1. A moment of madness for Doriane Pin
It was so nearly the perfect weekend for Doriane Pin. Touted as one to watch ahead of the season opener, with several high-profile performances in endurance racing with the Iron Dames, the Frenchwoman lived up to the hype as she took a double pole position in qualifying. Her two quickest laps in the half-hour session were 0.785 and 0.684 seconds quicker than Abbi Pulling’s two best efforts.
Race one went entirely to plan for the Mercedes F1 team representative as she dominated from start to finish. Seeing off the challenge of Pulling into turn one and from then on maintaining a gap of roughly one second all the way to the end.
The action in race two told a similar story. Pin led from start to finish, and looked absolutely untroubled as she navigated a handful of safety car restarts and rebuilt her lead time and time again.
She should have completed a perfect weekend when she took the chequered flag, but without notification from her team that she had sealed the deal she inexplicably continued pushing on at racing speed, unnoticed by her team as they celebrated on the pit wall. By the time her race engineer had got on the radio to tell her the race was over it was already too late. Pin had crossed the finish line for a second time, a transgression that earned her a 20-second penalty that dropped her to ninth in the final classification.
That moment of chaos was the only, albeit major, blemish on her weekend, and Pin has surely positioned herself as the early favourite for the F1 Academy title in 2024.