• GP2, Turkish Grand Prix, Race 2

Coletti wins sprint race as Bird charges to third

Stefano Coletti kept his cool to win the Turkey sprint race © Sutton Images

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• Race:
• Turkish GP2 round

• Championship:
• GP2 Series

• Drivers:
• Sam Bird
• |
• Stefano Coletti
• |
• Giedo van der Garde

Trident's Stefano Coletti took his maiden GP2 Series victory at the Turkish Grand Prix sprint race, keeping his cool despite having a comfortable lead vanish due to a safety car in the closing stages. He led home Giedo van Garde in second and a hard-charging Sam Bird in third, who now ties on points for the championship lead with Romain Grosjean thanks to two podiums in as many days.

Coletti started from fourth on the grid but was up to second by the end of the first lap behind Dani Clos's Racing Engineering, which started from pole. But the 23 lap race was more of an exercise in tyre preservation than a genuine sprint and by lap seven Clos' rears were already showing signs of degradation. Coletti took advantage to pull off an epic overtaking move that started under braking for turn 12 but was not complete until the exit of turn three on the next lap.

Coletti then eased into a comfortable lead but saw it slashed to nothing when, with five laps remaining, a massive accident on the pit straight brought out a safety car and bunched up the pack. Davide Rigon had been defending form Julien Leal towards the back of the pack and in an attempt to cut back across Rigon and position his Rapax on the outside exiting the final corner, Leal clipped the back of the Coloni and sent it hard into the barriers. It took four laps to clean up the mess and Rigon left the scene in an ambulance after calling for help once he had lifted himself out of the cockpit.

The result was a final-lap showdown but van der Garde, who had started from fifth and followed Coletti through the field, could not make an impression on the Trident and crossed the line a full 2.1 seconds behind. In third place Bird rounded off a brilliant weekend by overtaking Charles Pic on the last lap to secure a podium from seventh on the grid.

Bird had seen his two closest rivals from yesterday's feature race, Grosjean and Jules Bianchi, come together on the first lap and took full advantage of their absence in the top six with an aggressive but well measured drive. Saturday's winner Grosjean tagged the back of Bianchi coming out of the final corner on lap one and, while both cars carried on with impressive drives of their own, neither finished in the points.

But it so nearly went wrong for Bird too, as on the final-lap restart his team-mate Marcus Ericsson launched an overambitious move onto the pit straight and clouted the side of Bird's iSport. Ericsson bore the brunt of the collision, however, and dropped from fifth to eighth while his team-mate went on to pull his move on Pic for podium glory.

Behind Pic, Fairuz Fauzy and Josef Kral took the final points on offer in fifth and sixth.

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