Academy Report: Luke scores on debut and Alessandro takes another trophy

After finishing the Formula 3 Championship in third place, Williams Racing Driver Academy's Luke Browning made his Formula 2 debut in Baku at the weekend.

He was one of several rookies taking to the Azerbaijan streets for the first time, yet Luke showed impressive pace among far more experienced drivers.

But it wasn't just the Caspian sea that saw Williams Racing representatives racing, with Alessandro Giusti on track in Austria and our karters contesting the FIA World Championship at the UK's PF International Circuit.

Luke was less than a tenth away from starting his first Formula 2 race from P1 after missing out on reverse grid pole by just 0.079s in his first F2 Quali session on Friday.

The tight field continued into Saturday's Sprint Race, where Luke went wheel-to-wheel with F1-bound Andrea Kimi Antonelli throughout the 21-lap race en-route to a P11 finish.

Lessons learned over the weekend helped in shortened Feature Race on Sunday, and Luke picked up a P7 classification despite running with a damaged car.

A Lap 1 crash caused the race to have a lengthy delay before restarting, when Dennis Hauger broke Luke's front wing endplate.

Undeterred, Luke kept his head down and finished a commendable P7 with his damaged car to take 4 points on his championship debut.

Sandro has now managed three podium trips in three weekends in the 2024 Formula Regional European Championship by Alpine.

This latest success came on a drizzly Saturday at Spielberg's Red Bull Ring, where our French hopeful occupied the top positions throughout Race 1's duration.

A late-race charge by Sandro's teammate resulted in a P3 finish rather than P2 as sensible racing prevented any intra-team collisions, leading to some delighted champagne celebrations on the podium.

Sadly, Race 2 did not have the same silverware result after Alessandro was the innocent party in a multi-car collision, but he remains in the upper positions of the FRECA championship fight.

Another busy weekend at PF International had our trio of karters racing at the Lincolnshire track.

For Oleksandr Bondarev, this was the last race in karting machinery before his upcoming graduation to F4, but his karting time ended in the wall with eight laps remaining after picking up some places in the soaking wet finale.

Fine margins separated Sara Matsui from the OK-class Super Heats as she missed out on the shootout to race in the final alongside Bondi by just 3 points.

Dean Hoogendoorn managed to score the Fastest Lap and overtake 16 drivers in Super Heat B of OK-Junior, but his weekend points tally wasn't enough to reach the final this time, either.

The Williams Racing Driver Academy will next see Lia Block join Formula 1 in Singapore as F1 Academy fires back up for its first visit to the Marina Bay Circuit this weekend.