A new year and a new track. Flying to Alicante with Peter to have fun on the race track Cartagena. We both saw some YouTube video’s on the internet about the track and we both thought that it would be a difficult track. Heavy breaking in the corners and also accelerating under a decent lean angle with some blind turns made us sweat before we even drove 😅.
We also did a walk on the track the night before so that we could have a look at the track from a very slow speed.
We where the guest of MVR Racing a race team in the German IDM. We where able to share a box with them and get some tips while at the day.
The amount of things a race team uses is amazing 😯. So much things and tires we both where flabbergasted how serious they take their job. We arrived early and had quite some time to set everything up nicely.
First time out, nervous as I was and I forgot to turn on the camera 🤦. But we drove on a easy pace. Track was still cold and every corner was new. But the track is quite fluid and not so difficult as I though from the YouTube video’s I saw.
When you look at the second video you can see that I got more familiar with the track, was not so nervous anymore and could raise the pace more and more. Because we had 7 sessions in 1 day of each 30 minutes we had plenty of time on the track but I had Covid 2 weeks before and my body was not 100% fit due to the lack of training. Did not run the full 30 minutes we had in each session because I wanted to spare some energy. There where only 2 groups so we only had a 30 minute break to. A intensive day.
On day one I ended up at a 1:52 something lap time which was according to the other riders not bad at all.
The good part of having professional riders in the box that at the end of the day when we started to watch the 🎥 we got feedback 🤗. 2 of the riders Koen Meuffels and Roy Voermans watched my video’s and gave pointers on our lines on the track. They told that my lines where fine and just needed to push more 😰 and Peter was driving to neatly. They told with a 1000cc superbike you need to make triangle like corners. Due to the lower corner speed you sort of overshoot the entry of the corner and then make a sharper turn, put the bike back up again and open the throttle again. A small hint on the next day he remembered the tips and he was much faster then the 1:54 he did on the first day.
But spending more then just one day on a track the benefits are that you don’t need to wait a week or most of the times more then just a week to put the tips into practice.
Continue here for the next day
