Last time I raced at Silverstone I had 1st place snatched from me on the last lap on the second race which really annoyed in more ways than you can imagine and so I wanted this visit to be very different. I very much like the International circuit, although not quite as spectacular as the Grand Prix circuit it still is very decent with a variety of fast and slow corners.
The first practice went reasonably well with only 0.1 of a second separating Gabriel my main rival and me. I had some concern to how the water temperature of the engine was a bit too high but after initial inspections there seemed to be a correction that would solve this issue.
The second practice session proved extremely problematic with the water temperature again being too high – if ignored, it can lead to engine failure. I lost a lot of time in the garage trying to solve the mystery, so from this I had very limited laps and some uncertainty over how the car and engine would hold up in qualifying.
After the practice session the engine was then changed to make sure no mishaps would arrive during the qualifying and a couple of car set-up changes were also made. Going into qualifying the weather was sunny like it had been all the previous day and after waiting 10 minutes for the circuit to grip up from other cars driving around I left and pushed to get my hot lap in. In the end I qualified 2nd in class behind Gabriel Dias and 15th overall only 0.2 behind Dias.
Going into the race I knew I had some handling difficulties which wouldn’t make my race any easier. After a difficult start to the race with my own team mate slowing too much into the first corner I lost many places and had 5 cars between me and 1st place national car Dias. I pushed the whole race trying to catch up the deficit of places and managing to climb slightly higher but to no avail. The whole race I struggled with a lot of oversteer which made my job extremely hard. I had to put up with 2nd place in hope that I could progress both myself and the car for the next race.
Photo gallery
Click on thumbnails for larger versions.