Marti Stoyanov solidified his status as the second fastest driver in the Sport 125 class at the Bopfingen round of the Schaffhausen kart championship.
Although this was a new track for him, already during the Saturday open practice Marti was posting very competitive lap times. This track is 1020 metres long and it is characterized by technical corners where the phases of braking and turning should be blended. The track is very reminiscent of modern F1 tracks and that’s because it was designed by the Tilke architects!
Marti learnt the track quite fast and already in the first practice session he was second and thus confirming the pecking order where only Ramon von Rohr is faster than him.
Qualifying didn’t go exactly to plan because Marti encountered traffic during his last fastest lap and after it the peak grip of his tires was gone, this cost him probably around 0.2-0.3 sec. P4 was the end result, but this didn’t bother him much and he was confident that he can compensate for qualifying. His confidence was justified as he managed to overtake one driver into turn 2 on the first lap and one more on the next lap, thus he finished a solid second.
For the second race Marti had to start from P2 and finished there without any drama. By the middle of the race it became clear to Marti that he didn’t had the pace to pressure von Rohr, but equaly the drivers behind weren’t fast enough to give him any worries and thus he decides to back off in order to save his tires for the final race.
In the third and final race Marti was second all the way through the finish, but this time the race was 4 laps longer. Marti was getting tired and the third and fourth placed drivers put some pressure on him, but their attacks went in vain. It was clear that Marti could brake very, very late and he was very hard to overtake.
Then during the final lap, when Marti had a comfortable 1 second gap to the third driver, unexpectedly Marti slowed down at the second to last corner, some 200 metres before the finishing line! His momentum couldn’t take him to the finish, so he had to jump out of his kart and push the kart to the finish. He lost many position and later the reason for this was identified as torn throttle cable.
Luckily for him, in this championship the results of all 3 races are taken into account, so despite his bad luck in the final race Marti still had 1 more point to finish second overall.
This was the third consecutive race where Marti finished second, but he’s no longer happy with the podiums and now he’s totally focused on cutting the gap to the 20 year old Ramon von Rohr, who is dominating this season in this class.
At the end on the podium it was only Marti without wearing a mask, because the masks weren’t required for kids below 12 years.
There are two more race weekends in the Schaffhausen championship – Vesoul, France and Wollen, Switzerland. For these races Marti will have to work alone with the team, because his father and mechanic will be busy working at races with Emil Frey Racing.
