Chris van der Drift on Top in Thailand
Chris makes it 6 consecutive Victories in a row.
Wow! It was again another awesome weekend racing, the circuit we went too was a brand new track in a town called Buriram (pretty much in the middle of nowhere) and it was an F1 spec facility. Only a handful of guys had driven there before so it was like Korea pretty much new for everyone.
The first session started off and we were immediately at the front and ended up fastest by the end, for FP2 we had a best set of used tires to run but they turned out to be worse than the original set and ended up 5th overall – I think they went bad from the heat an traveling from the last event in Japan as everything is stored in containers they could have been at the top and cooking away for weeks.
In any case we reset everything overnight and prepared for Qualy. When I woke up Saturday morning everything was soaking as it rained quite hard overnight and when we first started for the session the curbs and Astroturf was still a bit wet, the rain had washed some of the grip away so before the 2nd set of tires we managed to make a small setup change to help to go faster.
We fitted the next set of tires and went like crazy it was hard this run with catching traffic as it didn’t matter how much of a gap I left I would always come across someone, even on my fastest lap I had to pass a car around the outside of the last turn and then my next best lap I also had to send it up the inside of another slower car, luckily though my laps were still enough to get a double pole – this making it 5 pole positions to date.
The race was only a few hours after so we didn’t have much time to get everything ready. When I pulled up to the front spot again on the grid I thought to myself man this is wicked to be here again – when the race got underway I think I did my best ever start the car just hooked up and launched I was even a little surprized myself, then when I crossed the finish line on that first lap I was already 4 seconds clear of P2 but then half way round that lap the safety car was brought out so I lost all of my lead. The safety car was out for 5 laps and then when we got back underway I again pushed on and made a gap until another safety car came out so we did it all over again. By the time the second incident was cleaned up we had two laps before the finish flag which again I started to take off into the distance.
For race two again it had rained very heavy overnight and even right up to two hours before the race, it was hot in Thailand so anything will dry and by the time we got out onto the track everything was pretty much dry except for two places where there were some streams running across. I managed to get away to a great start again and pulled away, we didn’t have any safety cars this race so I managed to make a gap and then control it to the finish making it 6 race victories in a row!!!!
The points system in Asia for the Carrera cup is a bit out being that between first and second it’s only 2 points and again between second and third its two points so I’ve been pulling away slowly from Bairdo, he keeps scoring points which I guess with his experience he knows how to drive a championship.
I have been trying to organize a seat for the Supercup event at Spa with the F1 event with the Sebastian Loeb team who I raced with last week at Spa but I’ve just been told today all the guest start entries are taken, so I have started to ask around if there is another team with a spare car so will keep you updated if I can make it happen.
Our next Asian championship round is in Malaysia (Sepang) on the weekend of the 5th & 6th September.
