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 Ajith's
New Formula!
Anand Philar
Chennai, Oct 24:
Despite the on going turbulence with his
racing license, Ajith, accompanied by his wife
Shalini and Racing Manager Akbar Ebrahim, went
ahead with the scheduled test in the Formula
Asia car in Zuhai, China on October 15.
Unfortunately, it was a regular test day and
Ajith had just three 40-minute sessions to learn
the track and get used to the car.
The Formula Asia car is a
much more powerful car as compared to the
Formula Maruti that Ajith has just started racing
in Chennai. The Brake Horse Power of the Formula
Asia car is 150 BHP as compared to 45 BHP of the
Formula Maruti car.
However, Ajith got to learn
the track fairly quickly and slowly started to
come to grips with this more powerful machine.
 There
was a further loss of track time in session 2 as
Ajith spun off in corner 4 thereby making him
miss the entire session.
In the last session, Ajith put
his head down and steadily improved his lap
times from 2min 10secs to 1:47. This impressed
the team owner and Championship organiser David
Sonenscher who immediately offered a drive in
the next year's Formula BMW Championship and
also a drive in Macau next month (Nov 17) in the
present Formula Asia car.
Next year, the Formula Asia
car and the AF2000 Championship is being
replaced by the Formula BMW Championship. This
championship is being run by David Sonenscher of
Asian Festival Of Speed and backed by BMW.
The power of the car is 150
BHP with a 5-speed sequential Formula 3 Gear
Box. The engine is a 1000cc BMW bike engine
specially prepared for racing by
Schnitzer-Germany.
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