Coelho cruises to A1 win at Asia Touring Car Championship

Bruno Coelho cruised to victory in the opening A-Main of the Asia Touring Car Championship, the Infinity driver ending up with a one & a half second advantage over Lucas Urbain who came under pressure from a hard charging Michal Orlowski.  As the Top Qualifier, Coelho would break clear of the field over the opening lap of the large Hongyu GDC track, helped by Urbain having to battle his own Awesomatix as it got out of shape.  Starting from 3rd, Naoto Matsukura also had to fight with his car first allowing 6th place starter Orlowski through for 3rd before a second off, in which he got stuck in the track’s infield, dropped the Japanese driver to last.  Schumacher’s Pekko Iivonen was the benefactor finishing P4 ahead of Infinity’s Ryosuke Yamamoto.  In the opening 13.5T Stock A-Main, it was the prototype ARC of Enrico Jung who took the win ending Xray’s qualification domination.  Having secured the TQ, Shin Sawada would, after a jump start, spin out on the opening lap allowing Xray team-mate Jan Ratheisky go to the front.  Passed by Jung, he soon found himself back in front as Jung got crossed up but it wasn’t for long as the 3rd place qualifier again got to the front where he would stay to the end to win comfortably by 2.8 seconds from Ratheisky and Martus Benetin.

The only driver to break into the 15-second lap times, reacting to his A1 win, Coelho said, ‘The car improved for sure.  I was a bit afraid for the conditions because we had similar conditions the first qualifier (in which he struggled for rear grip) but we made the right choice (on set-up) learning from the first qualifier.’  He continued, ‘We went on the right direction, the car was pretty good, pretty solid, easy to drive and fast which is what we want in these conditions.’  Racing under the track lights he added, ‘It is very difficult to see the car, the car looks like it is going 10 times faster than during the day but yeah everything was pretty good with the car.’  Asked about changes for A2, the World Champion said, ‘we are always testing something new, at the end of the day it is the FEMCA race but it also a warm-up race for the Worlds so we have to test everything in all conditions and see what happens.  Of course I want the result but I want more the outcome of what we are doing on the car to have the knowledge for the future.’

‘Not too good’ was Urbain response on how A1 was for him.  The Awesomatix driver explained, ‘I struggled to adapt to my car.  I had a hard time trying to get a good reign on it.  It tried to kill me on lap 1 with a good old snappy snap.  So then I drove carefully and then Bruno opened a gap and Michal was catching so I tried to push and then it turned out I had massive understeer so I was totally wrong with how it felt initially.’  Looking to A2, he said, ‘I am not too sure what to do right now but I will probably adapt the tyre prep slightly for the opening laps and probably a mechanical set-up change  somewhere to recover a bit of steering towards the end.’

Asked where he pulled out his A1 performance from, Orlowski said, ‘We had good pace today.  Q3 I was really fast but Hayato was in front of me when his speedo shut down on the first lap and I tried to avoid it and went into the dust and started doing donuts but my pace was really good after that.’  The Polish driver added, ‘The pace has been good just not a good starting position.  We still have many days to test and I am not to bother about the result (of this race).’