This weekend we had the last race of the CKCV at the Circuito de la Ribera - Aspar Circuit, where we were playing for the title with Alberto Hurtado in the Senior category, 6 points behind the leader.
ALBERTO HURTADO
Alberto came in second overall, looking for the title in this last race. Friday was a good training day, where it was clear that this is a very physical circuit, where both chassis and drivers were going to suffer.
After a couple of sessions, Alberto's chassis came back to the pits with a broken front bar support, so we had to weld it to withstand the lateral forces, which are quite high at this circuit.
At the end of the day, we managed to get a pretty good set-up, where we only lost out to a couple of drivers on the grid in the second sector. Therefore, we focused on improving that aspect without compromising the other two sectors throughout Saturday.
In the individual classification, we had the misfortune of being the first category to open the track. A track that gets dirty very easily, so it was a clear handicap if you had to start from the first as in our case, we started in fourth place, with our rivals starting in the last positions.
In the end, we managed to qualify in P4 for the first race on Sunday with a good feeling.
On Sunday we had a fantastic start, with a first place in the Warm Up. For the race we knew we had to make a good start to get through the first chicane, where there is only room for one car, and from there try to make progress.
But bad luck struck again. After a fantastic start as we had discussed in the box, and placed in P2 behind the third classified and ahead of the first in the overall standings, we tried to move forward. However, due to the mistake of one of the drivers, we had an accident in turn 1, causing us to spin and we were the last ones on the track.
We finally managed to move up a few positions to finish the race in 13th position.
With this result we had almost mathematically lost the championship, but after seeing our speed on track we wanted to finish it on a high, so we decided to go for everything in the last race, risking a little more with a more aggressive setup to try to come back. We started in P11 due to penalties, but by lap 5 we had moved up to P1. Finally we took the victory in the last race of the championship, which left us with a better taste in our mouths despite not having won the championship.
JAIME DEL PORTILLO
Jaime arrived after a good performance in the last CEK race, where Del Portillo's improvement throughout the season was noticeable.
After a long day of practice, the first physical problems started to appear. Jaime began to complain of intense pain in his ribs caused by the hard pianos of the circuit.
Little by little Jaime was adapting to the circuit and gaining confidence, but at the same time the pain was increasing. He finally finished the last run on Friday early due to physical problems.
On Saturday we decided to work on the chassis to make it easier for Portillo to go through the corners and not have to push so hard to see if he could recover a little from the pain.
When it came to the Q we had the same bad luck as Alberto, he was the second group to start and also Jaime was in second place on track. In the end, it was not a bad qualifying, where he finished in P11. The bad news is that the pain had increased during the day and it looked very bad for Sunday.
In the Warm Up we decided to just go out for a lap to make sure everything was OK and not to force Del Portillo, thinking that he might not be able to hold on for the two races on Sunday.
In the first race he suffered a lot on the track, where he tried to hold on to the leading group but finally with a couple of successive mistakes he fell backwards. Then came the attacks from the cars behind and he ended up asking for the time.
In the second race, after having taken different medications and having used creams to try to mitigate as much as possible, he returned to the track quite hurt. However, he was able to manage the times very well and took advantage of different moments in the race to finish with a fantastic Top 10.
