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Nacho Lopez report of the last round of Spanish Nats in Sevilla (10/10/2018)

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Reporter-2

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Viper 988 1/8 GP


FRIDAY
We arrived on Friday afternoon to the fantastic track of Sevilla, a perfect place to do some racing with the 1/8 scale cars.
Till the first fuel tank on Friday the balance of the car was quite good. I just had a bit of understeer and we changed the setup a little bit to try to find this extra steering I needed. Step by step the car was working better and the pace was quite fast and super constant.


SATURDAY
On Saturday we had 3x control practices and 4x qualys. The controlled practice was so so, with some small issues with the car which only allow as to make one good one, taking the second spot in de reseeding.
The first qualy was pretty nice taking the second position 0.8 seconds behind Adrian Santeiro who was super fast the hole weekend.
In the second one the temperature was higher, so the track was slower. However with some small changes we did on the car we were able to keep the same pace than before being the fastest driver of the heat but not enough to beat the previous time done by Adrian.
In the third one more or less we have same conditions than before. We improved our time being less than 0.2 behind the TQ time.
We know that the last one went to be the one to beat the time done in the first one. However we were distracted and we missed almost all the warm up of the heat, making just two laps before staring the qualy. The first laps were not so good, but the last ones were so fast and consistent. We won again the qualy but we didn`t improved our time because the first laps. So we had to make the super pole being quite confident with my package.  


The superpole was quite easy because the other two guys had some issues during their laps. One of them was not able to make any lap and the other one make their laps with a super lean engine. So in my first lap I did a lap enough to get the second direct spot to the sunday final.


SUNDAY
The training for the direct finalists was quite nice and the car felt exactly the same than on Saturday. The main final started quite nice with some clean laps putting some pressure to Adrian who started from the TQ. After some minutes he did a small mistake with which I was able to take the lead. I was worried about the right front tyre wear as it was so critical because the sweeper after the long straight. So I was focused on keeping the small gap I had with Adrian without pushing to much at the sweeper to be able to reach the minute 22 for the tyre change with some rubber still on the rims. However in the minute 16 Adrian had to retire from the race after some radio issues and I was able to keep a comfortable lead till the end of the 45 minutes winning again a race after two difficult seasons.


Talking about the Serpent team, we had a really good weeked, being 1st and 3rd in the A-main and 1st and 2nd in the +40 main! Well done guys!

I want to thanks Serpent for being my chassis Sponsor during last 8 years!

Setup can be found at the setup page of the Viper 988.