing Engineering driver was determined to finish on the podium again. With one lap remaining Julián put in his fastest lap of the race at 1:33.201s to open out the gap on Bird to 0.8 seconds and he crossed the line in 3rd to take his second podium in two races.
Fabio made a clean start as the lights went off gaining two places on the opening lap to cross the line in 6th, 0.3 seconds behind Dillmann and 0.8 seconds ahead of Haryanto. Over the next few laps the Racing Engineering car dropped away a little from the Russian Time car as the young Swiss concentrated on preserving his tyres. By lap 9 the gap was up to 2.6 seconds with Haryanto 1.8 seconds behind.
Although Fabio began to close the gap a little on Dillmann in the closing laps the Racing Engineering driver was conscious of the importance of gaining more points with Nasr and Coletti out of the top ten and Bird just two places ahead and on lap 19 Fabio grabbed fastest lap with a time of 1:32.791s to gain an extra two points and he reduced his time further on the final lap to 1:32.749s to finish in a fighting 6th.
This was another great weekend for Racing Engineering with a win and 6th for Fabio and 3rd and 5th for Julian. Fabio leaves Monza in the lead of the 2013 GP2 Drivers Championship and Racing Engineering have moved up to 2nd in the Team Championship. The next round of the 2013 GP2 series will be in Singapore in two weeks’ time.spacer
