MotorsTV UK Official Blog

Hi

I’m Callum Macleod and this year I’m racing in the European F3 Open. I’ve not had a full time drive since winning the British Formula Ford championship in 2007 and so much of last year was spent searching for funding and trying to get into as many different cars as possible to stay sharp.

My manager and sponsors have done a fantastic job getting the budget for this year and so hopefully it’ll be a very successful season.

I’m racing for Speedsport/West-Tec. My manager, Mike O’Brien, started Speedsport over 30 years ago and they have run winning cars in British F3 in the past and West-Tec have good experience in the re-branded Spanish F3 championship.

I’m racing a 2006 spec Dallara. Pre-season testing had been very encouraging, however, we were one of the only teams not to have attended the Valencia test two weeks prior to the race and so were on the back foot a little.

Friday practice at Valencia was tough as we struggled to find the balance of the car and were typically around P18 in the three half-hour sessions. We knew we had a lot of work to do in order to even make it into the super pole on Saturday – in the Euro F3 open there is a 20 minute session and then the top 10 do a further 10 minute session known as Super Pole.

In Q1 I knew the car was much better from the first lap out of the pits. With 2 minutes to go I was down in 13th but knew there was more time in the car. I found some space and on the last lap put in a solid time which moved me up to 6th. This pace carried on in the Super Pole and I lined up 6th on the grid for race 1.

Race 1 was okay, we had the pace initially but as the race wore on I struggled for grip and dropped to 7th in the closing stages. Still, not a bad result but you start race 2 from where you finished in the first race, apart from the top 6 positions that get reversed. As you can imagine, this makes 7th a very frustrating place to finish having ran in the top six for so long!!

In race 2 I got a great start and moved up to 5th place, only to run wide onto the gravel and drop to 8th. I had better pace throughout the race than in race 1 and worked my way up to 6th where I finished.

All things considered it was a solid first race weekend of the season but we still have a lot of work to do and I’ll be hoping for much better results in the remaining rounds.

I’d like to say a big thank you to Speedsport, Team West-Tec and all my sponsors for making this year possible. I’ll be back on here after Jarama in a few weeks time to let you know how it all went.

Callum

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 8:23 am and is filed under Formula 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.