The most anticipated race of the 2023 Ferrari World Finals at Mugello, the one dedicated to the drivers of the Trofeo Pirelli and Pirelli AM classes, took place late in the morning today with a nice duel between the two youngest and most promising drivers of the Ferrari Challenge Europe, namely Thomas Fleming and Eliseo Donno.
The British driver prevailed after a race in which he had to defend the first position from the attacks of the Italian driver of the Radicci Automobili team, he took home the title with a perfect defense in all 3 restarts, caused by 2 Safety Car interventions and a red flag.
The race proved to be eventful right from the start, when Matt Kurzejewski, Yudai Uchida and Brian Cook came into contact with the Luco, prompting the race direction to deploy the Safety Car. The marshals signaled the entry of the safety car, but a few seconds after the first accident, another occurred at Materassi – Borgo San Lorenzo and involved Bence Valint, Dylan Medler and Roberto Perrina.
One of the cars ended up against the barriers between Luco Poggio Secco and Materassi Borgo San Lorenzo, breaking them. The subsequent contact between two other cars of the drivers mentioned brought a lot of dirt and debris onto the track. This, given the 6 cars involved, led the race direction to interrupt the race with the display of the red flag.
The stop to clean the track and repair the barriers lasted almost an hour. Then the cars started racing again, starting behind the Safety Car. The race was interrupted almost immediately with a new entry of the Safety Car due to Danilo Del Favero spinning, who spun at Buccine and ended up hitting the innocent Justin Rothberg.
On the next restart Tony Davis, Michael Porter and Balkissoon crashed at Poggio Secco. The first two got the worst of it and this led to the last Safety Car of the race being called. At that point Fleming had to do nothing but bring his 488 Challenge Evo to the finish line ahead of Donno and Adrian Sutil, third.
As regards the Trofeo Pirelli AM classification, Franz Engstler was the star performer, becoming champion of the class ahead of the Canadian Marc Muzzo and Nobuhiro Imada. Engstler also had the satisfaction of finishing fifth overall, ahead of Muzzo and the second Italian in the Top 10, Max Mugello, driver of the CDP – Eureka Competition team.
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