Alex Lynn took a hat-trick of podiums in the FIA Formula 3 European Championship after a competitive weekend at the Dutch circuit of Zandvoort.
Lynn, who turned 20 years old earlier this month, scored a second and two thirds to lead the challenge of the Prema Powerteam squad in style with his Mercedes-powered Dallara.
While Prema’s championship leader Raffaele Marciello struggled to a best result of fifth, Lynn was comfortably the best representative of the Italian team as he moved into third place in the points table.
On a circuit where it is notoriously difficult to overtake, Alex laid the foundations for a solid weekend with a trio of top-four grid positions, including a front-row start for race one.
It was a solid bounceback from a disappointing weekend last time out at the Nurburgring. “It’s nice to be getting good grid positions again,” he said. “We’re just a little off the ultimate pace across the whole team. We were always really quick in the fast corners of sector one but it slipped away over the rest of the lap.”
Starting on the slippery side of the track, Lynn struggled to hold off title contender Felix Rosenqvist at the start but managed to defend second place at the opening corner.
After an early safety car, Alex could not resist Rosenqvist, whose car had tremendous early-race pace that he made use of to get second place. Although Lynn gained on Rosenqvist towards the end, he had to be satisfied with third. This gave him points for second position, as race winner Daniil Kvyat is not registered for the championship.
“My start wasn’t the best I’ve made this year,” said Alex. “There wasn’t a lot of grip. I didn’t make a fantastic restart and Felix got past, which is a shame because it would have been nice to pick up the points for a win. But the 18 I got are good in the battle for third in the championship.”
In the second race, Lynn jumped ahead of Kvyat from third on the grid to chase Rosenqvist. As the race wore on he managed to get closer and closer to the Swede, but was unable to get near enough to challenge for the win due to losing front downforce through following closely in the Zandvoort circuit’s long, fast corners.
“I had a really good start and jumped Daniil,” he said. “At first I wasn’t as fast as Felix, but I tried as hard as I could to stay with him. I just tried to pressure him into a mistake but he drove a really good race.”
Once again Alex made a place at the start of race three, moving from fourth to third before giving chase to Rosenqvist and Jordan King. By this point of the weekend he had used his whole allocation of Hankook tyres so knew that it would be a struggle to keep up on older rubber. But as the race wore on – and the newer tyres on the cars in front began to fade – he stabilised the gap to take third position. It was the second time this year where Lynn has taken a podium in every race on a weekend.
“It was nice to get on the podium again, especially starting from fourth on the grid,” said Alex, who is a member of the MSA’s Team UK and the British Racing Drivers Club’s SuperStars programme.
“With three podiums in one weekend I can’t really complain, especially when my team-mates struggled so much. Pacewise I was struggling compared to Felix and Jordan, who each had two new tyres to benefit from, but I was pleased to pull away from Daniil Kvyat behind, who also had two new ones.
“We had very consistent pace in the races, but our qualifying pace, while fast, was not quite fast enough. We need to find out how to improve that before the last two race weekends.”
While Lynn still has an outside mathematical chance of the European F3 title, far more realistic is his fight for third and the status of best series rookie against team-mate Lucas Auer. Heading into the next round at Vallelunga in Italy on 12th/13th October, Alex leads the Austrian by 26.5 points, equivalent to just more than a race win.
