FIA GT - Nogaro

The 8th round of the FIA GT Championship was held last weekend in Nogaro, South of France. It is one of the favourite tracks of Markus and the expectations were high, but the weekend was full of problems right from Saturday morning. Both practice sessions were cut shorter with gearbox problems and this prevented the team to work on the setup of the #60 RSR. Markus qualified 10th with 1,6s gap to the front. 10th was naturally a disappointment, but the lap time was good considering the lack of preparation earlier that day. However, the strangest reason caused the Finns to retire in the race. Markus was forced to park in the garage with a leaking radiator after just 30 minutes of racing. He was running 7th in GT2 at that moment and was coming in for a scheduled stop. The cause of the leak was an impact to the front bumper by a huge ball of rubber pick-up, thrown by the car in front of him. The impact was hard enough for the bumper to damage the radiator. After examining the damage, the team decided to stop the race.

"I can't even explain how disappointed I am for the whole weekend. It started bad with gearbox issues and ended with an incredibly stupid reason to stop the race. In free practice I didn't drive at all, because Mikko had an off that damaged the first set of tyres. We decided to save the 2nd set for the pre-qualifying and use the time in between to adjust the gearbox. We missed also part of the pre-quali, but when I got on the track, the car was quite frankly undriveable and the few changes we tried did little to help. Fortunately, the works-car had gone through their test program and we were able to use that knowledge to set the car for the qualifying. I went out without knowing what to expect and had to find out how the car behaved. Not really optimal for setting a quick time when the rubber is at its best. It was much better and I did an ok time on my first lap, 2,2s quicker than in practice, but when I tried to push, I had loads of oversteer and couldn't improve enough. So, we were in the right area with the set-up, but not yet there. We would have needed one more test session to find the right way to go", said Markus.

"I got a good start in the race, but was blocked in the 2nd corner and lost some places. The car felt quite ok and I was able to pass a couple of guys, but as soon as the grip got worse, the car became really tricky to drive. I had just caught up with Mücke in the G2 Aston, when it threw that pile of rubber on me. I saw some smoke and the temperatures started slowly rising. We decided to keep going until the pitstop, but when I pulled in, it was obvious that there was no way to continue. It's really a great shame as I was expecting a lot from this weekend. It's also bad for Mikael who didn't get a chance to drive at all in the race", concluded Markus.