Ongaro tops seeding at Philippine Masters

Team Associated’s Davide Ongaro goes into qualifying at the Philippine Masters tomorrow as the Top Seed, the Italian being one of three different drivers to top each of the seeding rounds today at Round 2 of the Cayote backed Asian Buggy Championships.  With Infinity’s Kouki Kato laying down the opening pace, Mugen Seiki’s Burak Kilic topped the second round but fell short of bettering Kato’s fastest 2-consecutive laps.  With Ongaro somewhat off the pace in SP2, he would bounce back for the final round being the only one of the Top 6 to improve finding 8/10ths of a second on his previous best to better the Japanese driver’s time by a 1/10th.  Overall Kato, winner of the 2024 Asian Buggy Championship season final in Indonesia, will be the No.2 seed ahead of Kilic.  Team Associated’s Alex Bernadzik ended the day P4, the 2023 ABC Australia race winner’s best run coming in SP2,  followed by Infinity’s Naoto Matsukura and Sworkz’ Mattia Polito.

Reacting to his seeding topping run, Ongaro said, ‘It was good.  Honestly it was the best one we had today.  Tyres were ok, we put the same compound as yesterday so the one that is working because at one point I had to use it to see if the car works and yeah the car was good, tyres, engine and everything was OK.’   Using Matrix Blackhole tyre in clay soft compound, he said the car was now ‘what I need and what I want so I can push and make two good laps and check the rhythm for 5-minutes so its good.  We are in good shape for tomorrow.’  It was double top seeding for Ongaro as he also set the fastest time in eBuggy with team-mate Bernadzik making it an AE 1-2 ahead of Kyosho’s Ryan Lutz who completed the Top 3.

Using the final seeding round to break in a new set of Hotrace Sahara tyres for qualifying, Kato said they only came in after about 4-minutes at which point it as too late to  push for an improvement on his SP1 time.   Despite being just 5th fastest for the round, the Japanese driver is confident he has a very good car going into the first 2 rounds of qualifying that make up Friday’s action at the Circulo Verde track.  The 18-year-old said, ‘the car is still good and it is consistent.  We now have two sets of tyres ready to go so for tomorrow so we will the set-up the same and just just go out on the used tyres.’

Asked how he was looking going into qualifying having ended the day P3,  Kilic said, ‘Everything is good. My 5-minute pace is really strong’.  Having originally planned to use SP3 to break in a fresh set of 6mik tyres for tomorrow, the Turkish driver said in the end he didn’t have enough time to get the tyres ready.  Changing something in the front of the car he said, ‘It didn’t work out how I wanted’ and so for Q1 he will revert back to his previous set-up.  On not having a second set of tyres broken in for qualifying Kilic didn’t seem to bothered adding the wear is low so I will use the one set of tyres for all of qualifying.’

Bernadzik summed up SP3 with, ‘It was pretty good, pretty clean, although I could of got a couple of tidier laps.  Each lap I did do had some sort of bobble’.  The 22-year from Brisbane continued, ‘I think my 5-minute pace is right there and that’s what sort of matters for tomorrow.  I made some set-up change to make the car easier to drive which definitely helped.  It was pretty radical in that second round so we put a bit more rear toe-in to lock in the rear end and it helped.’  In terms of tyres, Bernadzik has chosen to go for JConcepts Double Bar super soft clay compound adding he plans to stick with that for both qualifying and the final.

Asked about ending the day in P5, Matsukura responded with, ‘not bad for me’.  Running the same tyres as his team-mate Kato, but a slightly different chassis set-up, the Japanese driver thinks qualifying should be OK  but added that today it was taking him too long to find his rhythm and it is was not until the end of the run that he was ‘warmed up’.   Planning to try and drive more smooth tomorrow, the multiple onroad World Champion said running safely feels more slow but overall the time is still good.’

Summing up his day, Polito was overall happy with how it went adding he is confident the car has the consistency for a good 5-minute pace.  One thing the SIGP podium finisher did add was that he was still chasing a bit more steering and that this would have to come from  a set-up change.  Like Ongaro, the Italian is running Matrix Blackhole tyre in Supersoft Clay compound, describing them as ‘perfect’ for the track here in Manila.