Magny Cours Club circuit was host to the FunBoost Sprint race in the beginning of December. This February Marti took part in the endurance race of the same series, so this was Marti’s second car race, but also his first race alone with no teammates.
All drivers had on their disposal Mygale MySpider cars prepared by the circuit based LSP team. These are silhuette racing cars with weight of 550 kg and powered by Yamaha R1 motorcycle engines with 170 hp.
The race weekend started with a 20 min timed practice session that determined the grid for the semi-final and then the result of the 20 min semi-final determines the grid for the final. This final race was also 20 min long.
Before every session the drivers were receiving their transponders & after that a lottery decides which driver gets which car. This way every driver had to drive different cars.
The morning practice started at 9 a.m. on a drying track and Marti was immediately setting the pace. He kept the top spot for the first 10 minutes, but then while overtaking a slower driver, Marti left the track and had a trip over the gravel trap. His front splitter was damaged and Marti had to pit for it to get fixed. He lost several minutes in the pit and went down to P5. On exiting the pits he found himself in traffic, but somehow on the very last lap he managed to get P2 and jumped onto the front row.
In the semi-final he started a fight for the lead, both Marti and the leader broke away from the pack. But when they caught up with the backmarkers to lap them, one of these drivers spun right in front of Marti, so he had to take evasive action and this allowed the leader to escape. Later on he and the third placed driver received penalties for insufficiently slowing down for double waved yellow flags. This didn’t change the result and Marti kept his second position for the start of the final.
Sadly, for the final Marti didn’t have luck. Right after the start it became obvious to him that the car he drew in the lottery was lacking top end speed. To compensate for that, during the first lap he tried taking a corner flat, but there was not enough tyre temperature and he went off losing many positions. From this point on, he put a very spirited drive to climb his way back to the top. There was a rather hard battle for P3, but Marti managed to snatch it. The race ended one lap early because of a crash involving 3 cars.
This is how Marti took his very first car racing podium!
