.sachafenestraz's SFormula title bid came to an end at Suzuka on Saturday with a limp run to 16th place. The Kondo Racing man thinks his lack of speed could be related to his crash at Fuji back in July:
Sacha Fenestraz believes his"weird" lack of pace in the penultimate race of the Super Formula season at Suzuka could be an after-effect of the heavy crash he suffered in July's Fuji round.Kondo Racing driver Fenestraz went into Saturday's opening race of the Suzuka double-header facing a near-impossible task to overhaul the points advantage of Tomoki Nojiri, which grew to 35 points after qualifying.
"We found some issues on the aero balance. It's the first time we came to a high-downforce track since the crash at Fuji, we have a fully new car and my engineer found some things after qualifying, like a weird aero balance. "I was surprised how well it worked at Motegi [with the rebuilt car], but there are not many high-speed corners," he said."When you arrive at this kind of track where the roll stiffness and the aero are really key, we found some odd things that were caused by the crash at Fuji.
Hirakawa failed to make up any places on the opening lap and spent a large chunk of the race stuck behind the slower Inging machine of Sena Sakaguchi as he opted for a strategy of leaving his pitstop until later in the race. "We were not good in qualifying," said Hirakawa."Q1 was ok but in Q2 we made a mistake on the set-up and we couldn't perform well. We qualified P11 which is pretty bad, because Suzuka is a hard track to pass.