Coelho Top Qualifier at FEMCA Championship
Bruno Coelho is the Top Qualifier at this year’s FEMCA ISTC Championship, the Xray driver picking up where he left off yesterday to top the third round of qualifying this morning in Foshan, China. Faced with low traction conditions for the 3rd of the 5 scheduled qualifier, this would prove to be Coelho’s slowest TQ run so far with the World Champion unable to match the two 25-lap runs he posted in yesterday’s opening two qualifiers around the GDC Indoor track. Again it was Infinity’s Naoto Matsukura who presented the biggest challenge, the gap however at the end of the 5-minutes still significant at 3.3-seconds this time round. After a slow opening lap, Shin Sawada would recover to complete the Top 3 times, the Xray driver benefiting from his fellow countryman Kouki Kato rolling his Infinity on the curbing coming onto the main straight on lap 16 which cost him over 2.5 seconds. Behind Kato, the Awesomatix of Rocket Zhang led the home challenge, the well known Chinese driver rounding out the Top 5 ahead of the similar car of Maxim Laverychev.
Reacting to the first run of the morning Coelho said, ‘It was pretty slippery this morning. I think the track was for some reason much more slippy than yesterday. I hope the track conditions will get better for the next round. If not for sure we will have to change our set-up to generate more traction’. Asked its thoughts on the low traction he said, ‘The tyres are getting more and more worn so they should be better so there is no reason for this low traction but I hope it gets better for the next one’. Pleased to lock in the overall TQ early, the Portuguese driver said this gives him the option to use the last two rounds to try some more ‘drastic’ changes on the car.
A driver who has struggled to get traction, asked about his Q3 performance, Matsukura replied, ‘today the traction is even lower.’ Having checked over his car after crashing heavily into a marshal’s foot yesterday and thankfully found nothing to be damaged, the Japanese driver said he didn’t make any set-up changes for this morning but somewhat left scratch his head on how to find improvement said he now he must think what he can do for the remaining two rounds concluding ‘we need to try a new idea’.
‘No grip today, yesterday was so so, today no grip so I had to drive safe’, was how Sawada summed up Q3. Having had a mistake while running P2 in yesterday’s second qualifier that dropped him to P3, the 20-year-old said this morning’s run was clean but ‘just too slow’. Asked if he planned to wait to see if the track improves for the penultimate qualifier or change his car, he replied, ‘I will change the set-up. I will make the car more narrow, narrow hubs.’ Having run 2.5 rear toe he will also go to 3 degrees for the next one.
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