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Spa: Mad Croc race report
Mad Croc scores first victory in FIA GT1 World Championship Xavier Maassen and Jos Menten on the highest podium in race 1 of Belgian FIA GT1 round Spa-Francorchamps. The Dutch pairing Jos Menten and Xavier Maassen scored a first pole and a ...
Edited: Aug 1, 2010, 3:26 AM
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Mad Croc scores first victory in FIA GT1 World Championship
Xavier Maassen and Jos Menten on the highest podium in race 1 of Belgian FIA GT1 round
Spa-Francorchamps. The Dutch pairing Jos Menten and Xavier Maassen scored a first pole and a maiden victory for Mad Croc Racing in the FIA GT1 World Championship on the legendary Belgian track Spa-Francorchamps.
On Friday morning the #11 Corvette was fastest in qualifying, so the Mad Croc Corvette started on pole for the first race of the weekend.
Jos Menten: "It's nice to be back again, and nice to see that the other car I drove is also so good. It was a late call, and to go with someone who lives 30 km from me is also nice, we can speak the same dialect. To be on pole and to come here is always nice. Normally I don't get a hotel here because I live an hour from the track, but yesterday it finished at 1am, and this morning, back at 7, so it was a bit tiring. But being on pole, I don't feel so tired anymore."
The #12 sister car of Oliver Gavin and Pertti Kuismanen finished in 16th position.
Some hours later, Jos Menten and Xavier Maassen drove a perfect race and finished ahead of all the other competitors of the prestigious World Championship.
Xavier Maassen: "It was great. We made a good pitstop. We had an awesome car in the beginning. Struggled a bit with a bit the low tire pressure, and I saw Ricardo coming quite close; it was a bit up and down. I needed to increase the gap, and we had the ability to do it, which was good. The car seemed to be running fine. We had a good car all through the race, except for the last couple of laps, with the understeer and oversteer, because of the high tyre degradation here. But we managed to do well and we've now officially qualified on pole for a championship race, which is good. We'll still have a job to do tomorrow. We're going to look at the data to see if we can improve a bit for tomorrow, and from there we'll see what happens tomorrow."
After a race incident, the #12 car came home in 18th position.
The Championship on Saturday started also very promising, but a flat tire due to a race incident ruined the race of the victorious Dutch pairing. "I'm sure we could have won without the flat tire. The car was perfect, the team had a strong strategy, we still had a set of fresh rubber, the race was perfect so far, but it turned out different for us. I'm disappointed, but I'll try to keep the souvenirs of the pole and the win", explains Xavier Maassen.
Oliver Gavin also took a very strong start in race 2, but yet again a race incident intervened. "I got hit out by another competitor", tells American star driver Oliver Gavin. "But it wasn't his fault, as he also got hit... Maybe some drivers should calm down a bit... Otherwise we could have done much better than 17th."
The next race will follow in about a month, on the 27th, the 28th and the 29th of August on the famous German Nurburgring.
-source: mad croc
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