BMW junior Joel Eriksson wins Hungaroring finale for points lead

The Swede shook off a challenge from the other front-row starter, Callum Ilott, over the first two corners and then immediately drove his Motopark Dallara-Volkswagen to a one-second gap to his rival.

Ilott stayed just over a second behind Eriksson over the first quarter of the race, but then the gap doubled over the next four laps.

The advantage never grew above three seconds and the race finished with Eriksson backing off on the run to the line to take victory by 1.8s.

"I'm really happy," said Eriksson, "because we started the weekend quite low, but as you could see it finished with a good payoff.

"We worked really hard and kept pushing throughout the weekend."

Yet again Lando Norris didn't make the best of starts from third on the grid, but this time Carlin's McLaren-Honda protege lost only one position to the Prema car of Ferrari Driver Academy youngster Guan Yu Zhou.

A lock-up at Turn 2 by Zhou at half-distance put Norris on his tail, but the Chinese looked to have done enough to repel the challenge.

That was until the penultimate lap, when Norris drew to the inside as they accelerated from the long Turn 5 at the top of the circuit towards the Turns 6/7 chicane.

Norris was absolutely level to Zhou's inside when Zhou cut across the asphalt to the left of the chicane to hang onto the position.

Zhou refused to cede the place over the remaining lap and a half, and completed the podium from Norris.

Motopark newcomer David Beckmann took advantage of his fifth place on the grid to retain that position throughout the race.

Beckmann lacked the pace of the leading quartet and spent the race with Prema's pre-race championship leader Maximilian Gunther behind him, with Hitech GP man Jake Hughes in turn right behind Gunther.

As the race wore on, Van Amersfoort Racing's Joey Mawson and Carlin driver Jehan Daruvala also latched onto the group to make it a quintet, but there were no place changes on the hard-to-pass Hungaroring circuit.

Nikita Mazepin claimed the final point of the weekend, the Russian earning a round of applause from his Hitech team this morning for actually making it to his marshalling duties on time.