Driver Database News

Dani Domit had his first race meeting this weekend – of any kind – and came away with a podium and a fastest lap!

The Mexican driver is a novice and had no car or karting experience before early last summer when he decided to become a racing driver! While studying engineering at the University of Florida, he signed up for a two day Skip Barber school course and followed that with a three day one in August.

All fired up, he bought himself a shifter kart and hit the local track for open lapping sessions and some fun racing. The feedback he got from his Skip Barber coaches gave Dani the confidence he needed to sign up for Grand Prix Shootout and history was made!

With a late deal made with JTR to do the MSA British Formula Ford championship, Dani had done no testing at all prior to arriving at Oulton Park for the race weekend.

A test was planned for the Wednesday which saw very little running due to rain, sleet and hailstones! The test on Friday was a bit better. Dani got some dry sessions in the morning and two wet ones in the afternoon.It wasn’t much but better than nothing and he looked forward to first qualifying session the next day.

Dani qualified second, third and third in the scholarship class only about three tenths off the pace.

In race one Dani ran very well and came second in the Scholarship class and so visited the podium for the first time! Race two was a bit disappointing as Dani found out how tough racing is. He spun on the second lap and another car hit him on the side damaging his radiator.

Race three was a mix of emotions. Dani was getting into his stride and feeling more comfortable when he clipped the tyres at the Knickerbrook chicane. His race was over but not before he had set the fastest lap in his class.

It was a very difficult way to start a racing career. Dani had to start as a novice from zero with a new car, team and circuit. Oulton Park is one of the most difficult tracks in the UK and can be very intimidating to newcomers – especially if they are novices!

However, Dani was lapping at the pace that the other Grand Prix Shootout winner, Tio Ellinas, was doing three weeks earlier on his first trip to Oulton Park. Tio was very impressive at the weekend and everyone hopes that Dani will too very soon.

Tio Ellinas has very quickly established himself and JTR as title contenders for the 2010 MSA Formula Ford Championship and has already got a lot of people talking about him since his race début at Oulton Park at the weekend.

Tio had just five outings in a racing car before the Easter weekend meeting though most of his running was affected by poor weather and red flags. Despite this, Tio was quickest by up to two seconds in the two wet test sessions on the Friday before the first race.

On Saturday morning, Tio was still getting up to speed in the dry during qualifying. With seven minutes to go he set the quickest time ahead of the experienced Josh Hill, Scott Malvern and Daniel Cammish all in their second year of Formula Ford. However, with three minutes to go, Australian driver Scott Pye pipped Tio for first place and so Tio had to start race 1 from second on the grid. It was a shame because if he had held on to that first place, he would have been the first driver to get pole position for a British Formula Ford race in his race début since Ayrton Senna thirty seasons ago!

Race 1: Tio held his grid position and was running second behind Scott Pye but a pedal problem caused his foot to apply 30% throttle while braking. This caused his brake pedal to go “soft”. His telemetry showed that this cost him 0.4 seconds per lap which prevented any challenge to Scott Pye and forced him back towards Malvern, Hill and Cammish. The pressure from Malvern and the “soft” pedal caused him to lose two places but he still managed to pressurise Hill into a spin. He finished fourth, his first ever car race. Tio, Malvern, Hill and Cammish’s fastest laps were separated by 0.02 of a second!

Having spent Easter Sunday fixing the pedal problem, Tio and the excellent JTR team were looking forward to Monday’s two races where Tio would start 7th and 6th.

Race 2: Unfortunately, Tio stalled his engine as the cars were going out on the green flag lap. He had to wait in the pit lane while the rest of the field did two laps of the slightly damp track. In the race, Tio stormed through the field from a distant 25th place to challenge Jake Cook for 6th on the last lap. He made an error attacking Cook that lost him one place. He set the fastest lap and was the only driver to get under 1:41:00. Team boss, Nick Tandy: “A lot of drivers would have over-driven and made mistakes. Tio put his head down and drove a very fast race and overtook a lot of people. It was an amazingly mature performance!”

Race 3: Tio started 6th on the grid. The result was that he found himself in 6th place in the race behind Daniel Cammish but obviously quicker. He made a move down the inside of Cammish at Turn 1 and unfortunately ran out of room. He went over the top of Cammish’s rear wheel and his race was over! The team felt that if he had sat behind Cammish for eight laps nobody would have been happy and it was best to have a go. Tio has learnt a valuable lesson!

The only driver to have outpaced Tio all weekend was Jamun driver Scott Pye in the dry. Title favourite Pye had already competed in over 80 Formula Ford and Formula Toyota races before this year and had tested a lot with Jamun before the first race. Jamun have won the British Formula Ford title for the last five years and, with four drivers, have a lot of testing data to call on to aid performance. They use a new 2010 spec car where JTR are still using last years chassis.

