- Schumacher MI5 - Martin Hofer - European Championship - Torres Novas - 01-04.08.2013 -



Departure to the Euros in Portugal was set to be Wednesday around lunchtime. Not much time to prepare all the stuff, get my clothes washed and bags packed again.

Upon check-in I was a bit unlucky since the guy at the check-in desk insisted on weighting my hand luggage which turned out to be slightly overweight (19,2 instead of 8kg :P ).

It’s just so hard to fly to races and stay within the weight restrictions. I shuffled some stuff from hand to flight luggage and went to check-in again. This time a nice lady greeted me and I just had to pay 40€ excess baggage charge. However, when she told me that right now, they cannot give me a seat yet as the machine is fully booked out I was a bit worried.

But the gatestaff was really friendly and with a bit of chitchat I ended up on a emergency exit seat -> checkpot :)

After I had arrived in Lisbon, I spent about 4 hours waiting for Grainger to arrive. Flights well planned this is …

Luckily the hotel in Torres Novas, the small town the euros where held at in the middle of portuguese nowhere had an aircon and nice beds.

Thursday morning meant practice would start. Somehow EFRA managed to strech a race with 64 participants over 4 days. Scotty Ernst would have had this done before lunchtime!

The track was nice and since the curbs where very useable also enjoyable to drive. The only thing that led it down where the VTEC 33x tires we had ot use. New set for every single run. Even practice. Absolutely crazy.

Our (Colin Price, Chris Grainger and me) cars where quite good with Colin’s being the best. So we worked our way towards his setup and kept testing different ideas and small changes to get the best out of it.

With qualifying over we managed to end up 17th, 18th and 19th. The team then decided (without me being involved in the decision) that I would come last. And that’s exactly what happened. To be fair Mr. Grainger managed to finish ahead of me just by cutting the track. But still he has

PDF File

Source:

M. Hofer