Parente scores Ocean's first win

Parente took the chequered 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 0.9s ahead of Nico Hulkenberg, but the gap had been as much as 4.5s 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.

Pos  Driver               Team                  Time/Gap
 1.  Alvaro Parente       Ocean               54m12.997s
 2.  Nico Hulkenberg      ART                  +  0.943s
 3.  Lucas di Grassi      Racing Engineering   +  3.179s
 4.  Pastor Maldonado     ART                  +  3.468s
 5.  Roldan Rodríguez     Piquet               +  4.349s
 6.  Giedo van der Garde  iSport               +  4.687s
 7.  Kamui Kobayashi      DAMS                 +  5.469s
 8.  Edoardo Mortara      Arden                +  5.972s
 9.  Diego Nunes          iSport               + 29.105s
10.  Dani Clos            Racing Engineering   + 32.315s
11.  Nelson Panciatici    Durango              + 35.474s
12.  Stefano Coletti      Durango              +  2 laps
13.  Javier Villa         Super Nova           +  3 laps

Retirements:

     Jerome D'Ambrosio    DAMS                20 laps
     Luca Filippi         Super Nova          13 laps
     Davide Valsecchi     Addax               13 laps
     Karun Chandhok       Ocean               7 laps
     Davide Rigon         Trident             7 laps
     Vitaly Petrov        Addax               6 laps
     Michael Herck        DPR                 0 laps
     Alberto Valerio      Piquet              0 laps
     Ricardo Teixeira     Trident             0 laps
     Sergio Perez         Arden               0 laps