Race 1 – First race and first victory for Alvaro Parente

Alvaro Parente won the first GP2 Series race of his career: it was also his first GP2 race today in Barcelona. He took advantage of a safety car to make a difference and finished ahead of Bruno Senna and Andy Zuber after 48 laps. Romain Grosjean, in his first European series race, finished 5th, just 8 seconds behind!

The 2007 World Series by Renault champion took the lead of the race right from the start, capitalizing on the issue faced by pole-man Pastor Maldonado who stalled. He never relinquished it despite some problems during the race and a safety car.

The Portuguese driver indeed refueled at the right time, just before the safety car, which allowed him to maintain the first position. The same was true for Senna and Zuber. The three men stayed within five seconds of each other for most of the race. All three of them are found on the podium.

Senna is therefore in second place and was very threatening to the Super Nova driver but was unable to take the lead.

Zuber finished third, less than a second behind Senna, and 2 seconds ahead of Giorgio Pantano.

Romain Grosjean, the only Frenchman in the discipline, started in 11th position. He got off to a good start and, after numerous overtakes, moved into the top 5, once again impressively. He notably took advantage of a mistake by Vitaly Petrov (6th) when the latter briefly went off into the gravel.

Sébastien Buemi and Kamui Kobayashi round out the top 8 and are therefore the last to score points. The two men are within less than 5 tenths of each other at the finish, but it is ultimately Kobayashi, in eighth, who will start in pole position tomorrow for race 2 (reverse grid based on the order of arrival of the first race).

Chandhok, after his accident on Friday morning, missed out on points by a narrow margin but lost most of his chances during his pit stop where he had to wait behind his teammate, Senna, who was already in the pits…

Maldonado, the pole setter, started from the pits after stalling for the warm-up lap. He managed to gain many positions during the safety car to take 10th place and eventually finished 12th.

This was made necessary when several collisions occurred at the same time. This was the case between Rodriguez and Tung as well as Conway and Pavlovic, who collided at different spots on the Barcelona circuit.

Valles set the fastest lap in the race, so he also scores a point.

Results of Race 1 – GP of Spain – TOP 10 or View the full live