Parth finishes in Top 10 in Spa
Parth closed out Rd 3 of the Formula Alps Championship with a strong drive to finish P9 with good race pace and some close racing . It was expected that this round would be the most difficult given BVM’s limited experience at Spa, the absence of any tests as at the other circuits, compounded by the fact that all the front runners had done the Eurocup race here the previous weekend.
The 3 hour free practice on Thursday began well with Parth already just outside the top ten when the time came to switch to new tyres. Unfortunately 2 red flags in the last 15 minutes meant the new tyre run had to be aborted. When they did go to new rubber in the 40 minute session on Friday, the car behaved totally differently. As a result qualifying had to be done on a radically different set up. This set up worked, and but for an error on his fastest lap that cost 4/10th sec, Parth would have been atleast 3 places higher than the P7 and P6 he ranked in his group. But considering he was P26 in official free practice , this was a good recovery.
Starting from P14 in Race 1 , he had moved upto P12 when it was red flagged after 2 laps. He held on to this place after the restart, eventually finishing 11th. It was a solid race performance, but the race pace was off by a half second compared to the front runners, and he needed it to finish higher up in Race 2. A change to the qualifying set up had not worked, and the effort to find more speed actually went the other way. The problem was too much oversteer.
In Race 2 he made his customary good start to hold onto P 12 at the first corner. After that it was 12 laps of close, high pressure and high quality racing which eventually moved him upto P9 . The race pace was very good, and the engineer and the driver had managed to find the half second that was missing in the previous race. Had he qualified 2 rows further up the grid, a top 5 was possible.
After 3 rounds and just before the half way mark in the season, some benchmarks have been achieved. He is a clear top 10 runner in terms of qualifying and race pace when the car is right. This is good when one factors in the quality of the grid and the relatively little testing that he has been able to do so far. The race craft is on par with the best. These were the targets set out for the first half of the season and they have been achieved with some degree of comfort. One can now look at achieving some podiums in the latter half of the season.