Chennai, January 20: Chirag Ghorpade, the schoolboy from Bengaluru, and Coimbatore veteran Arjun Balu lit up the free practice sessions with some serious pace to kick-start the third round of the MRF MMSC fmsci Indian National Car Racing Championship 2021 at the MMRT, here on Thursday.
Chirag, who heads the championship table, topped the two practice sessions in the premier MRF F1600 category with a best lap of one minute, 39.950 while his closest rival, teenager Shahan Ali Mohsin from Agra, posted the second best of 01:40.018 as the talented duo seemed to be heading for a close battle for honours in the triple-header to be run over the next two days.
On the other hand, veteran Arjun Balu, piloting the Race Concepts-prepared Honda VTec, was in a league of his own in the Indian Touring Cars category. He was about a couple of seconds quicker than his nearest rivals, the Rayo Racing pair from Hyderabad, Jeet Jhabakh and Ishaan Dodhiwala, both driving the Volkswagen Polo. Balu’s best laps in the two practice sessions were 01:51.211 in the morning and 01:50.768 in FP2.
Bengaluru’s Varun Anekar (Race Concepts) and Performance Racing’s Deepak Ravikumar from Chennai, set the fastest laps in the Indian Junior Touring Cars and Super Stock categories, respectively.
Earlier, two teenagers from Bengaluru, Tijil Rao (Momentum Motorsport) and Ruhaan Alva (MSport) topped the two practice sessions in the Formula LGB 1300 category. Tijil was the fastest on the day, clocking a best lap of 01:51.242 in FP1, but was only third quickest in 01:51.886 in the next session. Ruhaan topped FP2 with a lap of 01:51.511, an improvement of over two seconds on his FP1 best of 01:53.700.
In the 22-car Volkswagen Polo category, local challenger Sandeep Kumar set the fastest time of 01:55.657 over two sessions as he seeks to consolidate his position at the top of the leaderboard in this class.
Haryana’s Justin Singh put in the quickest lap of the day in the MRF Saloon Cars (Toyota Etios) with a 02:03.391.
The qualifying sessions for all categories followed by six races will be run on Friday.
