Felix Rosenqvist held off a tenacious pursuit from Charles Leclerc to win the Macau Grand Prix.
In doing so, the Swede emulated Edoardo Mortara by taking back-to-back Macau wins.
But Rosenqvist’s Prema Powerteam Dallara-Mercedes looked seriously under threat from the Van Amersfoort Racing Dallara-Volkswagen of Leclerc in the early stages.
The Monegasque pulled off a superb manoeuvre, passing Rosenqvist on the brakes on the outside line to take the lead at Lisboa on the first lap.
Going into lap two, Rosenqvist got into Leclerc’s slipstream out of R Bend and dived inside at the Reservoir kink, only for Leclerc to then pick up the tow and repeat his first-lap move.
That was moments before the race was suspended, owing to the track at Fishermans Bend being littered with debris and the stricken cars of Gustavo Menezes, Ryan Tveter and Mitsunori Takaboshi.
After the restart, Leclerc had no chance of repelling Rosenqvist, who drafted past out of the Mandarin kink, while Sam MacLeod took advantage and passed Leclerc on the brakes into Lisboa.
The Team West-Tec car kept Leclerc at bay until the seventh lap while Rosenqvist extended his advantage to over two seconds, before Leclerc passed the Scot around the outside into Lisboa.
The gap remained around two seconds for several laps before Leclerc gained, finishing just 1.168 seconds behind.
MacLeod lost his podium position on lap eight when he got into a slide at Moorish and hit the wall, before bringing his car into the pits to change a punctured tyre.
Alexander Sims therefore moved up to third in his Double R Racing car, and looked as though he could be under threat from qualification race on-the-road winner Antonio Giovinazzi, who had charged through from 10th on the grid, but the Carlin driver couldn’t bring the gap much under a second.
Markus Pommer took fifth for the Motopark team after passing team-mate Sergio Sette Camara, who then pitted with a puncture.
Santino Ferrucci was a lonely sixth in his Mucke Motorsport car, while the second VAR machine of Alessio Lorandi came out on top of a battle with Prema’s Lance Stroll for seventh.
Stroll’s team-mate Jake Dennis was ninth, with T-Sport’s Arjun Maini completing the top 10 on the second competitive outing for the new ThreeBond/Tomei engine.
Callum Ilott’s miserable weekend, which started so promisingly with second in opening qualifying, ended with a crash at Police.
MacLeod set fastest lap once he rejoined after his pitstop, only for Sette Camara – the last driver to cross the line – to lower that laptime on his final tour, which was the fastest racing lap ever around Macau.
