Pekka continues his triumph in IFC -serie
The third IFC race weekend out of five was held at Shanghai International circuit at this weekend. The tests were exceptionally started already at thursday, due the shortness of previous race weekend caused by the organisation.
The Perfect Beaty team's Pekka Saarinen was the fastest driver at thursday's and friday's test sessions. Pekka's margin was a huge 1,5 seconds to his teammate James Mo (CHN). The next three places went to Honghe Team's Francis Tjia (NED), Red Bull's Jim Ka To (CHN) and Baleno's Picho Toledano (MEX).
The air temperature was raised almost to 40 degrees and the track temperature to 70 degrees just before the saturday's first race.
”For sure there's enough heat for us. But after you've weared the helmet on, you better not think about it.” told Pekka from his car, where the temperature was 60 degrees.
The front of the grid for the race was Saarinen, Raed Raffii, James Mo, Francis Tjia and Picho Toledano. Like in the previous IFC races the start of the first race was performed as a rolling start. After the lights went out Pekka took the lead and started to pull out from rest of the pack. Again, there were several crashes but luckily for the finn, the safety car wasn't needed. Finally Pekka took an excellent win before Ka To and Raffi, whom were fighting the second place through out the whole race. Fourth place went to James Mo and fifth position went to Toledano.
At Sunday the weather was just like day before, hot. It meant hard race for the drivers but also the cars were ahead of big challenge. The grid was formed by saturday's results and instead of rolling start the cars were ordered to standing start. Once again Pekka took an excellent start and leave the others far away. Weekend's second victory came with quite an easy way and the others didn't have any weapons for stopping Pekka.
”It was a easy race. Even though, I had to keep up the rhytm and keep focused. My pace was pretty close to maximum through the whole race because we wanted to do some testing for the next AFR race which is held here at Shanghai. The lap times were pretty fast and I can be satisfied to the setup we found.” told Pekka after the race.
13.08.2006
