Race Winner press conference PDF Print E-mail
Written by Xosé Estrada   
Friday, 30 October 2009 20:03
Here it is the press conference from Spa-Fancorchamps TEAM GG Grand Prix

DMSv

Race Winner, Roland Ehnström


Earlier in the week I was actually struggeling a bit in dry conditions, while the car felt better with a little moisture on the track. But on wednesday, when the forecast started to indicate a dry race, I made some radical changes to the setup and the car really came alive! I got that old Spa-feeling back from the GTR/GTR2 days, and that's when I knew I had a good chance for a top result.

In qualifying the track was damp at the start but the sun was out and it was drying out nicely, so I waited until the last moment before I went out to set my time. By this time the track was more or less dry in the racing line but quite wet outside, so I decided to use my dry setup but drive a safe-ish lap focusing on taking the best lines rather than ultimate speed. I also saw from the laptimes already posted by other drivers that some of them probably had made some mistakes, because several of them were a good bit slower than they had been in the practice-session when it was actually raining. For a moment during the lap I was never the less wondering if I was taking things a bit too cautiously, so it was a nice surprise when I saw that I had pole by 1.2 seconds!

Again in the warm-up session some drivers drove laps close to the very best I had been doing with a full tank, so I was looking forward to a close race. But then already on the first lap I pulled out a gap of more than two seconds, and after ten laps my lead was fifteen seconds!

At this point I decided to change my strategy a little bit, waiting until everyone else had pitted before going in for my one and only stop. This way I had the best tires in the second stint, to make sure that I could set the fastest laptime of the race, and claim that important bonus point. I went all-out on my first flying lap after the pit-stop, and the clock stopped at 2:20.666, which is a lap I am very proud of. I then backed off and drove safe 2:22's for the rest of the race.

Right at the end there was a small incident when I was about to lap three cars fighting for 12th position, two of which were my team-mates in DMSv-Green. I didn't want to get in their way as they were both trying to get past BFR's Kristofer Larsson, so I hesitated to pass them and dropped my pace considerably. In the end when I finally passed Kristofer, he had an accident with Peter Melin, and they came sliding sideways towards me as I was braking for the bus-stop chicane. Fortunately I saw all this in the mirror and drove straight-on in order not to get tangled up in the mess. Then I was very careful when re-entering the track in order not to get a bogus black-flag by the game for cutting the chicane, so all-in-all I lost quite a lot of time on this lap. I still had a 30-second lead, so it didn't matter much, although it would have been extra nice to win the race by a margin of more than one second per lap.
Last Updated on Friday, 30 October 2009 20:11