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EDUCATIONAL WEEKEND FOR ASHWIN AND ADITYA AT EUROSPEEDWAY

The round 2 and 3 of the Volkswagen Polo Cup was held at the Eurospeedway, Germany between 29th and 31st May 2009 and Indian drivers Aditya Patel and Ashwin Sundar participated. It was a complete educational weekend for the two Chennai lads.

It was a weekend of rain, sun, wet dry, slicks, raintyres, yellow and red flags , safety cars and crashes.

Fortunately both boys kept their noses clean, and were not nvolved with any skirmishes from the word GO!

The 1st Qualifying Session was cancelled as the cars were out on slicks , and down came the rain. It was decided that the grid for both the races would be on the 2nd qualifying. The Qualifying 2 was on wet weather tyres. Ashwin qualified 7th and Aditya 18th, only 0.70 Seconds apart. Ashwin said "I was really confident of doing well because after seeing the data of Friday with my engineers I knew that I just had to correct 2 corners to come in top 10".

Then the fun began!

In race 1 Ashwin spun on lap 1 and had to wait for the field to clear before getting on to the track again. Aditya moved from 18th to 14th, and was progressing well, when his windscreen fogged up, and he spun, fortunately, on track, and went back to eighteenth, fighting back again to regain fourteenth place. Ashwin who rejoined the race in the 22nd position after he spun, fought back, overtaking almost one car every lap and finished eighth, before the safety car was out after a huge cash and stayed out till the end, so both Ashwin and Aditya could not move up further.

Race 2 was again closely fought, Ashwin again had a small detour on lap1, send him down the field. A slight miscalculation with tyre pressures gave him a car that was a handful to handle, but he kept it going. Ashwin had to really fight to finish up 13th .

Aditya moved up steadily, keeping his nose clean, and was up to 14th place just behind Ashwin. Aditya put in some flying laps, after passing a few cars and getting a clear track only to his disadvantage, as he got his fastest sector time under yellow flag. This resulted in a drive through penalty on the third last lap, sent him to the back of the field.

Overall , it was a satisfying weekend , as far as the learning curve goes, but the results could be better.

Both Aditya and Ashwin expressed their gratitude to Volkswagen Motorsport, JK TYRE, Amaron and Ma-Con for the exemplery training imparted to them and giving them this wonderful opportunity to learn motorsport in a healthy, sporting and cordial atmosphere.

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