Tough weekend in Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup at Spa-Francorchamps
Jeffrey Schmidt was unlucky in Belgium. The Swiss driver headed to Spa-Francorchamps for the third-last weekend in the Porsche Mobil 1 Supercup, hoping to keep his chances alive in the fight for the championship. The Lechner Racing Middle East driver was plagued by bad luck right at the start in qualifying. A misunderstanding on the part of race stewards meant that the 22-year-old failed to place higher than 13th on the grid, and then came his early retirement in the race on Sunday. Schmidt had to abandon the race following a no-fault contact under braking on the approach to Les Combes. The Swiss driver is now in fifth position in the overall standings but still has a chance of a top-three finish in the championship with a deficit of just 13 points on the driver in second place.
Jeffrey, you headed to Belgium in third place in the championship but have now failed to score.
I didn’t really get into my stride the whole weekend and simply lacked momentum during my first outing on Friday. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do any testing at Spa. Things didn’t go well for us right at the start in practice. Still, I’m sure that more would have been possible, as I either made a small mistake or traffic got in the way. I know that I usually do well at Spa. After all, I was fifth there last year.
Your lap times in qualifying were deleted to begin with. There was subsequently a lot of confusion about track limits. What happened exactly?
Spa is a bit peculiar as far as track limits go. That’s why I tried right from the start in practice to be very careful not to leave the track. After all, I didn’t want my lap times to be deleted. Everything went smoothly on Friday, so I didn’t change the way I tackled qualifying on Saturday. The race stewards had placed a marshal on the corners that are critical. Their job was to see how drivers took them. However, their findings were based on what they could see with their eyes.
And in qualifying, their decisions went against you initially…
Yes, that’s right. I made a small slip during my first lap on my first outing and got stuck in traffic on my second lap, unfortunately. When I returned to the pits, the team told me that I’d gone outside track limits and both my laps were deleted. That’s why I went out for a second time and posted two more laps as a precaution, taking care to stick to the track limits through every turn. That took a lot of time as you can imagine. And then the same story again in the pits when my last two laps were also deleted. I had to see the stewards after qualifying, and we watched the videos which showed that I’d run wide briefly only on the first lap and that all the other laps were within track limits. Unfortunately, the race stewards got things confused, but the bottom line was that I qualified only 13th thanks to the mix-up. Very tough!
Then came your early retirement in the race. What happened exactly?
I had a contact with another driver at the start and bent the steering. The race was incredibly difficult for me subsequently. After four laps, another driver overcooked it at the end of the Kemmel straight. The last time I looked in the rear-view mirror, he was about 50 metres behind me. I steered into the turn, and he suddenly crashed into me on the off-side. He just braked far too late. My car was badly damaged, and I had to retire from the race on the next turn.
Racing now continues without any let-up, as Monza is scheduled for next weekend. How do rate your chances?
We can certainly be among the front-runners at Monza if all goes well. I was second-fastest there in this year’s Supercup test, so in that respect, I’m in quite a good position to start with. The track itself is really cool. The Variante Ascari especially is always a dream, as it’s very fluid to drive and yet is still a real challenge. A podium should be possible if we can be a bit luckier than we were at Spa. That’s important for the overall standings, because I’ve still got a good finish firmly in my sights. There’s everything to play for in the championship stakes.
