Thomas Raldorf

The season kicked off at Kaeng Kracharn Circuit on the 23^rd and 24^th of April with Rounds 1 and 2 of the Thailand Touring Car Championship. The car had been prepared well leading of to the season opener with all th new body work being completed by Sa-Ing Garden workshop and their team of mechanics and the race engine being prepared by Haew Motorsport.

In the weeks leading up to the race a major testing program at KK Circuit was completed and showed great promise with laps times being a lot faster than the previous year’s best lap I ever drove there. Mr. Guenter B from R & B Motorsport helped setting up the Honda Integra for the race and the handing was really good.

There were a few issues with the car in the time trials but we still posted the 3^rd fastest time of the event.

The start of the first race was really bad as the engine with the Killer cams almost stalled on the grid as I was trying to take off, and that meant I dropped from 3^rd to 10^th going into the first corner, but them it was steady forward and within 5 laps we were back up into 3^rd place, but with no chance of catching 1^st and 2^nd place who had opened of a huge gap to everybody else, so we planned to cruised home and save the engine and equipment, but with 5 laps to the engine suddenly dropped a valve and that was it, first race of the season was a DNF, and I was very disappointed, as I felt I have done everything to take care and bring the 3^rd place home.

In the evening Tony my Team mate stepped in and offered me to use his race engine as he was not racing that weekend, and so did Mr. Urs offered to drive from Pattaya to Cha-Am with the engine in the evening / night, which is a small return trip of about 600 odd KM.

The mechanics worked all morning to get the engine ready and on the warm-up lap we did a few test runs in high gears to get the MOTEC tuned to the new engine, and then I started from 10^th of the grid.

The engine was great and after a few laps getting to know the gears and shifting points we started to move up the grid and finished the race in 3^rd place overall and 2^nd in class, so we took away 2 podiums and some valuable points from the first race of the season.

Next race in the “Pro Series” Thailand Touring Car Championship will be at Bira Circuit on the 25^th and 26^th of June, but by then the season will have kicked well off and we will have done both the Supercar Thailand Championship and the Honda Racing Fest events.