Bangalore Racing Stars (BRS), comprising Oliver Webb, Arjun Maini, Michelle Gatting, Nayan Chatterjee and Vishnu Prasad, struck it rich winning three out of the four races in the first round of the X1 Racing League, which formed part of the JK Tyre Festival of Speed, at BIC here on Sunday.
BRS had won two races quite comfortably on Saturday but it seemed to go Mumbai Falcons’ (Mikkel Jensen, Kush Maini, Pippa Mann, Karthik Tharani & Sohil Shah) way soon after lunch. The latter looked well prepared for the challenge and, with a clever strategy in place, outwitted the former, to throw open the contest.
In the final race, run on a relay format, the Mumbai side was quite determined to pull it off over BRS but an unfortunate spin upset its calculations.
Arjun Maini was certainly pleased. “The team’s been fantastic and we are waiting for the points to come in but we should be leading the championship.”
“I hope we have a decent lead so that we can keep building on this in Chennai,” he added.
He said Mumbai came up with a good strategy. “The combination of Kush (his brother) and Jensen was a big boost to the team which wasn’t there yesterday.”
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It’s going to be interesting for the two teams going for the final battle of the season in Chennai later.
Kush had this to say. “It was a good day but yesterday it never went right as we did not have the drivers we wanted in the same car.
Obviously, we were losing a lot of time. But we sorted that out and qualified second and won the first race of the day. Though, we had an unfortunate spin we still did the fastest lap in the three off the four races. I think we deserve more wins.”
The four races were run on different formats of which the relay format seemed to be a bit tricky. It needs lots of planning and some clever thinking. We did that and finished third after starting sixth on the grid in the final race,” said India’s first F1 driver Narain Karthikeyan.
Every other team went through some teething issue or the other but it was quite understandable as it is only the inaugural edition for this kind of a format, the first in the world of motorsport.
The results
Race 1: 1. Mumbai Falcons; 2. Bangalore Racing Stars; 3. DGR Ahmedabad
Race 2: 1. Bangalore Racing Stars; 2. Mumbai Falcons; 3. NK Racing Chennai.
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