Hockenheim, October 15, 2013 - The final event of the FIA Formula 3 European Championship season takes place this coming weekend at Hockenheim, almost bringing to an end a hectic first year in international motor racing for Sean Gelael.
Including this weekend’s races at the German Grand Prix venue, 16-year-old Sean from Indonesia will have taken part in 15 race weekends in 2013, and a total of 43 races.
It has been a real adventure in his high-tech, 250km/h Double R Racing Dallara-Mercedes racing car, which he has raced in Germany, England, Italy, Belgium, Austria and the Netherlands.
Going into Hockenheim, Gelael has completed 723 laps of racing this year – add on all his qualifying, free practice and testing laps and this come to an approximate figure of 2000!
So it has been fantastic experience for Sean, who was sorely lacking on that before the start of the season. The youngest driver in a field of almost 30 international young talents from around the world, he also had the shortest career, comprising only a race winning season in Formula Pilota China in 2012.
This F3 season has been very valuable in gaining competitiveness, but of course while Gelael has been getting better, so have all his rivals, even though they started from a higher plateau of experience.
A fantastic example of this is that Sean qualified just 0.988 seconds away from pole position last weekend at Vallelunga, on a circuit with a 90-second lap time, but this still meant he had to start from 25th position on the grid.
Had he put in such a performance relative to pole position earlier in the season, then he would be starting from 15th or 16th place, which proves how everybody is using their Formula 3 experience to become better and better racing drivers.
Add to this, Gelael has had to return home to Indonesia between races in order to continue his schooling – something that is not a problem for the European drivers in their twenties!
So to Hockenheim… Everyone wants to bow out of the European season on a high, especially because, as we said earlier, this is only ‘almost bringing to an end’ the 2013 campaign. As soon as the cars are packed away in their trucks after their racing in Germany, they will be rushed back to their teams’ workshops – in Sean’s case the Double R Racing facility in Woking, just down the road from the McLaren Formula 1 team – in order to be prepared for air-freight to the race everyone wants to win: the Macau Grand Prix in November.
“We have already raced at Hockenheim earlier this year, and we had a good test there in September,” said Gelael. “So everything is going to be really competitive. We just need to do our best and hope we can get a good result – it would be nice to go to Macau on a high!”
The weekend at Hockenheim kicks off with free practice and qualifying on Friday 18th October, with the first two races on Saturday and race three on Sunday. (arl)
