Bearman wanted red-flagged Monza F3 feature race to restart

The Prema Racing driver was running second in the feature race when it was prematurely ended after a collision between Kush Maini (MP Motorsport) and Carlin’s Brad Benavides exiting the second Lesmo.

Championship leader Victor Martins (ART), who was running fourth and 13 points clear of Bearman in the standings, was then handed a five-second penalty for exceeding track limits.

This dropped him to fifth, before he was promoted back to fourth when William Alatalo (Jenzer) also received a penalty.

Martins was crowned champion with 139 points, five clear of Monza feature race winner Zane Maloney (Trident), and seven clear of Bearman.

But the Briton, an F3 rookie in 2022, believes he could have passed Maloney if the race had restarted, and that Martins would have “fallen back a lot”.

He told Autosport: “I think if the race restarted, I had the pace on Zane, I think I could have passed him.

“And Victor would have been within the five seconds of everyone and fallen back a lot.

“So that would have been nice, but it's not up to me whether the race restarts or not.

“I would have liked the race to restart, but it probably wasn't safe at that point or it probably would have taken a while. So there's obviously a reason they didn't restart it.”

Bearman was a winner at Spa, but came up just short in the F3 title race

Photo by: Ferrari

Asked what he thought about the race result being called with five laps remaining, the 2021 Aston Martin Autosport BRDC Award finalist said: “Yeah, I mean, at the end, it's a Sunday, we're preceding F1, they take priority.

“The fact the race couldn't restart is completely out of our control, it probably would have taken a while to fix the barrier and everything, so it's fine.

“We knew we needed a lot of things to go away this race to be in with any chance of winning the championship and not everything went our way. So that's P3 in the end, but happy.

“I'm not happy, but better P3 than P4, I’m on the championship podium.

“Of course, I'm really disappointed. But it's life, I can't change it now.”

Bearman had finished second in race one to Van Amersfoort Racing driver Franco Colapinto, explaining afterwards that he believed he had one more lap to get the move done on the Argentinian.