The Spaniard stole the lead from polesitter Pierre Gasly with a fast start, squeezing his Red Bull stablemate to the inside of the track before swooping around the outside to move ahead.

Gasly ran wide at the first corner as a result, and had to spent the first couple of laps fending off Jazeman Jaafar to hang onto second place.

Jaafar tried everything he could to get past Gasly, but in the end his attacks left him open to a challenge from Roberto Merhi, who pounced on him for third.

Merhi would lose the place to the Malaysian during the pitstops, but he once again found a way by on track in the second half of the race.

However, by this point their fight was no longer for a podium place, as Oliver Rowland made use of an early pitstop to catapult from fifth to third at their expense.

Rowland – who had leapt from eighth to fifth with his second great start of the weekend – briefly attacked Gasly as the Frenchman got his tyres up to temperature after his own stop, but he could not quite keep up and had to settle for third.

Jaafar made Merhi work for his fourth place by attacking a few more times in the closing laps, but the Spaniard held on to leave himself 44 points behind Sainz in the title race with 50 remaining in next month’s Jerez finale.

Gasly’s second place was not enough to keep him in title contention, so the championship decider will be an all-Spanish affair.

Behind the Merhi/Jaafar scrap, yesterday’s podium finisher Matthieu Vaxiviere capped a solid weekend with sixth, getting the better of Sergey Sirotkin, who slipped from third on the grid mainly thanks to his car making a sluggish getaway.