The Pizza Company Team Qi-Meritus driver, Earl Bamber, claimed his third Pole to
Flag win of the Formula V6 Asia season today at Okayama International Circuit.
The 19-year old maintained a fast pace close to the pace he set during the
qualifying session held earlier in the day.
It was a clean 17-lap race held in
cool conditions where the practice session of the World Touring Car
Championship helped to lay some rubber for grip on the otherwise slippery
circuit. The only casualty was Kevin Chen whose steering was misaligned after
rubbing tyres with Hafiz Koh at the
start.
The rolling start served Bamber well
giving him the chance to pull away instantly from the start of the race. “It
was a good race. We were leading into the first corner and we managed to pull a
gap in the first lap and after that I just concentrated on keeping a good pace.
We managed to get close to our qualifying time and maintained the pace
throughout the race.
“The car is fantastic,
the engineering team did a great job so hopefully we can do the same thing
tomorrow”.
Bamber’s teammate and fiercest
rival, Thailand’s
James Grunwell took home second place but was not
happy with the pace of his car. Grunwell had to fend
off the constant attack of Australian driver Isa-Ro Charlez
right from the start of the race.
“From the moment we set foot on the
track we didn’t have the best pace. To hold Charlie off, who was obviously
quicker than me the whole race means we did a good job. It’s going to be a long
night of looking at the data and to do a track walk or two to see where we are
losing time and then get out there and challenge Earl because it shouldn’t be
like this, or this far at least. Hopefully tomorrow, Charlie and I can bring
the race to Earl” said an upset Grunwell.
Charlez managed to get past Grunwell on lap 13 but lost the position just a few turns
after. Not wanting to jeopardise a good points
collection, he did not fight for second. “It was a good race, the start was
quite tight. This season I’ve had too much bad luck so I really had to make
sure to keep it clean.
“I had a good fight with James and he
did a good job to hold me back and do what he had to do to keep me behind. It’s
a very tight track so to get past is very difficult and its very slippery off
line so there wasn’t too many places to attack” concluded Charlez
during the post race press conference.
Singaporean driver Koh finished the
race in fourth and once again collecting an 8 point haul for Team TaraDTM. He
was followed across the line by Macau driver
Michael Ho of Champ Motorsport, Mark Williamson of Team TaraDTM and Robin Tato of E-Rain Racing.
The 28-lap Rd8 Formula V6 Asia race
will be held tomorrow, Sunday, 26th October 2008 at 10.15am.
