Just one week after the Australian Grand Prix, the GPO field settles down in damping hot Malaysia for the third round

of the Grand-Prix Online championship. The Press is swarming the paddock hoping to get some juicy lines from the drivers. In the Challenge championship Jan-Moritz Kammann leads with 37 points, the Sprint Championship is led by Malcolm Rice, who scored 40 points from the last two Grand Prix.

The Track

Sepang International Circuit is 5.543 meters long and contains 15 corners. Ten of them turn to the right. The drivers will have to complete 56 laps in the Challenge Championship, and 28 laps in the Sprint Championship. The track will be opened for the drivers at 18:00 GMT. Qualifying starts at 19:45 GMT this Saturday.

Sepangs impressive straights

The Challengers

In the Challenge race it looks like an all Kammann race. The fast German is looking for his second win after a rather disappointing race in Melbourne, and the tests look very promising! Don’t forget Drazen Cokor, he has been consistently finishing on the podium and wants to take his maiden win. An outsider might be Stuart Fields, who isn’t much in the picture, but very consistent. Further down the field the battle continues hard with drivers looking to close the gap to the front runners of the first two races.

The Sprint race is opener in who will win this one. Top favorite is Robin van Brenk, who surprisingly won the Australian GP. Malcolm Rice however doesn’t want to give up his first place in the standings. Behind these two, the battle looks more open. Past two races showed a lot of drivers are at a rather same pace, so who will take the points in this race is going to be a big surprise.

Paddock Talk

Yours truly went for a stroll around the paddock and tried to get a hang of a few driver remarks.
First one was the talkative Kammann, who told us he was determined to take the win here:

“I’m only here for first place, second place doesn’t count“, said the German Redspeed driver. Immediately jumping in his car to show his pace which we got the footage from, the lap  view is currently in an editing phase.

Further down the road, we found Ben Williamson looking at his Williamson Dynamics team. He said that WD is trying to improve their pace to make a jump onto the podium. They recently terminated the contract with Patrick Weir, who found a new home in the GRIDline Team.

Sepang Grand Stands

As the paddock isn’t quite filled yet, I couldn’t reach more drivers just yet, but I’ll try to talk to some more drivers in the upcoming days.

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