Up front, on the 'wrong' tyres, there was a ding-dong battle between Austin, Piquet, Power and Rossiter. Austin may have left the F3 series full-time and dabbled with the SEAT Cupras and even the Ginettas to get his speed kicks, but he can still mix it with the big boys in the
F1 feeder series. Pushing all the way a couple of mistakes meant that Piquet could make a brave move around the outside of Stowe.
Piquet's lead wasn't to last long and a couple of corners later Austin was back in front, but not for long. The battling between the two in front allowed Will Power to challenge for the lead and the fourth lap was ended with Piquet ahead of Power with Austin having the attentions of James Rossiter to concern him.
Austin soon despatched Power to get back into second, whilst in the Scholarship class Ryan Lewis seemed determined to have his worst weekend of the year when he could and should have been winning the class and get it together with second-placed in the class, Stephen Jelley. Lewis lost out and was off at Luffield.
Four-way battling for the lead over, Piquet got his head down and proceeded to benefit from the Austin/Power battle such that he had a 2.3 second lead by the start of the seventh lap. Behind then Marcus Marshall had worked his way up a place or two per lap to sixth place. Things would now start to get interesting in the slicks vs wets battle.
By the start of the eighth lap Marshall clearly had a massive advantage and he was right on the tail of second-placed Rob Austin. Leader Piquet had earlier had the shock of his life as the flying Fairuz Fauzy had blitzed past to unlap himself. Fauzy's car has the identical paint scheme to Austin's, who is running in the Malaysian's old car, so Piquet could have been forgiven to wondering what on earth was going on.
