The final weekend of the V8 Thunder cars Finnish Championship was driven on September 11th and 12th at Alastaro Circuit. Milla Mäkelä was holding P2 in the standings before the final with only 4 points difference to Jonne Rautjärvi.
“Our goal was to deliver a solid weekend. We have had our difficulties in the final rounds for the past two years and now we knew that a solid performance should do it to fight for the vice-champion title.” Milla sums up their goals for the weekend.
On Saturday the track was wet in the morning but was drying up slowly. Milla decided to go with intermediate tires as she wanted to save the fresh rain tires for the predicted wet race on Sunday and the track was still too wet for the slicks. The grip was much lower than expected and the old rain tires never started working properly during the qualy. As a result Milla had to start the race from 4th on the grid. The track kept on drying out and it was slick weather for race 1.
“We had a plan to attack at the start of the race. We thought that the track would be half wet and that we have only one warm up lap as usual to prepare the brand new slicks for the race so we went quite high with tyre pressures. Due to towing cars and other variables the track was dry and instead of 1 there was a total of 4 warm up laps! My tyres were ruined before the race even started.” Milla recaps.
The damage was not huge though as Milla crossed the line in P4 and scored 3rd highest points. Jonne Rautjärvi caught up by 2 points only, so Milla was still holding second place in the standings. The speed needed to be better for Sunday though.
“On Sunday it was a wet race and I had a P5 start due to bad lap time in Race 1. I got a great start and was running first in the first corner, but then I got hit from behind and spinned. I gained one position at the end of lap 1 and after avoiding a collision between Jonne and Markku Blomqvist I was in P2 at the start of the second lap. The race was then red flagged due to the crash.” Milla says.
The race was completely restarted and Milla got away well again from the third row, this time climbing to P2 and staying there for half a lap before Sami Talvitie passed her. From then on it was a race between Milla and Jonne all the way to the finish line.
“Jonne got past me when my 3rd gear started playing tricks after mid race. I had to drive with one hand holding the gear in and only one on the steering wheel at the high speed corners. I was able to keep up with Jonne, but I didn’t really get a chance to over take when driving onehanded. It was a good fight though and it all happened on the track! We are tied in points now, but as we have less second place finishes this season we got P3 in the series. This season was amazing and the races were so intense. Huge thanks to everyone who supported us and thanks to my team!” Milla ends.