Maximilian Günther will arrive in Belgium with boosted confidence as he finished first, second and fourth in the previous race meeting at Zandvoort. Lance Stroll, however, won one of the races but failed to score in the other two – his first zero-point races since the 2016 season was kicked off at Le Castellet. And he also hasn’t got too fond memories of his first F3 race weekend at Spa-Francorchamps: in 2015, he had to leave the Belgian racetrack completely empty-handed. While Günther, currently his toughest rival in the fight for the title, managed to secure two top-10 results by finishing seventh and eighth respectively. At the same time, there are two drivers on this year’s FIA F3 European Championship grid who did clearly better in last year’s Spa-Francorchamps meeting: both George Russell (HitechGP) and Sérgio Sette Câmara (Motopark) secured a podium, last year in Belgium.

On the coming weekend, the FIA Formula 3 European Championship regulars will be joined by a newcomer: Ukyo Sasahara will contest the coming FIA F3 European Championship weekend for ThreeBond with T-Sport. In the past three years, the 20-year old Japanese raced in the Formula Renault 2.0 and celebrated his biggest success to date by finishing third in the 2015 Formula Renault 2.0 NEC. Sasahara is the first Japanese driver on the FIA Formula 3 European Championship grid since the series was revived in 2013.

For once, the FIA Formula 3 European Championship race weekend at Spa-Francorchamps will begin as early as Thursday – with the practice sessions and the two qualifying sessions. The Friday schedule features race one and race two, with the third FIA Formula 3 European Championship race being held on Saturday. The reason for the unusual time schedule: Formula 3 is part of the support programme of a 24-hour race.

George Russell (HitechGP): “Spa-Francorchamps is a great, legendary racetrack and possibly the most beautiful circuit in the world. It features fast sections and offers numerous overtaking possibilities. Actually, the circuit has got everything you could ask for and I really am looking forward to the race weekend. As the circuit is that long, achieving a faultless lap is particularly difficult and furthermore, you can’t complete as many laps in a 20-minute qualifying sessions as on shorter racetracks. So, you haven’t got as many chances of setting a fast lap time. I’ve set myself the goal to close in on the front runners and win races. We had very good race weekends at Pau and Budapest but since then, we slightly fell behind. Nonetheless, should we succeed in increasing our straight-line speed we should have a good chance of also making it to the Spa podiums.”

Timetable