Nina Gademan dominated the opening race of the 2026 F1 ACADEMY season, leading every lap from reverse grid pole to take her second win in the all-female series.<\/p>\n
The Alpine driver pulled off a comfortable drive, keeping a steady one second buffer throughout the opening stages and was untroubled by a Safety Car restart with four laps remaining on her way to victory.<\/p>\n
It was a debut to remember for Natalia Granada, as the Sephora driver pulled off a mature drive to finish second in her first single-seater race.<\/p>\n
Emma Felbermayr made two late overtakes, dispatching Payton Westcott and Rafaela Ferreira to take Audi\u2019s first podium in P3.<\/p>\n
The Austrian driver narrowly avoided an early end to her race after Ferrari\u2019s Alba Larsen clipped the back of Felbermayr\u2019s car in an overly optimistic move at Turn 3 for fifth. While Felbermayr avoided damage, Larsen was left with a broken front wing and eventually had to pit, dropping her to last place.<\/p>\n
Ferreira delivered a career-best finish in fourth ahead of Alisha Palmowski. Westcott, Ella Lloyd and Lisa Billard rounded out the top eight points scorers.<\/p>\n
Palmowski will line up on pole for the first time on Sunday, with Race 2 getting underway at 1040 local time (UTC+8). For an in-depth report of Race 1 in Shanghai, you can head to the official F1 ACADEMY website here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nina Gademan dominated the opening race of the 2026 F1 ACADEMY season, leading every lap from reverse grid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[572],"tags":[64,63,806,805,803,804,85],"class_list":["post-540741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-motosport","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-motor","tag-motor-sports","tag-motosport","tag-motosports","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}