Technical failures and setup issues have been the bane of Valentin Kluss’ start to life in Eurocup-3. The German driver told Feeder Series he expected more from the opening rounds of the season, and says his aim to finish top five in the championship has gone unchanged.
By Juan Arroyo
You might have expected Valentin Kluss to be higher up in the Eurocup-3 standings by this point. Campos Racing were also a reasonable bet to be leading the teams based on last year. But they’ve both hit several bumps at the start of the season, and both have ground to make up as the series heads into the summer rounds.
Technical issues have struck the championship heavier than any other junior series, but they’ve struck Campos even more. Since pre-season, nearly all its drivers have experienced some failure in the car that has impacted their running across a weekend. Race one in Spielberg gave Kluss his latest early retirement, this time due to a suspension failure.
At the same time, Campos have been lagging behind MP Motorsport since the non-championship round in March. Alongside Valerio Rinicella’s double win that weekend, three separate MP drivers have won the other three races held thus far. The Dutch team lead Campos by nearly 80 points in the teams’ standings after Spielberg.
Kluss left the Red Bull Ring seventh in the standings and leading the rookie standings. Those standings are not the most representative of the grid at the moment, nor does the German driver care for the rookies’ much – but it is one of the few positives he can take out of this slow start.
While Campos is indeed “a step behind” their rivals, as the German himself put it, Kluss himself has found getting used to the Eurocup-3 car challenging. He acknowledged that he has been noticeably behind Christian Ho as a result.
“We have to make sure that performance-wise and reliability-wise we get where we want to be, because there haven’t really [been] many sessions where all of our cars went without issues,” Kluss said.
“I have to work on my driving and make sure that I fix the problems that I’m having myself, because Christian [Ho] is my main reference at the moment and I’m clearly a bit slower than him.”
Kluss explained that he has struggled to find the correct feeling in his Tatuus T-318’s brakes so far, calling the car “a lot softer to brake”. The German driver has consequently been losing most of his lap time compared to Ho in hard braking zones, where harsher inputs on the pedals are necessary.
“I’m used to pushing the brakes really hard [in F4] and I’ve completely lost the feeling because the brake is really soft and you need to be really careful. If the brake is soft you just lose all feeling and you might just push [the pedal] way too hard and all the wheels lock. A lot of my confidence in braking is gone now. I mostly brake earlier and not as hard. That’s one thing I’m also able to work on in the simulator – trying to get my brakes similar to the real life car.”
Kluss’ brake issues go all the way back to pre-season testing, where he was on average around one and a half seconds behind Ho. There was notable progress during those test sessions, as he reduced the gap to less than half a second on the second day of running. But as Ho became a polesitter, Spielberg showed that Kluss still has some way to go in matching his teammate.
“There’s some progress [since Spa] and I will surely be improving. I feel like I’m pretty quick at getting used to different things but in the end you still need the time [on track]. You don’t have a lot of testing in this car so you need to make the best of the test sessions that you’re having, but I think it will be fine. In Portimão I will make sure to work on it and then we will see in the data if I’m improving or not.”
Kluss is not helped by the fact that he is effectively running with one race weekend less of experience. At the non-championship round – the best opportunity drivers would have had to practice for the season ahead – he was unable to set a lap in qualifying and retired from both races with gearbox issues. Spa’s heavy weather meant the round there also saw limited running – to the point that practice, qualifying and one race were cancelled.
The Spielberg weekend was Kluss’ first that went relatively trouble free. He topped it off with a sixth-place finish in race two, his best result of the season so far. But Campos drivers Ho and Suleiman Zanfari still had technical failures that took them out of the running, and the team as a whole was slow to keep up with MP on track. So what exactly has been going on?
Kluss suggests Campos might have room for improvement in maintenance. “You check up the cars after each race. You check if the engines are fine, you take the whole car apart to check if everything’s okay and that [process] probably hasn’t been done [with enough detail]. We were changing the parts after they broke and not before they broke.”
“It’s probably also a bit experience-wise because the championship has only existed for one year. But I think Campos had fewer issues last year than this year so far, so it’s a bit surprising, but it is what it is in the end.”
As for pace, at least at the Red Bull Ring, the Campos driver said he was mostly losing time on the long straights – specifically in sector one, which features a single corner. That, however, may have been due to a higher-downforce approach in setup rather than any engine issues.
“We were catching up a bit in the middle sector where it’s mainly corners. We lost the most in the high speed and full-throttle sectors and it’s not because of the engine. It’s because of the downforce that we were using. We caught up in the middle sector with the corners, but they didn’t lose as much time in the middle sector as we did in the first sector.”
Despite his initial struggles, Kluss’ aim of a top-five finish in the drivers’ standings remains the same. The German driver said he was expecting to be higher up in the upcoming Portimão round, especially as Campos and MP will enter the weekend on equal footing.
“MP has their data from Spa and Red Bull Ring from [competing in] FRECA. They don’t race at Portimão. We also haven’t race there yet but at least they don’t have the benefit compared to us and I think that will make a difference,” Kluss said.
“I think Christian will be able to fight for wins because he’s the quickest driver on the grid at the moment. I will be trying to fight for at least top five or podiums. But, for now, I also hope that the car will not break down again and that we will just be able to have clean sessions because so far that has not been the case.”
“[My goals] are still the same and I think we can still easily achieve that because we’re only three races in,” Kluss added. “If I make a step up driving-wise and the team make a step up performance-wise, we’ll be able to fight for the championship for sure. Maybe if I make my step, even top three is possible, but I would be happy if it was top five and I just want to prove that I can be consistent.”
Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency
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