Carlos Durães wins the Portuguese Nationals

Oct 12 2011

Race report by Carlos Durães (9.18.2011)

The last round of the Portuguese Nats took place in the North of Portugal, at Trofa. I had
already secured enough points to win the championship, but as we must “throw away” one of
the results – only 4 classifications are considered – I wanted to be at my best to get all the 4
wins and achieve the perfect 480 points…

During Saturday it was time to practice and find the best setup for the car. My car wasn’t
bad but we needed to improve. We changed a few details during the afternoon and the car
became much better.

We had some rain over the night and on Sunday morning the track was quite slippery. I had
achieved a good setup for dry conditions, and that made me struggle a lot in the qualification
and ended up in 6th . Bruno Coelho was the TQ.

The track was drying as the day went by, and on my Semi I just had to adjust a couple of things
and the car improved a lot. I had a poor star, with some errors and bumps, but I managed to
recover and still got the top spot in the A-Main grid.

The A-Main start was really bad, even worse than in my Semi, with too many stupid mistakes.
I had to push hard to reach Bruno Coelho. I managed to recover the gap and had to fight for a
few minutes with Bruno for first position. When I got the lead, I kept it until the end, opening a
nice gap which allowed me to control the race in the final minutes.

The Portuguese Nats are now over, and I’m very happy to get the title with 4 wins in 5 rounds.

Thanks to all of those who helped and believed in me…

See you at the tracks.

Carlos Durães

TOP12

1st Carlos Durães – Xray 808 2011 (Avid)
2nd Bruno Coelho
3rd Ricardo Monteiro
4th Miguel Matias
5th Pedro Figueiredo – Xray 808 2011
6th Nuno Casal Ribeiro
7th Carlos Cardoso
8th Tiago Parreira
9th Rodrigo Luís
10th Nuno Rebelo
11th João Pedro Gomes
12th Jorge Augusto