STD Championship Round 1 Highlights

The championship is an old idea renewed by a new organization. mostly all done by Andris Pavars alone. The slowest class of cars called STD consists of XR GT and XF GTI.

XF GTI is a 115hp FWD road-car with the mass of only 940kg.
XR GT is slightly more power-full with140hp engine. It's a RWD road-car, but it's significantly heavier than XFG with it's mass of 1167kg. Both cars are reaching top speeds of about 190 km/h. Obviously XFG looks like an easier car to drive, however most of the drivers opted for the rwd machine including myself as well.

Organization has come up with an interesting format of races. Starting off with a 20minute hardcore qualifying, followed by a 15minute sprint race and a 30minute featuring race with top 8 finishers on reversed grid spots and a mandatory pit stop. To make things even more interesting they've decided to award the best with success ballast to prevent any kind of domination. It will be interesting to see how this works through the season.

I took a nonchalant approach to this championship without too much training as the cars are rather easy to drive. While most of the grid was trying to extract every last tenth out of the car with RHS driver position for this track.

Qualifying
Round 1 was held at Aston's North circuit with reversed layout. For the first time in a while I managed to brake my own PB in official quali session. I was expecting to qualify around 7th, but I found myself in much better position for start, 4th. Joe took pole-position and Joni was 8th.

Sprint race

I was off to a good start. Isaac who was starting right behind me, tried to make an early dive into the T1. The fight with him and Andres from Lanzerote Racing Team was raging all all the way thru the race. The battle was very enjoyable, even though I was defensive for most of the race. Enjoy video highlights from the race.


Featuring race
As the top 8 was reversed, Joni suddenly found himself in pole who finished calm sprint race in 8th.. He kept the lead for most of the race. Joe, who won sprint race without any problems, was making good progress right from the start. On the other hand I made a small mistake going out to the back straight and was immediately under attack from Reno. I tried to hold the outside line for stadium, but the car just slipped away from me, costing me 3 positions. It's a good lesson to get used to car with such a low grip rate, though. The race took a devastating way for me when Matti from Western Wolfs rammed into back off me on braking for T1 and send me into a nasty accident with J.Pecker. The car was undamaged, but I was all the way down to 19th. I recovered to 11th by the end of the race, mostly thru pitstops strategy and got promoted to 10th after Matti got post race penalty.

Results | Standings | Success ballast for round 2