This weekend the third stage of ESET V4 Cup Edition 2019 will be hosted by the quick circuit at Grobnik near the harbour town of Rijeka. The red-hot Croatian bitumen will serve dozens of passenger and sport cars and monoposts.
The popular GT category will again be represented by a number of GT3 racing specials. Richard Chlad, the interim leader of the ESET GT3 ranking, after the unlucky accident at Red Bull Ring, has his Audi in order again, and will struggle to reinforce his position at the top of the ranking table in front of the always quick Marcin Jedlinski, who skipped the Austrian racing weekend. The starting field of GT3 will include, in addition to this duo, the pilots Libor Milota, Stanislaw Jedlinski and Rudolf Machánek with their Mercedes specials, and for the first time also Rado Raspet with Audi.
The BMW M4 car included in category GT4 will again be piloted by Gregor Zsigo and TC-3500 class will include eight special racing passenger cars headed by pilot Marek Jedloczki, who has so far ended his four starts this season with four victories. Jedloczky pilots a Seat Cupra in the team colours of Zengo Motorsport. This Hungarian team will be represented by the largest number of pilots in the starting field, also including Tamas Tenke, Csaba Toth and Gabor Kismarty-Lechner.
Numerous will also be the representatives of the ESET TCR class, including the dominant Milovan Vesnič with his Seat Cupra TCR and his greatest rivals Jáchym Galáš, Tomáš Pekař or Dušan Kouřil. For more information click HERE
Grobnik will also be largely populated with monoposts. The starting list includes eighteen monoposts of classes F3, E2-2000, formula Renault and F4. The most popular and the quickest are Formulas 3, dominated by Tom Beckhäser of Franz Wöss team. His greatest rival is assumed to be Andrea Cola, who competes with the Czech pilot at other formula championships as well. Recently the two rivals collided in the course of a race. Other categories will feature, inter alia, Robert Hefler, the leader of Formula Renault class, the leader of F4 Stefan Fürtbauer and the quickest pilot of E2-2000 Paolo Brajnik.
Mudguard by mudguard, plate by plate, this is the characteristic of the cup races Clio Cup, Twingo Cup and Cruze Cup. Michal Makeš hopes in continuation of his victorious wave in Clio Cup, and reinforcement of the first rank in the interim ranking of Twingo Cup will be attempted by Mark Škulj. But this task will be far from easy for this category will include twenty of these small cup cars.
On Saturday afternoon the traditional one-hour endurance race will be held for sport as well as passenger cars.
The Grobnik circuit is a typical old-style circuit. The circuit was opened 41 years ago to replace the nearby city circuit at Opatija, where races had been held in the years 1931 to 1977. In 2018 Grobnik welcomed ESET V4 Cup for the first time in the circuit history. Before the circuit had been reconstructed and in addition to a new bitumen top coat also received new curbs, which partially changed its nature and the ideal trail. The 4168 metres long circuit with fifteen curves thus became a new challenge for all pilots. The reconstruction resulted in shortened lap times and the new circuit record holder became in that year Paolo Brajnik in his Dallara F308, who covered the more than four-kilometre circuit lap in 1:19.577.