The weekend at Sachsenring have confirmed the positive results seen in the last races of ADAC GT Masters for Michele Beretta and Aaro Vainio, who have got their best result in qualifying and other important points for the championship standings.
After a difficult start in free practice, on a track unknown for both drivers, in Qualifying 1 the italian-finnish duo had a good performance with the eleventh place on the grid, few thousandths far from the Top 10, resulting the fastest Lamborghini Huracan GT3. In Race 1 Vainio lost some positions in the early stages of the race, delivering the car to Michele in thirteenth position; the italian showed immediately to be very comfortable on the winding german track, imposing a very competitive pace recovering the gap on the cars, bringing the white-black-orange Huracan #53 to the finish line in ninth place and conquering other points for the championship.
Having demonstrated in Race 1 that he could really fight for the top positions, Beretta was very confident in Qualifying 2, but a slow puncture on the rear right wheel slowed him down, preventing from going beyond the nineteenth position a few tenths from pole position, anyway a good result considering the technical problem encountered on the car.
At the start of Race 2, the chaos generated in the first meters also involved the young italian driver that, after a contact with another car, was forced to cut into the grass slipping to the bottom of the group and reporting some damage on the Huracan; the rest of the race was noticed by three major accidents that required the Safety Car freezing the positions for most of the laps. In the final laps, an engine problem forced Vainio to retire.
Michele Beretta: “We leave Sachsenring convinced that we did a good job and proved to be quick. After months of work and many small positive steps together with Team Rosberg, we finally closed the gap that separated us from the top. We return home with a ninth place in Race 1 and a DNF that does not represent our real perfromance. Above all, in Race 1 we were consistently the fastest Lamborghini, just a few tenths from the leaders and I am sure that if we were on a less tortuous circuit and with more overtaking possibilities we would have obtained an even better result. Too bad for the problems we have encountered today; after the excellent race yesterday I entered a really heavy qualifying, but a slow puncture made the car gradually more and more nervous, preventing us from expressing our true potential and forcing me to an early return to the pits. The race was then full of accidents and we spent more time behind the Safety Car than to fight against the others, until the withdrawal due to a technical problem. We take home important points and the awareness of being able to close the championship fighting for the positions that count in the final race at Hockenheim.”