All of the team are extremely impressed by Tio’s performance.

Stuart Prior, JTR’s coach, said he was flabbergasted by Tio’s performance all weekend and that Tio drives a Formula Ford as well as anyone he has ever seen…already!

Guy McCullough, Tio’s race engineer, said that Tio basically has almost nothing to learn from the data of JTR’s previous drivers and now has to forge ahead with development of the car to go faster. Guy says that when you tell Tio to do something, he does it perfectly from then on and that he is great to work with.

Nick Tandy, JTR team principal, said that he was “blown away” by Tio’s performance and that he is very proud Tio is driving his car. Nick has won the Formula Ford Festival and was a race winner in British F3 but when he saw Tio through Lodge Corner in the wet he said “I couldn’t do that!”

Daniel Erickson once again showed his Aussie fighting spirit by putting his race 1 DNF behind him to score third place in Round 23 of the British Formula Ford Championship at Brands Hatch today.

In his first race meeting on the daunting Brands ‘GP’ circuit, the CAMS International Rising Star came within a whisker of grabbing second place from Rogier de Wit, shadowing the Dutch driver by just 0.79 seconds at the chequered flag.

The 12-lap, 44km race was won by American Josef Newgarden, who escaped from his battling pursuers to clean-sweep the meeting’s two BFFC rounds.

Typically, Erickson was more disappointed about not finishing second than bouncing back from his disastrous Round 22.

“It was a tough battle with Rogier,” he said.

“Second place should have been mine, but I just couldn’t get past him.”

After today’s result, Erickson is now only eight points away from being the top-placed British Formula Ford debutant in this year’s championship.

The final two rounds will be at Castle Combe on October 3.

Young Australian racing driver Daniel Erickson was an early retirement from Round 22 of the British Formula Ford Championship at Brands Hatch today.

The young Australian driver said his Spectrum 011c spun off the track after running into the rear of Chrissy Palmer’s car at Surtees corner on lap five of the 12-lap race.

“Chrissy braked early, leaving me with no option but to collide with him,” Erickson said.

Rather than soldier on in the race and gain only a point or two towards the championship, Erickson pitted to after the incident to conserve his little-worn tyres for a concerted attack in today’s second and final BFFC race (5.10pm UK time, 2.10am Monday AEST).

A solid day’s testing at Castle Combe (pronounced “koom”) last week has put Daniel Erickson close to the required pace for the last two rounds of the 2009 British Formula Ford Championship on October 3.

Like all of the venues in the prestigious development series, Castle Combe is new to the CAMS International Rising Star, making every practice lap another step along the learning curve. This test was all the more crucial, because there’ll be little margin for error during the unusual one-day race meeting.

The 3.0km former RAAF airfield circuit, near Bristol in south-west England, is very fast and bumpy, putting extra strain on the transmission and suspension. And there’s precious little space between the bitumen and the fences outside the sweeping corners, making any off-track excursion potentially very costly.

After 80-odd laps during the day in his Australian-built Spectrum 011c racer, Daniel was tired but reasonable satisfied with his day’s results with the Kevin Mills Racing team.

“It was a pretty tough day, physically and mentally,” he said. “Castle Combe is rougher than Silverstone or Oulton Park, more like Knockhill, and there aren’t many slow corners.

As usual we concentrated on finding ways to keep the car’s lap times consistently quick during the races. It’s important to start at the front, but it’s even more important to finish at the front!

“For the first two sessions I drove on the tyres I used at Brands Hatch the previous weekend. They were fairly well worn, so my lap times weren’t anything special. Then I changed to a set of tyres that hadn’t done quite as many laps, and my times improved quite markedly to 67.7-67.8 seconds. That was only a couple of tenths of a second off the circuit’s Formula Ford race lap record.

“In the last session before lunch the gearbox input shaft broke, which meant my mechanic, Greg, had to fix it before he could eat!

After lunch we fitted a set of new tyres, and I did a 67.3s lap. Our team was timing the other quick drivers, and the championship leader James Cole did 66.8s on new tyres, but that might have been with a qualifying set-up.”

Daniel said that he’s confident of being among the frontrunners in the two 18-minute races that will wrap up the 2009 series next month.

“We’re on the pace in qualifying – there are just a few things we need to work on to stay at the front in the races.”

That’s what Daniel Erickson discovered today in Round 19 of the British Formula Ford Championship. Erickson started from third grid position in his first ever race on the ‘Indy’ circuit, but he finished fourth. A less than perfect getaway by the CAMS International Rising Star allowed Dutchman Rogier de Wit and Briton Chrissy Palmer past on the first lap. Erickson repassed Palmer before the chequered flag, but by then de Wit had scampered away. The 18-minute race was won by American Josef Newgarden, with de Wit second and championship points leader James Cole third.

Erickson said after the race that his fate was virtually decided at the start.

