MEDIABALAP.com – It certainly was an eventful race 1 at Baku in the second round of the 2018 FIA Formula 2 Championship. Despite lining-up with two extremely competitive cars, the day for PERTAMINA PREMA Theodore Racing was conditioned by race incidents at the Azerbaijani street venue. Indonesian racer Sean Gelael, who started from P14, was involved in an unavoidable turn 1 contact at the start. Dealing with a damaged racecar, he delivered a positive comeback up to 10th position to secure his second points finish of the year.

On the other hand, Nyck De Vries was outright impressive at the start by climbing up to P2. After an initial pursuit to the leader for the first half of the distance, a safety-car condition bunched up the field, leveling the gaps. The Dutchman, now with a chance to fight for the lead, went to the attack at the restart but couldn’t make it stick ideally, which caused him to go straight at turn 1. Gelael and De Vries will start race 2 from P10 and P14 respectively tomorrow at 13:10 local time.

# 3 – Sean Gelael

“It was an eventful race, I hope it was fun for the spectators as there was a lot of action. Sadly we had an incident in turn 1 that was unavoidable for me as one driver launched on my inside and I had nowhere else to go. I feel bad for Deletraz but I really had nowhere to go. After that, it was damage limitation because there must have been some front-end damage on the car and we were struggling with pace. Eventually, we were there, I made some mistakes but we hanged in there and I still managed to make 1 point. Hopefully, we can add more points tomorrow.”

# 4 – Nyck De Vries

“We were looking pretty good, did a decent start and some good first laps, running P2 quite comfortably. George and I were the quickest on track. I had a big gap but the safety-car came and brought all the field together. I got a good restart and was on his slipstream but I think I wanted a bit too much. Brakes were not ready for it so I locked up, went straight and that was it.”

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