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Race report by Jorge Simoes
Round 3 of the EP TC Portuguese Nationals took place in Maia near Oporto. This track has a really challenging layout with a mixture of fast corners, tight fast corners and slow corners around the 300m perimeter of the track, and medium traction. The weather was very warm and sunny. Because this is the farthest track for most of the drivers, some were absent for this event and so there were only 18 drivers in Modified and 5 in Stock; this was the worst attendance of the year so far.

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Qualifying had a good pace from the front runners, my car was very comfortable to drive around the track but I was having some problems with my ESC and motor combo which resulted in my qualifying 7th for the A-main grid. This was not good considering the feeling I was getting from the car. During the break for the finals, I thought a lot about what could be causing the lack of speed and decided to re-do the entire firmware upgrade process, and voila! the problem was solved. Pedro Moura was struggling a little bit with his set-up but still managed to qualify to the main, and José Figueiredo was comfortably driving with a good pace and also made the main.

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Starting from the middle of the grid in the final is a difficult task to recover from , specially when all the top 10 is going real fast. My car was fast and comfortable and I decided to take some risks and drive on the edge of the driving line; at this track if you drive over the track borders you’re on the roof and that happened to me twice when I was in 3rd spot during the final laps of the 5-min mains. Pedro Moura and JosĂ© Figueiredo drive strongly in the mains and finished in 4th and 5th spots.

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At the end I felt the results for the team were very good and we had a good bases to work from for the rest of season. For me it was the very first race with the T3'12 and with team, and I'm really confident we can get some good results in upcoming races.

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1. Bruno Coelho
2. Hugo Miguel
3. Helder Silva
4. Jose Figueiredo - Xray T2'007
5. Pedro Moura - Xray T3 2012 Specs
6. Jorge Simoes - Xray T3 2012 Specs

7. José Carvalho
8. Nuno Lourenço
9. Rui D' Almeida
10. Jo?o Completo -
...
14. Ricardo Mendes - Xray T2'008
18. Joao Mariz - Xray T3 2012 Specs


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Set-up sheet
Jorge Simoes