Qualification, CIV, rounds 5-6
All team arrived in Mugello for the double round of end of july had to solve the same problem: the impressive tyre consumption due to the new asphalt.
Lot of work in the thuersday free practice, even for Yakhnich team, with both riders: Vladimir Leonov finded immediatly a good rithm, and fixed many laps in 1’57”, inside traffic. Sergey Vlasov had same good results: many laps in 2’00” using only old tyres, to fix the right set-up.
On friday team decided to use the first official qualyfing of Leonov (immediatly after lunch time) as main target. The second one, done on saturday early morning, would have not garantee the necessary grip to use the softer tyres for better timing.
This choice was good: working quicky at box, we succeded to change two times the rear tyre during qualifyng, and so Vladimir could do two “time attacks”. In the second one, there was time to do only one fast lap... and he decided not to close gas even if during the lap, had to overtake not one, but two slower riders! 1’56”395 that fantastic lap, just 5 cents of second back of poleman Pascarella, and in any case under the old circuit record.
Second position in his hands, Vladimir in second qualyfing made only tyre consuption tests, to let team understand which rear tyre should have been used for the race, as weather conditions not stable, do not allowed to consider a stable strategy for the race. And, as team prevented, it was not possible for the other riders to do better of vladimir in second qualyfing.
Sergey Vlasov used the friday second free practice to fix better and better the bike set-up, and as team gived him a new tyre, he immediatly fixed 1’58”5.
His saturday official qualifyng started under the better situation: immediatly Sergey took the rithm of 1’58”, doing his best lap in 1’58”6 and many laps under 1’59”.This ritmh, just to be clear is good to finish the race in the positions immediatly after the 2-3 faster riders, all signing 1’57”. And, just to underline his very good situation, Sergey finished the first qualifyng session in 8.th position... best results of the season!
Unfortunatly in the second qualifying he was not able to improve his performance. The best lap was 1’58”7, while some other riders, back of him in the morning, obtained a sligltly better performance, and hs position changed from 8.th to 14.th.
But only the firsr 5 riders can perform 1’57”, then, from 6.th to 14.th position, there are 8 riders in less then 1 second. If we well know Sergey... tomorrow will be a funny race for Yakhnich Motorsport, and probably Sergey will obtain his best final result of the year. Do you want to bet?