DAMS to bounce back at Imola after testing Baku weekend

DAMS suffered a difficult weekend in the streets of Baku and were surprisingly far off the pace from what we have seen from Iwasa and Leclerc this year respectively, a real contrast from what we witnessed in Australia were the team came out of Melbourne on Sunday with 47 points to their name securing pole position and a double podium in the feature race with Iwasa sealing the victory and Leclerc finishing P3 for the French outfit.

The difference at Baku with the DAMS drivers languishing on the fringes of points for most of the weekend, a difficult qualifying after the pair both missed out on having a second push lap in the final stages of Quali meant that they fell down the order to P13 for Leclerc and Iwasa fell as far as P17, DAMS blaming bad timing for poor showing.

The tale of woe continued into the sprint race with Iwasa having quite a monotonous race at the back of the field, Eventually the Honda backed driver retired on lap 11 with a technical problem. For Leclerc after climbing places off the start he found himself sat in P10 chasing down the final points paying position of Kush Maini. A late safety car caused by Roy Nissany hitting the wall at turn 15 gave some hope of achieving a decent points finish through some chaos at the restart, and chaos we got but not to the benefit of Leclerc who ended up having to take avoiding action at turn 1 from Pourchaire after a multi car shunt put them both clumsily into the wall forcing them to retire the car.

A more positive feature race came for Leclerc with a P10 finish after a post race disqualification for Victor Martins for a technical infringement as his car was 3.4mm below the reference plane instead of the standard 10mm above the reference plane. Iwasa managed a good recovery drive from the back of the grid and finished only +3.111 seconds behind his team mate to claim P12, a weekend in which Iwasa has not assisted himself in his championship fight although considering this is sort of a ‘off weekend’ he still remains only 7 points behind championship leader Theo Pourchaire as we head to Imola on the 21st May.

Looking forward towards Imola and although modern Formula 2 has only been to Imola once before, that being last year. It seems to be a happy hunting ground for DAMS and a track that really suits their package overall, In Qualifying last year Iwasa got onto the front row in a rain affected session whilst teammate Roy Nissany was P6 only +0.243 off Iwasa’s time. The sprint yielded a P4 for Nissany and P9 for Iwasa, both not moving from their starting positions throughout the sprint race and for Nissany bringing home a great haul of points for the team. Nissany

continued to be at the heart of the action heading into the feature race and after a mega launch he was late on the brakes and went round the outside of Ralph Boschung to take the lead into turn 1. Iwasa with a steady launch from P2 found himself in P3 come the end of lap 1. After a pitstop under a safety car Nissany was in the net lead after the round of stops and was in control at the front, but at the final corner running wide and clipping the gravel sparked the end to Nissany’s race on lap 21. Hitting the wall and causing terminal damage to the car. Iwasa claimed a solid P5 after a chaotic race.

History gives us great insight into whether a team can show up and deliver and it seems like DAMS could be in with a shout for a prosperous weekend and hopefully not a repeat of Baku as they can not afford to lose any more points if they are seriously thinking of a title charge this season.