"It was a fantastic pole position and it raises us into first in the championship, which makes us very happy," team owner Alfonso d'Orleans Borbon smiled, "Giorgio is co-leading the drivers' championship too, so we are pretty much first in everything. The whole team did a lot of hard work after Barcelona to get the cars ready, they have done a fantastic job and I want to congratulate all of the boys - and, of course, Cristina, the only girl in the technical crew."
To further emphasise just how competitive the Repsol and Telefónica-supported Dallaras were in qualifying, Javier Villa put his car into eighth place, the best position the young Spaniard has achieved so far in GP2.
From pole, it was simply a case of Pantano making a good start to lead into the tight opening sequence of corners in order to avoid any trouble. This he did and, with Grosjean and Zuber squabbling behind him, he was able to turn in a dominant performance to lead the feature race from start to finish.
His first flying first lap saw him leading by 1.35secs, and pulling away from Grosjean by almost a second a lap. He continued his untroubled progress and was the only driver regularly lapping in the 1min 35secs bracket other than a delayed Bruno Senna, who was at the back of the field. By lap ten, Pantano had a seven-second lead and, for the next 15 laps, carefully controlled the gap back to Grosjean.
Positions remained static until lap 24, when a spinning Alberto Valerio bought out the safety car, but the three leaders all took advantage of the incident to make their pit-stop, resuming in the same order. Unable to match Pantano's pace, the pursuers were again 2.7secs within a handful of laps of the restart and, with no mistakes, Pantano completed a deserved victory.
![Feature race podium in Turkey - Romain Grosjean, Giorgio Pantano, Andi Zuber [pic credit: GP2 Series]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/437631.jpg)
