Challenging weekend for Mato Homola in Russia
Press release no. 13, 3. July, 18:15, Sochi, Russia
The Russian racing weekend continued with two races on Sunday. Mato started to the race 1 from P9, but to the race 2 from P2 what gave us hope for a good result.
Mato had a good start and kept his place. Grachev moved under the red lights on the start a bit, but with no further action from the race control even after our objections after the race with a video. Afanasyev and Borkovic were penalized with Drive through and 30 s respectively, but it was more than strict when considering other drivers not respecting the track limits as well without any punishment. Borkovic dropped to 14th, and that meant a 9th place for Mato at the end. Mato was still struggling with the car and with the track, already since Saturday. The team had to do again some changes on the car and got ready for the race 2.
Mato started from the first row and P2, and we hoped, that the changes done on the car might bring better result. Mato had done a mistake immediately on the start, when taking the wrong position and not stopping in the white square. This brought him 5 s penalisation after the race, even though it meant no advantage for him, standing wrong. Thanks to not the best start and a wrong position he dropped just after the red lights went off to fourth, but we still kept our thoughts on the good result. This was gone when he started dropping in the field, to finish the race on 9th. Thanks to above mentioned penalty he went to 10th, but later after the race Kajaia got 30 s penalty for the track limits and Mato got his ninth back.
„We are struggling the whole weekend. I am not capable of finding the rhythm with the car on the track. I don’t want to blame the car only, we have changed the whole setup several times with the team and guys worked a lot, what I’m thankful for. This track simply doesn’t suit me and I find it hard to race here, but the car was also understeering a lot. Maybe there is also some technical problem, we need to investigate that later. But this is racing and not all the races finish as we want. Now the summer holiday is coming, so we will have time to relax a bit after exhausting last months. I will travel to Asia and I will fight for every centimeter on the track!“
Mato lost 2 places in the overall ranking and dropped to fifth, with still only 23 points to the leader!
You can see both races on TCR TV YouTube channel, or on www.tcr-series.tv.
Results: http://tcr-series.com/index.php/events/item/sochi-autodrom-russia
Download photos: http://bit.ly/Homola_Sochi-race
Photo credits: B3 racing
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