It was a very close weekend as the EuroFormula Open made its annual visit to Silverstone last weekend, with Motul Team West-Tec’s Yarin Stern and Tanart Sathienthirakul both in the thick of the frenetic race action. Friday’s free practice sessions were very, very close with Yarin topping the first session, but the final session being disrupted by red flags, leaving everyone guessing how the field was really shaping up.
Saturday qualifying saw Tanart grid sixth with Yarin in ninth, despite both feeling the car was good. A great start to that race saw Yarin passing cars and he was soon up in fifth place, challenging series leader Tereschenko hard. It took several laps of great battling, and aggressive defending, and eventually Yarin overtook to move up to fourth place. By then the leaders had long gone and though Yarin was able to gain on them he ran out of laps but still finished in a good fourth place after what was a great drive from his grid position. Tanart had unfortunately gone the other way on the first lap and dropped down the field in the early skirmishes but also staged a really good recovery, making his way back to eighth after setting some very fast laps.
Sunday turned into a near carbon copy of Saturday with Tanart and Yarin qualifying sixth and tenth, and then racing well. In the race Tanart was in the thick of an intense battle of five cars and finished in a solid sixth place and this time it was Yarin rudely shoved off the road on lap one and dropping to the back of the field, from where he was able to post front-of-the-field laptimes to get back into the top ten.
The EuroFormula Open will now reconvene at Austria’s Red Bull Ring on the first weekend in July.
Yarin Stern: I felt good in qualifying and was surprised to be so far down the grid each day. We had really good race pace and Saturday’s race in particular was really good.
John Miller, Motul Team West-Tec: Both times we had a really good race car, but seemed to struggle a little in qualifying which really handicapped us in the races. The drivers and engineers will be working hard on that for Red Bull Ring, where we have a full test day so I am sure they can be back where we all feel they should be.
One of the most successful teams in the history of the EuroFormula / European Formula 3 Open, Team West-Tec enjoys team support from Motul, Nielsen Chemicals, B-G Racing, Eibach, MIS Locktons, Mechanix and Freem GB.
