ART's Alexander Rossi took a dominant win in this morning's GP3 Series sprint race at Barcelona.
Rossi started from pole and led the entire race, but the decisive move came on the lap four restart following an early safety car when the American took off early, and second-placed Lucas Foresti simply failed to follow him. By the time he crossed the start/finish line, Rossi already had a 0.6sec lead, and a string of successive fastest laps extended that to 10.5sec by the end of the race.
While Foresti did not have the speed to trouble Rossi, the Carlin driver had enough defensive smarts to make sure that no one else could do it, either. ART's Esteban Gutierrez launched a series of attacks for second, culminating in a brave move around the outside of Turn 5 that ended with the Mexican running wide and dropping to fourth behind Tech 1's Jean-Eric Vergne.
However, Vergne was subsequently issued a somewhat mystifying drive-through penalty for forcing a rival off the track, which promoted Gutierrez back up to third, although he had to see off a late challenge from Canada's Robert Wickens to hold on to it.
Dean Smith finished fifth, with Pedro Nunes edging out James Jakes for the final point.
It was a disastrous morning for feature race winner Pal Verhaug, who was forced wide onto the grass by Wickens on the run down to the first corner. The Norwegian spun back onto the circuit and into the path of the unfortunate Mirko Bortolotti, whose miserable weekend was completed when he plowed into the Jenzer team car, putting both out of the race and prompting a safety car intervention to clean the mess up.