John Bennett Left Out Of Luck On Streets Of Madrid

John Bennett faced a challenging weekend as the FIA Formula 2 Championship visited the brand-new street circuit in Madrid for the first time (12/13 September).

One week on from enjoying his best FIA Formula 2 weekend to date at Monza, the Salisbury-based racer travelled to Spain looking to learn the ropes as quickly as possible as the Formula 1 support championship tackled the new 5.41km layout.

The Trident driver, who is the leading British talent in the championship this year, set a strong pace from the off in Friday's free practice session. That gave him optimism for a strong qualifying outing later that afternoon.

Bennett's times were initially very encouraging, and he set off on his next run looking even quicker as he set the fastest opening sector time of the session so far. The lap was sadly cut short when he clipped the wall, putting pay to the rest of the session for the former GB3 vice champion, and leaving him an unrepresentative P15 in the times.

A winner in Austria, Bennett's job was to climb the field across the weekend's two races - the first being a slightly shorter sprint race on Saturday afternoon. A good start ultimately paid for nothing however, as the twitching Invicta car of Joshua Durksen snapped across into the path of Bennett, turning the innocent Brit around the front of Sebastien Montoya's Prema machine and into an early retirement with damage out of his control.

Sunday was a new day, and with it a new opportunity for Bennett to grab a result in Spain. He started the 32-lap feature race from the eighth row of the grid, and was one of several drivers opting to begin the race on the harder Pirelli tyre compound.

After surviving the opening laps in an improved 13th place - during which a safety car was called - Bennett opted to switch to the softer tyre on lap eight. He emerged into a fierce battle with Noel Leon and his Trident team-mate Laurens van Hoepen, losing a position to the latter while having to re-address places with Leon, who had forced him across the run-off area as Bennett launched an attack around the outside.

A shunt further ahead forced another safety car on lap 18, but unfortunately Bennett could not take advantage of this situation as he was once again the victim of a collision with Montoya, who squeezed his #25 car into the wall and out of the race when in a great position to benefit.

John Bennett: "Luck just has not been on our side this weekend unfortunately! The pace was definitely there on Friday and we bedded ourselves into the new track quite quickly, so then it was about qualifying. We went purple in sector one, but then we made contact with the wall pushing hard to get that lap in which was not what I wanted.

"The Trident team again did a great job this weekend, and both races were wrecked by contact out of my control which was hugely frustrating. There's plenty of racing still to go, so we'll look forward to Baku and hopefully get back to where we were at Monza."

Bennett is swiftly back in action in two weeks' time, when the FIA Formula 2 Championship heads to the Baku street circuit in Azerbaijan over the final weekend of the month (26/27 September).