Last weekend from 4-7 July I was present at the first round of the FIA Karting European Championship with the Spanish-Portuguese driver Adrian Malheiro in the KZ category and with the Spanish driver Jose Antonio Peñalta in the KZ2 category.
It was my first weekend in an international Karting event and, although it could have gone better, I am happy with the work done, fulfilling the minimum objectives we had set ourselves.
JOSÉ ANTONIO PEÑALTA
With Jose Antonio Peñalta we managed to qualify for the Super Heat on Sunday in his first participation in a FIA championship (he had never raced in an international championship).
We started the weekend quite far away in terms of time, as we had the setup prepared for the VEGA rubber (CEK) and not for DUNLOP (FIA) - Dunlop rubber could not be purchased outside the event -, so we had to adjust throughout Thursday the different settings of the car.
We finished Thursday with a good feeling, and we managed to lap at a time reasonably close to that of the drivers at the front of the race.
On Friday we started Qualifying and the first Qualifying Heat, where we managed to put ourselves in a pretty good position compared to the fastest guys due to some chassis adjustments we made on Friday morning.
With this work done, we decided that this was the way to go and we didn't change much more for the Qualifying Heats on Saturday, where we managed to qualify among the best for the Super Heat on Sunday.
In the Super Heat we could not qualify for the Final (it was almost mathematically impossible due to the results of the Qualifying Heats). Even so, very good race by Peñalta, with the objective achieved and happy with the development of the weekend.
ADRIÁN MALHEIRO
On the other hand, Adrian Malheiro and I raced together in Sunday's final, where there was quite a fight. Finally, a problem in the cooling circuit of the engine forced us to abandon with two laps to go after losing positions due to this since the beginning of the race after a good start.
On Thursday we had the same problem as José Antonio, because we had been training with the VEGA tyre. We had to adjust the chassis, but we couldn't find the key.
In this case Adrián complained that he had no grip at all in the third sector, which is the most important for the chassis work at Motorland. As much as we tried different things, we couldn't get the best out of the car and Malheiro was not happy with the result.
On Friday morning we realised that we were running a little bit better due to more grip, but it was a mirage. As soon as the heat came back we had the same problems again.
On Saturday we also had another problem: due to the change in the weather and the arrival of the rain, we couldn't get the engine to work properly, which meant that it didn't run and Adrian lost places in the Qualifying Heats.
Luckily, in the last one of the day it started to rain in the middle of the race, when everybody was on dry tyres. This was good for us, as Malherio has always trained under these mixed track conditions, and he managed to make up 12 places in two laps.
Finally, on Sunday, we ended up dropping out of the final, due to an engine cooling problem, which started on lap 2 of the race.
