With 17 registered drivers, the CRG Racing Team will be one of the largest and most competitive teams in the 2nd Round of the FIA European OK and OKJ Championship scheduled from April 25 to 28 on the Val D'Argenton track. After his win in the OK category in the opening race of the Championship in Spain, Gabriel Gomez is the leader of the standings and in France he will try to pull ahead of his rivals.
The work carried out from a technical point of view in the Champions of the Future race 15 days ago provided a lot of useful data to the team and this weekend the objective will be to collect the maximum. The CRG team in the OK category also trusts a lot in Louis Iglesias and Davide Bottaro, who were both very fast in the 1st Round of the season, as well as Markas Silkunas, Mark Dubnitski, Guillaume Bouzar, Michale Ider, Santino Panetta, Tom Dussol, Ka Po Yu and Jacob Micallef, who complete the OK team.
In the OKJ category there will be 6 drivers from the CRG Racing Team: Asher Ochstein, François Kerdal, Oliver Rasmussen, Marco Garst, Manuel Miguez and Mats Van Rooijen.
From a technical point of view, the most important innovation will be the exclusive use of Iame engines for all CRG drivers, not only for the OK team but also for the Junior drivers. Track service will be managed for the entire team by BM Motors. From this race, therefore, the CRG racing department has definitively outlined the engine suppliers by tying up with Iame for all the international direct drive categories (OK and OK-Junior), while the KZ team and the MINI team will remain with TM.
The weekend program in France will respect the usual format of the FIA races with Free Practice on Thursday and the action on the track coming into full swing on Friday with Qualifying Practice and the first Eliminatory Heats. The Finals are scheduled for Sunday early in the afternoon and to follow them on the FIA Karting website, in addition to the Live Timing, Live Streaming will also be available.
CRG drivers’ expectations:
Gabriel Gomez (OK): “The Champions of the Future race we attended on this track 15 days ago gave us important information from a technical point of view and I think we have understood many things that will help us to make the most of the potential of our chassis this weekend. We worked very well on the overall performance, which will be useful in Qualifying Practice, but at the same time we defined a setup that we believe is also very competitive in terms of race pace. We hope that the weather will not affect the weekend, so as to have a linear path from the Qualifying Practice to the Finals, but in any case we are ready for any situation and the main objective will be to increase our score, maintaining the leadership of the Championship, which is our stated goal”.
Asher Ochstein (OKJ): “We carried out tests and the race in preparation for this event, focusing in particular on the engines, as from this event the whole team will move from TM to Iame. We have collected a lot of data and made important improvements from all points of view, so as to face this race with maximum confidence. I like the track and from the first laps our chassis proved to work very well, so we are all very motivated to have an excellent weekend."