FWT: David Ostella Ocala finale notes

David Ostella completed his first senior schedule last week as the Ontario teenager scored a pair of top-ten finishes at Ocala Gran Prix and tallied seventh in the Florida Winter Tour ProShifter Championship. All told he crossed inside the top ten four times in six Florida starts as he and tuner/coach Mike Roth came to grips with a new Cameron Motorsports/SwedeTech Maranello package.

"The Florida Winter Tour had many highs and lows and Ocala was much the same," Ostella said upon completing the schedule. "When the weekend started I was running good times and was not too far off the pace, and in Thursday practice I was right on it. Then on Friday we only had one session until it started raining and our practice day was ruined completely." Optimistic headed to Saturday and race one nonetheless, Ostella timed second quick in morning warm-up yet realized a washed-clean track would be changing throughout the day and would create a tuner's test. Just missing the ideal qualifying setup, he clocked tenth in a field of eighteen shortly after but matched the sharp end of the grid in finding nearly a second during the prefinal and moved up to eighth. For the final the pair tried new carburetion settings that didn't pan out in the late stages and Ostella struggled to salvage eleventh. Major changes to kart and engine were in order heading to Sunday.

Once again the day began well as David found over a full second from his Saturday final time and clocked third. "I was looking forward to qualifying after that," Ostella said of his morning warm-up time, "but qualifying was another disappointment because problems came back and I qualified just out of the top ten. We analysed the data to see if we could find the problem we were having but ended up just chasing it throughout the day." After a 35.615 second lap on day-old tires in the morning, Ostella mustered just a 35.924 in qualifying to start eleventh. He once again advanced during race action to climb back inside the top ten, yet despite further changes the situation worsened in the main and the senior rookie simply held station to cross ninth.

Ostella will now be testing for the upcoming Formula BMW Americas schedule before returning to Ocala Gran Prix April 4th for the Stars of Karting ICC East Division double-header.

-credit: www.davidostella.com