Sunset in Valencia

2010. szeptember 21. 11:27 | még nem szólt hozzá senki.  szerző: Viktor Adorján

While the weekends officially start with the first sessions when the drivers hit the track, the preparations are beginning way earlier to make the drivers able to extract as much as possible from the package. A key part in this process is the trackwalk which can't be skipped anywhere.

Routine tasks are mostly boring and the people just wish to get over them as soon as possible but not necessarily if you're in a company of guys who always have a story from the past to bring it up or something to notice and discuss with the qualified others.

This is what trackwalks are about on every circuit on Thursday or in Europe mostly on Friday evening. There are things that have to be discussed as a part of the schedule but there are always other aspects that pop up when you don't expect for them.

It should be hard to find a more qualified company in the WTCC to bike around the circuit than Zengő-Dension Team's Norbert Michelisz, Gábor Wéber, Gergő Bári, Norbert Kiss and Zsolt Matics (former karting driver now Michelisz's physio), only Arnau Niubó was missing from the crew.

Several good stories were mentioned from the past especially after Norbert Michelisz stated that he feels at home in Valencia since he has raced there 4 times over three years while SEAT Leon EuroCup race engineer Gergő Bári added that over this period he went to Valencia more often than the Hungaroring which is located only 20 kilometers away from Budapest.

Then the jokes came up about the billboards containing company names that translate "funnily" to Hungarian and so on but a quick revelation about a detail on the circuit always diverted back the discussion to the serious topics.

Wow, this is slippery

A light shower made the circuit wet a few minutes before the guys went onto the track and however it stopped raining while they were cycling, the tarmac remained slippery. Rain played a major role on Friday but didn't affect the rest of the weekend. Nobody could predict this at that point therefore the surface of the track was a long time topic among the team members.

All of us were amazed to experience how slippery the tarmac was after such a light rain and the difference between the different areas of the layout made the people to start to think about using alternate lines in case of the rain starts falling again.

Just to make you better able to imagine, if you put down your foot while the bike was still rolling, your shoes hardly slowed you down, you just kept rolling like (almost) nothing happened. Imagine this in a racecar around 200 km/h.

Discussing a track is full of comparisons; drivers compare their styles or choices with the others', their experiences on TV or simulations with the reality, the bad against the worse, the faster against the slower. Every third sentence is a question with "here when, how, where do you do something with the car" and you simply can't get enough of it.

These simple looking questions are ones among the most important ones as all of them are hiding a little key to captivate and rule a track, or at least the car on it. Drivers spend hours with watching data coming from the loggers or from the cameras with the aim of understanding how the others are faster or where they are slower to see the whole picture better.

When we arrive into the only corner where the drivers noticed significant differences among the curves on the displays they try everything in such a limited time to illustrate what, where and how they are doing and they did reach some progress in terms of understanding each other. Now there are new angles to check on the logger.

Darkness comes to Valencia

Before we reach even the end of Sector 1 Sun is beginning to hide behind the concrete grandstands around the circuit. "This is really like an arena," declared Norbert Michelisz and added that "races are usually well attended here".

True, the whole facility is designed to welcome a very large crowd and it is frightening even to imagine what the atmosphere might be like when the grandstands are full with enthusiastic fans.

Yet, it is still different some ways to the giant buildings of Algarve and more inspiring than Oschersleben despite the fact that the pit buildings are lacking any details that could make them remarkable from the architectural point of view.

But we are not here to care too much about that, the muddy trackside with the kerbs are much more important. Sometimes even the drivers have difficulties when it comes to find the logic behind some strange cornerings based on the skid marks but this is not concerning them so much, especially when those marks continue in the gravel trap.

"Yea, it was him," one of the drivers smiles when he looks at the markings in the gravel trap before the tractor comes to make it smooth again for tomorrow. While we continue our journey works are still being done on the circuit including cleanups and installing billboards onto the bridges across the circuit. Everybody have their own role in this giant logistical board game.

"Hurry up, its dinner time!"

We are beginning to approach the halfway of Sector 3 when SEAT Leon EuroCup driver Gábor Wéber announces his intend to have dinner which is a good motivation for the others to speed up a bit. However the last turn stops the small group of Zengő-Dension Team personnel as Wéber put emphasis on the importance of that corner.

Then the SEAT Leon EuroCup driver goes away alone for a minute and watches the corner itself without any words before declaring that he needs to focus on that one to gain more time in the start/finish straight. This section of the track is like a karting circuit; one corner with so much effect on the overall laptime.

As soon as they finish off the final corner as well it is time to set sail and get back to the SEAT Leon EuroCup motorhome of the team where Zsolt is awaiting the crew with a delicious Hungarian pörkölt for dinner in Valencia. Tomorrow it will begin again but that time from the cockpit around 200 km/h with some negligible pressure on the shoulders of the drivers...

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