At this moment, with a face full of happiness and relief, Zhou Haoran suddenly asked, "Could Qin Miao have deliberately created an opportunity for Zhou Guanyu?"
Before the other two commentators could respond, Zhou Haoran explained his reasoning: "I’ve watched Qin Miao’s qualifying videos, and he usually takes the outside line at T3, not cutting the inside kerb like he just did..." This content belongs to novel·fıre·net
The entire studio fell silent, and then the three commentators began analyzing the possibility of this scenario.
On the track, after helping Zhou Guanyu out of a predicament and ensuring Ilott wouldn’t attack him in the short term, Qin Miao started running at his own pace.
However, Qin Miao still left Zhou Guanyu a hand, because while running at his own pace, Qin Miao didn’t adhere to the team’s plan to fully push and open a gap of at least 2 seconds from the car behind.
After passing T3 and confirming Zhou Guanyu’s position was secure, Qin Miao began managing his tires at his own pace.
If Zhou Guanyu could catch up to his pace, Qin Miao wouldn’t mind letting Zhou Guanyu follow him, as for Zhou Guanyu’s attack.
Just joking, with his top-notch defensive skills maxed out at 100, and still driving a spec car, if Zhou Guanyu could overtake Qin Miao in the race, Qin Miao would hand him a P250 in every pistol round in the future games.
However, after the race, not only did Zhou Guanyu fail to overtake Qin Miao, but even with Qin Miao running at a tire-saving pace, Zhou Guanyu, trailing behind, had to push to the extreme to barely keep up.
And Zhou Guanyu could only barely keep up due to being in the slipstream of Qin Miao, while Ilott, who lost his rhythm due to Qin Miao’s dirty trick, remained third but had fallen at least 1.5 seconds behind both Qin Miao and Zhou Guanyu due to that braking incident.
This gap visibly widened, reaching 1.7 seconds after the first lap, 2.1 seconds after the second lap, and 2.9 seconds after the third lap.
Basically, Qin Miao was at least 0.6 seconds faster per lap than Ilott.
And before the opening of DRS by the race stewards, Zhou Guanyu was already more than a second behind Qin Miao.
It’s not that Zhou Guanyu didn’t want to chase, he simply couldn’t catch up.
Even though he could barely latch onto Qin Miao’s slipstream, the gap between them continued to be widened by Qin Miao.
From Zhou Guanyu’s perspective, Qin Miao’s racing line seemed machine-controlled, each step of braking, entering, apexing, and exiting the corners was executed perfectly, pushing the car to its limits with minimal tire wear.
When Zhou Guanyu was driving, there would inevitably be some minor flaws.
Compared to Qin Miao, it might be just braking a meter too late or early, or a slightly off angle entering the corner, usually not having a significant impact on speed.
But over time, even with full effort, Zhou Guanyu couldn’t catch up to Qin Miao.
So after the third lap, Zhou Guanyu settled down and began running his own rhythm.
Qin Miao and Zhou Guanyu were no longer on camera.
By the seventh lap, Qin Miao had opened a 2.5-second gap from Zhou Guanyu and a 3.6-second gap from Ilott.
Since it’s an F2 race, the broadcast director preferred to showcase more F2 drivers.
When the more challenging corners appeared on the broadcast footage, Qin Miao’s car was usually out of view.
Because by the time the F2 pack appeared on camera, Qin Miao had already passed that corner, heading towards the next one.
On lap eight, Qin Miao set his fastest lap time: 1:17.667.
On lap nine, Qin Miao lapped another driver for the first time on the F2 circuit, the unlucky one being the rookie Yuki Tsunoda.
This guy seemed to have encountered a mechanical issue and had pitted once, rejoining the track not far ahead of Qin Miao, who caught up in two laps and easily lapped him thanks to the blue flags.
On lap eleven, British driver Jack Aitken was the first to pit and switch to hard tires.
At this point, there were 29 laps remaining in the race.
Meanwhile, Qin Miao once again set his fastest lap time: 1:17.555.
On lap twelve, the pit window opened, and three cars pitted for tires.
On lap thirteen, the gap between Qin Miao and Zhou Guanyu reached 6.5 seconds, and the gap between Zhou Guanyu and his teammate Ilott widened slightly to 1.7 seconds.
Seeing the gap between Qin Miao and Zhou Guanyu, Bing sharply commented, "This is totally like an F1 driver dropping down to F2 to fight fish..."
On lap eighteen, Zhou Guanyu pitted for tire change, with the pit crew performing perfectly, taking only 6.2 seconds.
After rejoining, Zhou Guanyu was in sixth place, right behind the unpitted Russian driver Artem Makarov.
By lap twenty-two, almost all team drivers had pitted for hard tires, except Qin Miao, who was still running on those soft tires and set his fastest lap time again this lap: 1:17.332.
Upon seeing this, Fei couldn’t help but exclaim, "Where on earth did this Qin Miao pop out from? Strong starting ability, impressive defense, and now his tire management is terrifying, refreshing his fastest lap record on 22-lap old soft tires?"
Almost blurting out, this guy is terrifying, destined for greatness in the future.
At this moment, the time gap between Qin Miao and pitted Zhou Guanyu reached 42.7 seconds.