Complicated weekend in Round 3 of the Saxo 8v Cup at the MotorLand Aragón circuit.
We started Friday with difficulties. Our pilot had a mechanical breakdown and could not get to the circuit on time, which penalized us, having only 2h 45' available for training.
Added to this was that we had problems with the alternator, which did not charge the battery and in 3-4 laps the driver lost all the information from inside the car.
Therefore we changed the planning from doing a long run for fuel calculation to a short run and looking for the best combination of pressures and car setup for qualifying.
First thing on Saturday we were reviewing the data that we were able to store with the driver, to try to drop close to 1s for qualifying.
In Q1 we did a good job. We went out together with our teammate, who had an even pace, but as the minutes progressed my driver was getting better and better.
Seeing this and not wanting to harm our teammate, we decided to stop in the pits to adjust the pressures again and go out to ride.
We tried to catch a slipstream to improve our times even more, but a spin right in front caused us to lose that group. Even so, he improved his slipstream time by 0.1s, which indicated to us that we had the pace for more.
Finally P19 and an urgent need to overcome to enter the fast race.
As for the race, we had things very clear: not to crush the tires at the beginning and try as best we could on the track, and so we did the first two laps very cautiously and without overheating, which then gave us the opportunity to move forward.
After placing P14, a car failure caused us to lose 6 places. I asked the pilot who was passing by and he told me that he had lost his brakes for a moment.
On the next lap the car started to burn, and we had to retire from the weekend.
With this 0 we go from P22 to P31 in the general classification. The driver's and my spirits were a little low, but we sat down and looked at the positive things: the next race is in 3 months in Cheste and we have time to repair all the damage to the car again.
I also want to congratulate my colleagues Víctor Gago Coco, Alejandro Reguera and Fernando Otero for the work done this weekend, which has been quite complicated in every way and they have saved the furniture.
It is also a pleasure to meet again with well-known people like Imanol Zubikarai Crespo who has been my TFM tutor like Oriol Domingo, a great engineer and better person with whom it is a pleasure to always meet.
