Alvaro Parente converted his pole position into a first win for Ocean Racing in an incident-filled GP2 race at Spa this afternoon.
Parente took the checkered flag behind the safety car after Durango's Stefano Coletti went straight on at Eau Rouge and crashed heavily with two laps remaining. The Monagasque driver was conscious and communicating with medical personnel after the accident, but was still being extracted from the wreckage when the race finished.
Parente crossed the line 0.9sec ahead of Nico Hulkenberg, but the gap had been as much as 4.5sec before an earlier safety car -- brought out when Luca Filippi spun into the path of Davide Valsecchi at Les Combes -- bunched up the field.
Any disappointment that Hulkenberg might have felt at not finding a way past Parente would have been offset by the fact that main title rival Vitaly Petrov exited the race at mid-distance with an engine failure, putting the German into an almost unassailable points position.
Lucas di Grassi was third after surviving late-race pressure from ART's Pastor Maldonado.
Diego Nunes and Giedo van der Garde delivered iSport one of its best results of the year with fifth and seventh, respectively, the pair sandwiching Piquet GP's Roldan Rodriguez, while DAMS driver Kamui Kobayashi took the final point and will start from pole tomorrow.
Elsewhere in the field, a lot of repair work will need to be done ahead of tomorrow's sprint race. Alberto Valerio was an early casualty, being tapped into a spin that put him into the wall at Les Combes
The same corner also marked the end of Karun Chandhok and Davide Rigon's races when the Indian spun while trying to pass Valsecchi and collected the Trident car.