Singapore GP2 race report

24/09/2013

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As Monaco and Singapore have shown in the past, street circuits have always brought the best out of Jolyon Palmer, and the penultimate rounds of the 2013 GP2 season in Singapore certainly played to the Comma-sponsored driver's strengths.

Practice and qualifying:

From the opening laps of free practice, it was apparent that Jolyon was completely 'in the zone' as he consistently improved his times, finishing up as the only driver to brake the 1m56sec barrier with a best time 0.25sec faster than Fabio Leimer in second place, and over a second faster than his Carlin team mate, Felipe Nasr.

Official qualify simply confirmed that Jolyon was continuing to set the benchmarks for the weekend. It has perhaps been longer than he would have liked in coming, but Jolyon metaphorically lit up the night-time session with the maiden pole position of his GP2 career, annexing the top spot with a time of precisely 1m53.60sec. Nasr also pulled out the stops to make it a Carlin lock-out of the front row, ahead of championship leader Fabio Leimer and Alexander Rossi on row 2.

Feature race:

One of Jolyon's major racing attributes is his ability to overtake, which is just as well, since he made something of a botch of his start and exited the first corner in fourth place behind his team mate, Leimer and a fast-starting James Calado from the fourth row. Dispensing with Calado on the opening lap, it took Jolyon another three laps to get past Leimer, by which time Nasr was over 5 seconds down the road. Jolyon rapidly reduced that to 3.6 seconds by the time Nasr made his compulsory tyre-change stop, but something must have gone awry with his own stop because the gap to Nasr had increased to over 10 seconds by the time Jolyon re-joined the race. Indeed, things were looking not so good when the gap extended to almost 14 seconds, but at that point, Jolyon re-discovered his mojo and went to work on a devastating series of consecutive fastest laps to which Nasr was unable to respond. With four laps remaining, he blasted past Nasr to take the chequered flag, out of sight by a commanding margin of 13 seconds. A further 12 seconds back, Calado claimed the third podium position after a close-fought late race battle with Stephane Richelmi.

Quite apart from his stellar performance having elevated Jolyon to sixth place in the GP2 championship table, his win also earned him the unique distinction of being the only driver so far this season to claim the maximum Feature race points (31) for pole position, fastest lap and race win. Good days at the office don't come any better than that.

Sprint race:

This affair was all about making the most of unfavourable tyres, the super soft option being all that was available to Jolyon following his tyre choice for the Feature race. Starting from his fourth row, eight position as per the reverse grid

regulations, Jolyon initially made good progress to be in fifth place after a couple of laps, but the tyre compromise was beginning to extract its price, and after being passed by Jon Lancaster and Daniel Abt, Jolyon made for the pits and new tyres. This left him badly out of the running in 22nd place on his return, but he quickly then set the fastest lap of the race and had improved to 17th just behind his team mate Nasr at the end of the 20 laps.

With only the Yas Marina event left on this year's GP2 calendar, the top of the championship table is delicately poise between Fabio Leimer and Britain's Sam Bird – 179 and 175 points respectively. Our man Palmer is involved in an equally tense battle for sixth place – Jolyon's minimum self-imposed target for the season – with just four points covering him, Stephane Richelmi and Marcus Ericsson. If he can carry his Singapore form into the United Arab Emirates on November 1-3, the smart money will be on Jolyon realising his ambition.