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By Barney Flagman

This league didn’t tiptoe into Season 2—it detonated. Three rounds in, the headline for Season 2 of Sunday Night Skip Barber writes itself: the return of Leo Ovtcharov, and the immediate, almost rude reminder of what multi-time champions look like when they’re switched on. Leo has swept every pole, every win, and every fastest lap so far, and—this is the stat that really tells the story—he’s led 83 of the first 89 racing laps. That’s the sort of grip on a season that forces everyone else to recalibrate their goals from “win” to “how do we keep him in sight?”

The points table already shows the ripple effects. Bryan J. Kelly sits second, Nick Mazza is third, and the next wave—R. Scott Bell, Andrew Cole—are stacking steady results to stay in the conversation. It’s early, but the slope of the graph is clear: consistency is table stakes; moments of brilliance are mandatory.

How we got here matters. At Summit Point (Round 1), Leo controlled the race from the front while the podium fight behind him set the template for this season’s midfield: relentless, respectful, and never truly settled. A week later at Monza (Round 2), the draft chess match took over. You could feel the collective “monkey brain” impulse to abandon fuel-save the instant a run appeared, and yes, some of the most honest post-race debriefs centered on the same lesson: in our format, taking tires just doesn’t pencil out. “Never take tires. Not worth the extra time in the pits,” as one voice put it—advice that grew teeth when a few would-be undercuts faded late.

Hungaroring (Round 3) was the litmus test for who had really adapted to the F4’s rhythm. The car punishes impatience there, and more than a few drivers discovered that the tire-scrub soundtrack on replays can be deceiving. The fast guys were skating on the edge with fewer audible protests than you’d expect; the rest had to make peace with a track that rewards self-control as much as speed. The public verdict in the paddock was blunt—“Sh… chicanes” begat “hairpin hell” next—but it masked a useful truth: the drivers who learned to meter curb usage and protect rear tire temperature climbed the order.

So now Lédenon. If you’ve never raced it in anger, think roller-coaster physics with French attitude: blind crests, off-camber compressions, and that infamous late-lap, triple-right sequence that can turn bravery into gravel with one greedy throttle squeeze. The place forces you to join up your laps, not just your corners. You don’t “find” time here; you carry it—over each rise, across each load change, into the next braking zone. Those who thrived at Hungaroring by calming their hands will cash that dividend at Lédenon.

Strategy should look familiar. Two stints of fuel (or full-tank top-offs at one or both stops) remains the dominant line; a tire change is a vanity purchase in this series, especially with Lédenon’s short pits-to-track delta being offset by the track’s brutal rejoin costs if you’re on cold rubber into blind entries. Fuel-save will matter, but not in the Monza sense; here, it’s about breathing the throttle early to stabilize the platform over crests, keeping the front tire alive for turn-in rather than coasting in formation to cut a splash. That’s the kind of discipline the league already internalized at Monza and debated openly afterward, with several of you calling out how quickly tire strategy bites when you get it wrong.

Up front, let’s be candid: Leo is the favorite until proven otherwise. The data is ugly for the rest of the grid—three poles, three wins, three fastest laps, and a points cushion that already feels like a tax you pay to stay relevant. Bryan’s pace is the one pressuring him most consistently, and Nick’s racecraft has put him on the right side of fights that could have gone either way. Scott Bell keeps turning third-sector metronomes into top-five checks, and Adam Miles is the wild card that no one should let get hot; he’s been busy herding cats and servers, but anyone who’s raced him knows what happens when the admin hat comes off and the quali delta reads green. The spine of this league—Herrera, Cole, Baures, Dionne, Rossney—will decide whether we’re watching a coronation or a chase, because they’re the ones who can steal points from the alpha dogs on awkward weeks, and they’ve already shown they can do it.

The mid-pack is where Lédenon gets spicy. This grid has been unusually clean for the aggression level, and that’s not an accident. The Discord reveals the etiquette beneath the elbows—drivers openly owning first-lap errors, trading tips on active reset habits, even arguing that certain “training wheels” will make you worse and then linking track guides anyway. That culture is why the drivers in SNSB can go three-wide into Monza’s braking zones one week and still have a championship the next. Expect that same respectful brinkmanship to decide P6–P12 at Lédenon, especially in the compressions where trusting the car ahead not to check up early is half the move.

One final, practical lens for Sunday. Lédenon compresses mistakes. If you blow the first right of the triple, you don’t lose a tenth—you lose the entire rhythm of the lap. That’s why the real race will feel like pulses: two laps of cautious line-holding while tires come in, three laps where the sharp knives flash and margins shrink, then a phase where the fastest drivers are actually the quietest ones on the wheel. Watch for Leo to try to break the pack before those quiet laps arrive. Watch for Bryan and Nick to sit one car length back through the blind stuff, then trade air into the heavy stops. And watch the midfield for the drivers who can downshift their ego on the entry of that triple-right; those are the names you’ll see

leapfrog the standings by sundown. The table says Leo is running away with it. The paddock says not so fast. I’m with the paddock.