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.

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Parth Ghorpade, who was the 2008 JK Tyre Rotax Max Challenge, Junior champion, commenced his European karting season with a strong 4th place finish in Rotax Jr in the Central European Zone championships held at the PANNONIARING circuit in Hungary between 9th and 10th May 2009.

Racing with the Intrepid Force Rotax team based in Salzburg, Austria, the Kolhapur driver qualified 5th, and then had a 5th and 4th in the prefinal and final race. Competing against drivers from Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland, it was a creditable performance considering the strong European championship records of some of the drivers and the fact that it was his first competitive outing after the World Finals held in Italy in November. Pannoniaring is a technically challenging circuit, and a race pace consistently within a tenth of the drivers ahead of him was a pleasant surprise considering that this was his first European karting experience amongst race winners in the demanding Euro Max Karting Challenge.

Along with the JK Tyre Indian National Rotax Max Championship, Parth will be driving in selected races in the Central European Zone and National Rotax series for the year 2009.

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