Jerez, 21 June 2014: India’s Aditya Patel, along with Portuguese teammate Cesar Campanico, won the opening race in the GTS (GT3) category and finishing second overall in the third riound race of the International GT Open Series in Jerez (Spain) on Saturday.
Driving for Team Novadriver, the duo aced faster Super GT cars after Campanico put in a spectacular qualifying lap to secure pole position overall, thus giving themselves an edge over the second GT3 car that was starting fifth on the grid, an FMSCI press release said.
Campanico started the race for the team and lost a place to the Ferrari of Daniel Zampieri going into the first corner, although he held on to second place on the grid while continuing to lead the GT3 class for the rest of the drive.
Talented Chennai boy Patel, 25, sponsored by Audi India, JK Tyre and Amante, drove aggressively after taking over at the halfway mark, and despite losing nearly 15 seconds in a pitlane miscommunication he pushed the Audi R8 LMS Ultra hard, to close in on Roman Mavlanov and Zampieri but there wasn’t sufficient time to get past the duo and he had to settle for second place overall. This, however, meant they had won the GT3 category and Patel thus became the first Indian to win a GT3 race.
“It feels pretty nice to finally win a GT3 race after all the effort we’ve been putting in since the season began,” said Patel, while thanking his sponsors who have steadfastly supported him over the years.
“Again, Cesar did a fantastic job by fighting up in front during his stint. The pitstop incident was unfortunate. We were very close to winning overall and that would have really been great for us and the team! I’d like to thank Audi India, JK Tyre and Amante for their support over the years.
“Hopefully this is the first of many to come. Tomorrow we start fifth overall and third in class. The fifteen second pitstop handicap because of our win today will make it difficult but we will push hard for a good finish.”
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Aditya Patel takes his maiden win a Jerez on Saturday. An FMSCI pic
