Coelho opens FEMCA C/ship at top of SP1
After a very impressive ceremony this morning at GDC to officially open the 2024 FEMCA ISTC Championship in Foshan, China, it was the Xray of Bruno Coelho that set the opening pace when cars hit the track at midday. After his well executed speech during the opening ceremony, getting up on stage probably the most daunting things the World Champion has faced so far, the Portuguese returned to the environment he is far more comfortable with to set the fastest 3-consecutive laps of the first seeding round ahead of the Infinitys of Naoto Matsukura and Koki Kato. A driver who took part in the inaugural FIRC race last year, Maxim Laverychev would take his Awesomatix to the fourth fastest time ahead of the Xray of Japanese driver Shin Sawada with top Indonesian driver Bowie Ginting completing the Top 6 for the first of the three seeding rounds.
Summing up the first round of seeding practice, Coelho said, ‘It was a good run, with new tyres the car is always slippery so it was kind of weird for everybody on the track but the car is working good and I am not going to change anything because I am waiting for the tyres to come on point and from there on if I need to change any I will deal with that but for now it is pretty good.’ Asked about tyre wear he replied, ‘It’s actually not really high that is why we need to run a lot of times to get them to the best shape. Yesterday I think I did like 15 runs on the same set of tyres and they were still very good and all the time you drive the better they come in. The tyre wear is nothing.’
‘Low traction’ was Matsukura response after his run. The former World Champion elaborated, ‘the beginning was low traction and normally it gets better but I don’t know this time it didn’t really improve over the run’. Suffering one mistake over the 5-minutes that saw his car execute a number of rolls, he added, ‘I think the car is a little bit loose in the rear so we will make a change to get more rear traction. And we hope also the tyres will also improve but even with this we need to change the set-up.’
Kato described his first effort as, O’K but we know new tyres have completely different traction so I just focus on getting laps on the tyres.’ Planning to leave his car unchanged for the second run, the Japanese Offroad Champion said he might change his body shell saying ‘I want colour’. Running a one colour florescent yellow Twister he only has his colour scheme painted body in a Twister Speciale but he still feels he would still prefer to drive in his colours.
Finishing 6th at GDC last year Laverychev was content with his run saying, ‘The was good but the important thing for me was get good track time to understand the tyres correctly. Sometimes you might not have a good set of tyres but I think these are good because I have pace.’ Asked if he planned any changes to his car for SP2 the Russian said ‘I think I will wait and change something for the 3rd practice but for now I leave it the same.’ As a driver who raced on the previous GDC layout asked about this year’s track he said, ‘I think it is very fast. Not what you normal have with European tracks, it has more flow and more speed but I like it. Also it is less dangerous than before because they changed the curbs and now I use one body for 3-days and no problem compared to last year.’
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