Hungaroring FR3.5: Norman Nato denies Roberto Merhi race two win

The Frenchman, who also won in Monaco, made a rapid start from third on the grid, passing front row men Merhi and DAMS team-mate Carlos Sainz Jr around the outside into Turn 1.

From there he spent the entire race trying to keep race one winner Merhi under control, and he was able to maintain enough of a gap to prevent any attacks from the Spaniard's Zeta-run car.

Merhi came closest to taking the lead after a safety car restart, when he attacked around the outside at Turn 1 and Turn 2, but Nato forcefully held him off as Merhi gave himself a severe flat spot by locking up twice.

After the pitstops Merhi focused on saving his tyres and DRS allocation to mount an attack at the end, but Nato didn't put a wheel wrong and held on to win by 0.4 seconds.

Behind them Pierre Gasly took third place, picking off Oliver Rowland at Turn 1 after the pitstops, having earlier capitalised on an error from Sainz at the same corner to get ahead of his Red Bull stablemate.

Sainz had dropped down the order at the start after being slow out of Turn 1 when his car went into anti-stall mode, which allowed Rowland and Meindert van Buuren to push him down to fifth at that stage.

While Gasly was able to leapfrog that battle and chase the leaders, Sainz could not keep up with Rowland and van Buuren after the pitstops and instead had to focus on fending off a late-stopping Matthieu Vaxiviere to hang on to sixth place.

The championship leader revealed to AUTOSPORT after the race that he felt something was wrong with his brakes on the way to the grid, but there was nothing his team could do about it before the start.

Several laps were spent under safety car conditions early on, after a four-car collision between Sergey Sirotkin, Nicholas Latifi, Will Buller and Oscar Tunjo resulted in Tunjo's car being flipped onto its roll-hoop at the first corner.

European Formula 3 Championship leader Esteban Ocon failed to start what would have been his second FR3.5 race due to damage from his heavy qualifying crash.

Merhi's second place means he has reduced Sainz's championship lead to just 16 points with four races remaining.

RESULTS - 24 LAPS:

CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS: