Aditya Patel Finishes 9th in VW Scirocco Cup

VW Scirocco Cup on iSport: Aditya Patel had an eventful weekend at the Norisring in the VW Scirocco Cup. He gives iSport a firsthand account on his progress up the field.

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Last month, India's upcoming racing star Aditya Patel spoke to iSport on the VW Scirocco Cup.

Norisring, an extremely challenging street circuit, never fails to throw out a few surprises. In fact, this time there were more than just a few! To start with, Ralf Schumacher took pole position for the DTM race. That's something the Germans don't see everyday. Anyhow, this is a track with just four corners. It sounds simple but it's not! Even the smallest mistake can make you go from hero to zero. (I soon found out!)

When I got to Nurnberg, the weather was unusually hot, somewhere in the range of 35 deg C. This was definitely going to be a hard weekend for the brakes, tyres, engines and the drivers. As practice got under way, I immediately had trouble with the brakes and tyres heating up too much. After about five minutes, I was on top of the time sheets till about the half way point in the thirty minute session. I gave myself some time to cool off and went back out to give it another shot but the limited amount of push-to-pass meant there were limited fast laps we could do. By the end of the session I was half a second off the fastest and 10th on the time sheet! This was not what I was expecting. I knew something needed to be done. The data showed that almost all my time was lost on the first corner! Thus, I had my work cut out. I knew nothing could go wrong.

Come the end of qualifying, something went wrong. Very wrong! Since we can do only four fast laps due to the Push-to-pass system, I had made mistakes on two laps and had situation with traffic on my other two laps. Qualifying is extremely important at Norisring and by qualifying 16th; I knew I had pretty much thrown it (the race) away.

I now had my work cut out for the race. I needed to take home as many points as I could. Starting 16th, that wasn't going to be an easy task! The race was scheduled to begin soon after Germany's match against Argentina. Oh boy, you can imagine what the atmosphere was like! People were smiling!

Five red lights go off and it's GO! I got off to a flyer of a start and managed to move myself up to 12th place by the first corner (after a bit of pushing and shoving). This time I didn't want to commit the same mistake I did with the push-to-pass at Lausitz. I needed to preserve it for the dying moments of the race. On lap 2, the yellow flag was being waved on the last corner and like a true gentleman I respected the flag... and got hit from the side! I lost it all and fell back to 17th! Slowly but steadily I managed to pick up the pieces and was up to 13th with 5 laps to go. It was a three way battle for 10th place and with 3 more Push-to-pass left, I knew I could do it! Unfortunately, with 4 laps to go, the car in front of me clipped the barrier and flipped spectacularly causing the Red Flag to come out. I had to settle for 13th. With 4 legends in front of me, it meant I was overall 9th for points and 3rd in the Pro Cup.

All in all it wasn't the weekend I was hoping for but I still know that I have what it takes to fight for a win!