“I didn’t get away all that well,” he said.

“I was trying to be careful not to get too much wheelspin, but instead I bogged it down a bit.

“Roger de Wit went to my outside on the entry to the first corner, Paddock Hill Bend, then he snuck down the inside off the exit.

He ran me wide on the run up the hill to Druids, and Chrissy Palmer got past as well, so suddenly I was back to fifth.

“I followed Chrissy for three or four laps, and then managed to get by him on the inside through Surtees and McLaren.

“We touched wheels but I made the move stick, and pulled away from him after that. By that point the leaders were long gone, and it was impossible to catch them.”

Erickson said that racing on the short, simple-looking ‘Indy’ layout had been harder than setting quick laps in testing and qualifying.

“On most circuits I’ve been able to make up ground on other drivers fairly easily, but here it was extremely tough,” he said.

He vowed to get away from the grid faster in Sunday’s remaining two BFFC races.

“To be honest I’m a bit cranky with myself, because car definitely has the pace to run at the front,” he said. “I’m determined to get better starts tomorrow.”

Photo by Jakob Ebrey Photography.

If recent history is anything to go by, this weekend’s British Formula Ford Championship rounds at the Brands Hatch ‘Indy’ circuit should be good for Australian Daniel Erickson.

The CAMS International Rising Star is looking for another big points haul on the Kent circuit as the prestigious development series enters its closing stages.

Erickson was one of the pace-setters in his Australian-built Spectrum 011c at the last month’s Ford-sponsored test day on the 1.9km ‘Indy’ layout.

And despite racing for the first time on an unfamiliar track yet again, Erickson is looking forward to maintaining his recent good form.

His challenge will be heightened by an unusual race meeting schedule, which precludes testing before Friday’s official qualifying session.

BFFC competitors have had an opportunity to get their cars into race trim on the Friday preceding previous rounds, with qualifying for grid positions in the first two races normally held the following day.

“I’m quite positive going into qualifying, although it could be a bit strange because there won’t be any practice sessions,” Erickson says.

“We found a good set-up at the Ford testing day, and I was able to set fast times, even on old tyres.

“It’s like at Donington, where I didn’t feel any pressure going into qualifying because I’d already been quick in testing there.

“I thought ‘I can do this’, and put it all together and set the two fastest laps, which in the British Formula Ford Championship gives you pole position for the first two races.”

Erickson says that qualifying at Brands Hatch ‘Indy’ is even more crucial, because overtaking another driver on the circuit’s tight confines can be next to impossible.

“It’s so hard to pass there, especially at the two hairpins – Druids and McLaren. They just go on forever!

“If a driver in front of you takes a defensive narrow entry line, you really can’t go wide and try to cut back on the exit because there’s no apex like on a ‘stop-go’ type of corner.

“Of course that’s slower than taking the normal racing line, so you often find a ‘freight train’ of cars lining up waiting to pass.

“You just have to be patient and wait for the driver in front to make a small mistake so you can sneak past – a big ask in Formula Ford, with so many young drivers trying to show what they can do.

“The other scenario is that you can get hit from behind, which is why there’s usually carnage somewhere on the Indy circuit during Formula Ford races!

“That means qualifying will be even more crucial than usual. I’ll have to go for it right from the start, because you get only one or maybe two laps to set a quick time before your new tyres are past their absolute best.”

Saturday:
The first race of the weekend kicked off with a great start for Alex and his Australian team mate Daniel Erickson who took his maiden victory in British Formula Ford. From fifth on the grid Alex got the benefit of the two second runners colliding, taking them both out on the warm up lap. This enabled Alex to quickly move up into third place off the start line. With rapid pace he was soon making a bid for second place. An exciting duel ensued with Alex making a decisive and successful move on lap 3, but falling victim to Joseph Newgarden behind who managed to dive past into second. They raced on to get clear away from the rest of the field and Alex achieved his first podium of the season in third place. With team mate Daniel Cammish taking 4th place and the Scholarship win, this was a great result for Kevin Mills and the Spectrum drivers in 1st, 3rd & 4th places. “It’s been a long time coming,” said Alex. “I’m really happy for the Team. Its been a fantastic day for Kevin Mills Racing.”

Kevin Mills was delighted with the results delivered by his young drivers, describing it as “Mega. We have been promising this for quite a while and it is terrific to deliver.”

“Fantastic” was how Australian Spectrum designer Mike Borland summed up the result. “We’re also racing at Sandown this weekend for the Victorian Championship. Spectrum chassis won the Formula Ford and Formula Ford 1600 races at Sandown and then we sat up to watch live timing and see the two Dans and Alex crowd the podium in their KMR Spectrums. It is very satisfying to see our cars winning races around the World within a few hours. Congratulations to Kevin, his Team and the Drivers on a well earned result.”

http://www.alexjonesracing.com/