Sunday, 14 October turned out to be a beautiful day for Team Astromega with Karline Stala taking the Belgian F.Renault 1.6 title after a thrilling last race of the championship. Round about the same time Frankie Cheng put in a brilliant performance in the A1 Team China car at Brno, Czech Rep.

KARLINE CHAMPION

Going into the last round we had a 12 points gap to Niels Cox. So, without any misfortnue for Cox the title was as good as out of reach. But...

RACE 1

DOUBLE PODIUM FINISH

Due to circumstances Karline couldn't put a quick enough time in and ended up P5 on the grid. We were not hugely worried as we just knew that the race speed would be there. Cox however had had even more problems and ended up P7.

In the race Karline duly fought her way back up to P2. Unfortunately the race was a little too short for her to be able to challenge for P1.

Cox finished P4 on the road. BUT : no less than 6 drivers got time penalies after the race for running too wide over the kerbs in certain area's, one of them was Cox. This resulted in Niels being relegated to P7.

Jack Piper had fought his way up from P9 to P6 and inherited P3 and thus gave Team Astromega a double podium finish.

This meant that the points gap between Karline and Cox was now down to 5.

RACE 2

SUSPENSE TILL THE FINISH

REMARKABLE PERFORMANCE BY JACK

After a couple of laps when initial positions were taken Karline was P3, up from P5 on the grid. Niels Cox was in P5 with Jack in P6. Not enough for the title.

Then Karline put in the fastest lap of the race which would give us a point but would put her on equal points with Cox. Not enough for the title.

But then, Jack who was on great fighting form set a new fastest lap time. Fantastic for Jack, not good for Karline however...

Then Karline took P2 and potentially the title by 1 point.

And then Jack got P5 from Cox, thus giving us a bit more breathing space.

But, Karline wasn't quite sure of what the situation behind her was and went all out for P1. In the last corner of the last lap she nearly had a coming together with Grandsire and they crossed the line side by side, Karline just 0.1sec. behind. She'd won the championship! But didn't know it untill she got out of the car.

Jack got a well deserved P5 and made it an absolutely fantastic day for everybody. He made great process in 1 day and found now limits within himself.

MEANWHILE IN BRNO

SPRINT RACE

With a very gutsy move round the outside of Brazil in the very high speed first corner, Frankie got P1O

having started P11. This toghether with the lap times in the race was boding well for the feature race...

FEATURE RACE

We qualified P5 for the feature race which was already fantastic.

In the race Frankie had no problems matching the pace of the leaders and after the second round of pit-stops he was running P4 on the track, some 6 seconds behind Switzerland in P3.

With a string of fastest laps in the race at that point and also putting in the fastest lap officially, Frankie reduced the gap to P3 to finish right under his gearbox.

Needless to say Frankie was very happy with the car and engineer Brian Ireland's work and he is full of confidence for the remainder of the season. There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to score (a lot) more points.