Ferrari Challenge: Linos double

Spaniard Javier Diaz, renowned as a quick qualifier, took his second pole in a row for race one, but a chaotic first corner incident - at the bottleneck into the Castrol S - led to him being eliminated immediately. Diaz's departure allowed fellow front-row man Linos to pull away, building a leading cushion of 5.1 seconds after seven laps.

Ange Barde, penalised at Brands for an illegal car, was intent on fighting hard in spite of his championship chances being little more than theoretical. Though he made a poor start from fourth on the grid, the Monaco Motors driver shadowed Austrian Karl Baron in the closing laps and executed a move in the Mercedes arena which had been planned several corners before. Baron kept his head and finished a solid third behind the Frenchman.

Race two offered another opportunity to the championship protagonists to salvage their weekend - in the first race, Bosch had finished an unspectacular eighth, whilst Cullen had suffered a puncture on the penultimate lap. The opportunity, though, was not seized - Cullen suffered more car trouble, Diaz finished seventh and Bosch third, the latter now topping the standings by accident rather than virtue.

Linos, by contrast, again shone at the front, his additional experience from competition in the Italian Challenge series clearly paying off. After Barde, his closest challenger, retired on lap 14 with a punctured right rear tyre, Linos cruised away and finished some seventeen seconds clear, Baron and Bosch only able to follow in his wheeltracks.

In class two, rapidly improving Swiss driver René de Luigi convincingly won the first race from Emilio Giusti and Urs Grutter. Giusti threw away his lead in the feature race, allowing Jindrich Hudecek to take victory with a stellar drive from ninth.

Luciano Linos (I) 22m25.303s
Ange Barde (F) 22m31.193s
Karl Baron (A) 22m32.761s
Louis Machiels (B) 22m34.308s
Tony Ring (SWE) 22m37.894s
Jochen Berger (D) 22m38.549s

Luciano Linos (I) 38m14.788s
Karl Baron (A) 38m31.766s
John Bosch (NED) 38m39.691s
Pier Giuseppe Perazzini (I) 38m43.139s
Louis Machiels (B) 38m45.106s
Daniel Model (CH) 38m45.358s