VW VENTO CUP
All the action from India's premier touring car championship
TTHE NEW SEASON OF THE Vento Cup has begun with great drama and action as the first two rounds of the series took place at the Kari Motor Speedway in Coimbatore and then moved to the freshly resurfaced MMRT circuit in Chennai as a part of the 2016 MMSC NRC.
The VW Vento Cup is India’s premier one-make touring car championship and with the switch to MRF tyres as well as key upgrades in the suspension department, the 2016 Vento Cup car is now a much faster machine.
Over half the field is made up of rookies with just a handful of returning racers from the 2015 season. Naturally these returnees are well-versed with the car and tracks and have been able to utilise the advantage to claim pole positions and podiums.
At the Kari Motor Speedway, it was Hyderabad’s Ishaan Dodhiwalla topping the timesheets on Friday as well as on Saturday, securing pole position along the way. Goan Keith Desouza and Delhi-boy Karminder Singh rounded off the top three with Mumbai’s Aditya Pawar and Hyderabad’s Jeet Jhabakh completing the top five; the latter being the highest placed in the rookie cup.
Ishaan went on to dominate the first race, winning by a margin of 2.7 seconds from Karminder and Keith. Just moments prior to the start of the second race, the rain gods gave their blessing in Coimbatore, sending all the service crews in to a frenzy to switch the cars on to wet weather tyres. This was the first wet session for the rookies and a reverse grid starting order meant the leaders would have to make their way through the field in tricky conditions.
It was Karminder who came out on top in the second race after properly executing an ambitious move for the lead, down the inside of Aditya. Ishaan feared Karminder might get away and made steady improvements in order to fight for the win. But it turned out to be a bit too late and he had to settle for
second. Aditya held on to third place.
For round two, the championship moved to the MMRT where the Vento Cup cars have never raced, though its predecessor – the Polo R Cup car – did. The resurfaced track also didn’t help the racers as the track was slippery and the drivers struggled to adapt to the tricky conditions. To make the situation worse, the Chennai heat took a toll on the drivers.
Goa’s Keith Desouza set a scorching pace in both practice sessions and also set pole. Aditya and Ishaan locked out the second row while our editor, Sirish Chandran, taking part in the weekend as a guest racer, qualified fifth.
In the first race, Keith ran away at the front making use of his track knowledge to the fullest. Niranjan just held on to his second place while Karminder moved up from sixth to take the final podium position.
The reversed starting grid for race two was the most action packed race of the weekend with the lead swapping hands multiple times. The two Chinese guest drivers, winners of last year’s Chinese Polo Cup, were on the first row of the grid and did a splendid job of holding their position against the faster drivers behind them. Ishaan, starting third, took three laps to get past Xixi but by then Li Huiwei had opened up a huge gap.
Behind them there was all sorts of pushing and shoving going on with Aditya, in his hurry to get past Xixi, taking both of them out of the race and in the process incurring a ten grid place penalty for the next race. The melee only subsided by lap 7 of the 10 lap race and it was Sirish Chandran who emerged on top to finish third. Meanwhile at the front Huiwei made a mistake on the very last lap handing victory to Ishaan, the Chinese driver suffering from heat exhaustion.
In the final race of the weekend, Niranjan won the race narrowly from Keith, while Ishaan, Sirish and Li Huiwei completed the top five.
After two rounds, it is Ishaan leading the championship with 242 points, Karminder on 220 points and Keith on 210 points. The next round of the championship takes place again at the MMRT circuit from August 19-20.