Liam Lawson has won comfortably in the F2 Sprint Race at Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium this morning. Starting fifth on the grid, the Kiwi was the benefactor of Jehan Daruvala failing to start, his front row grid box left empty and providing Lawson with one less car to overtake. The remaining three cars proved no challenge, with the 20-year-old claiming the lead on Lap 2.
From here, Lawson never looked back. A safety car intervention on Lap 12 brought the field back to the Kiwi, but following the restart he again pulled away to come home ahead of Jack Doohan in second and Ralph Boschung in third.
The result sees the impressive weekend for Lawson continue following on from his practice outing with AlphaTauri in F1 Practice 1 yesterday.
Lawson took second position spectacularly off the start after beginning from fifth on the grid. A great launch saw Lawson immediately challenge those ahead, going on onto the main straight grass into Turn 1 and rejoining before overtaking Doohan and Richard Verschoor.
The Carlin junior took the lead on Lap 2, a move on Boschung promoting the Kiwi to the front. He worked to build a 5 second lead by Lap 12, before a safety car intervention was required after Carlin teammate Logan Sargeant lost control and buried his car in the barriers.
Several of the field stopped during the intervention, including championship leader Felipe Drugovich from sixth, to take on soft tyres for the remaining four laps of the event. Stops in F2 Sprint races are not required, but MP Motorsport believed that changing strategy would have seen them to the better of 4 seconds per lap over the field.
Emerging in 12th following the stop, Drugovich went about picking off the field and had quickly moved up into fifth by the penultimate lap. Lawson had one again continued to build his lead up front, which was how it remained come the end of the race.
Lawson emerged victorious, with Doohan second and Boschung third. Drugovich managed to work his way through the field to finish fourth.
Fellow New Zealand driver Marcus Armstrong also had an impressive race, finishing in seventh place, an improvement of five places on his starting position of 12th.
The feature race will begin tonight at 8.15pm, and will be shown live on Spark Sport.
