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Amazing drive from Markelov. In the end he was 8sec ahead of Nato - it wasn't even close. I was thinking the optimal time might have been a couple more laps longer but in the end coming in 2 laps later didn't win him the race, he just had much less deg. He still would have won if he pitted 2-3 laps earlier.
What about Ghiotto though? It's not often you see Markelov so far ahead of his team mate. Marciello and Evans were almost always ahead of him. I rate Ghiotto as a very good driver but half a minute behind Markelov and it's not like he really sat in traffic. He was slow at the end, he finished 7sec behind Albon.
Yeah Chunterer good drive from Albon, I'm surprised how much better he was than his much more experienced team mate Matsushita. Matsu really looked out of place in that race.
The other interesting result is Racing Engineering. You've had Nato and King competing for wins with them the last 2 years. Now Nato is 2nd with Arden and King 4th with MP Motorsport - two teams that are normally near the back of the field. Meanwhile Malja and Deletraz are 18th and 20th! Deletraz's ultimate pace may have put him in the top 10 though, he was 80 seconds behind the leader after the first lap, and he ended up 100 seconds behind. But that's with no traffic. Not bad to compare to Leclerc though, he would have only lost less than 10 seconds to him in absolute race time. Not sure what happened to Malja, maybe he pitted a second time.
I think two stops would have been a better result for some of the drivers with bad deg. 4-5sec a lap difference you'd quickly make up that 35sec pit stop and be able to push 100% for the whole race. I think a few guys tried it last year too, but not the frontrunners.
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