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Nacho Lopez reports Spanish IC Track Nationals in Valladolid (29/07/2019)

By:
Reporter-2

Linked to:
Viper 988 1/8 GP


THIRD ROUND SPANISH NATS REPORT HELD IN VALLADOLID

This time we were not able to attend Friday free practice because working reasons, so we started our race Saturday morning.

In Spain we have one hour of free practice on Saturday morning for the drivers who didn’t practice on Friday. So we started the free practice early in the morning and from the first lap the car was pretty ok. We were using a PICCO MONZA which gives us a lot of power, however in some corners it has lack of fuel. As we didn’t have time to fix that issue we tried an VS R03 engine which has less power but was constant all the laps, so as we didn’t have time to tune properly the PICCO MONZA we decided to use for the race the VS R03.


The two rounds of the controlled practice were super good, being the fastest driver in three consecutive laps and also making a really good 4 minutes solid run.

In the first qualy we started with small tyres which was a really big mistake, because we lost a lot of time, almost half a second per lap. This meant that we were using a too short gears so we moved to a longer one to be able to use more the tyres without losing time.

The second qualy was better but it was after lunch and the temperature was so high, around 40º. So it was impossible from here to be near to beat the best time Victor Gonzalez made in the first round before lunch. However, we secured the second spot and a place for the SUPERPOLE fight.

In the superpole the car was not perfect but quite nice and we won it in my third lap by around 0.2 seconds margin. So we were in the final that was the main objective taking into account that the rest of the fast guys had all the Friday to test.


SUNDAY

The finalist practice was super nice, with a really good pace, almost all the laps under 17 which was a really good pace for the main final.

The start of the main final was clean and in the second lap I noticed that the leader engine was rich and he had no power to fight. After a small mistake from him I was able to take the lead and to make the gap bigger and bigger with the drivers which were on the second and third spot. The car was fantastic, however I was a bit stressed because I knew that winning that race I secured the Spanish Championships.  This pressure didn’t allow me to show the good the car was in the final. Finally I was able to do a pretty good but not perfect final winning the race and the championship!

Special thanks to Serpent who is my chassis sponsor sice I don’t remember how many years, also to Bumpers, Serpent Spanish distributor, who is getting more and more divers for Serpent and giving a really good job for the band, and also for my mechanics that race, Alberto Gonzalez and my father as always!

Till next time
Nacho Lopez
Team Serpent

My setup can be found here:
https://www.serpent.com/xcart/cart.php?target=product&product_id=8258#product-details-tab-Setups