Dear racers,
Last weekend we were in Almussafes, Valencia (EC track two years ago) for the second race of the Spanish Championship. Here we have a lot of references from other championships and of course of the EC.

The track nowadays is a little more bumped, but the grip is more or less the same. So it was a perfect place to test the 966!

I arrived to the track at Friday midday. I tried to change some things to improve the handling in the car with different results. The car had an excess of grip and we try some solutions, like run with less than 1º toe-in in the rear! Finally we achieved a setup with which the car was very very fast but a little difficult to drive.

On Saturday in the qualifs I had some problems with a shock and some things that avoided me to run properly two of the four rounds. And I continued suffering setup problems with an excess of rear grip! After all I was third, behind Cabezas and Peracho. They were extremely fast the whole weekend.

On Sunday I rebuild the whole car checking it, and doing some changes in the setup in order to reduce the lateral grip. We decided to increase the width of the car 2 mm in both, front and rear end, and the car was a little better in the final.

In spite of my strategy was to change tyres at minute 25, I started with 69/76 mm tyres to achieve minute 25 with a good diameter. In the first lap I could overtake Peracho who had engine problems and I tried to catch up Cabezas. However he was faster than me in the first part of the race until minute 15, when he started to increase his lap times. Due to the fact that I save more tyres, from minute 15 to minute 23 I recovered the difference, and just when I was behind him, he decided to enter to change the tyres.

So I was alone with good tyres, and I tried to push the maximum before my tyres change. If I had had a good tyre change I would return to the track in the first place. However I lost 6 seconds compared to Cabezas in the tyre change. So the final started again with Cabezas 5 seconds in front of me. He started to suffer engine power reduction (too rich or too lean, I don`t know) so 7 minutes before the end of the race I was just behind him. Trying to overtake him at the end of the main straight my car touched his rear wheels going into the grass! I thought that the race was end, but with the problems of Cabezas 3 minutes before the end I was another time behind him!!

So I had my last opportunity. However I rushed to overtake him having another crash with him which results with my car on the grass another time! Bad luck!!!

Anyway the final was very exciting and very fun fighting 45 minutes with Cabezas!

I am learning how to setup the car in different situations, and I expect to be more fast and consistent in my next race with this impressive 966 car!!

Till next race!!
See you soon!

Set-up in the set-up section.

Nacho Lopez
Teaam Spain