RIO DE JANEIRO – Red Bull Air Race World Championship leader Paul Bonhomme will be looking to show his resurgent rival Hannes Arch of Austria why he is the title holder at the third race of the 2010 season in Rio de Janeiro on May 8/9. The Englishman saw his three-race winning streak snapped in dramatic fashion by Arch in Perth, Australia and will be eager to show the Austrian his place in Brazil in what is shaping up to be the most exciting season in race history with a half dozen title contenders chasing Bonhomme.
Arch, the 2008 champion, bounced back in style in Perth from a disappointing first race in Abu Dhabi with a narrow victory over Australia’s Matt Hall in front of 140,000 hometown fans who went delirious over the former RAAF fighter pilot's career-best result. Bonhomme, who had won the previous three races going back to 2009, made a rare engine-setting error in the finals and ended up third. It was nevertheless his ninth straight podium finish and the 10 points he collected (9 for third place and 1 for being the fastest Qualifier) gave him 22 in total. That was enough to widen his lead at the top of the standings to four points over compatriot Nigel Lamb, who was a disappointing fourth in Perth after taking second in Abu Dhabi. Arch and Hall are on 14 each.
“The good news is I know what went wrong and that we have more power in the bag,” Bonhomme said after studying his engine data readouts from Perth and discovering he had made a mistake with one of his engine settings in the cockpit just prior to diving into the track at 370 kph. “The bad news is that that my finger treble got it a little wrong.”
Bonhomme, who tried to pretend he wasn't a bit miffed about losing the final after he had dominated the racing weekend in Perth, added there was a bright side to the discovery of his blunder – he is confident his plane still has enough speed to start another winning streak.
“There are various settings on the engine prior to running in. I got one of them wrong,” he said. “You’re in the hold waiting to come into the track and then it all happens quickly. You can’t do the settings too early because you don’t want to run the engine at that power for too long. When you get called into the track you’ve got about 15 seconds to set it all up and I just got it ever-so-slightly wrong. On the one hand, I was unhappy because it was my mistake. But on the other hand, it’s good because I was concerned we were down on Arch. I think, if I get the settings right, we’re pretty level performance-wise.”
The race in Rio, the first in South America in three years, will be a special homecoming for both Bonhomme and Arch. For Bonhomme the 2007 victory here was his first racing triumph, even though he was declared the winner of one race in 2006 that was rained out, and was the first of three wins in his breakthrough year 2007. For Arch, it was by far the best result of his rookie season – he finished fourth.
“I’ve got good memories of Rio in my rookie year and am really looking forward to the race,” said Arch, who said he is a great fan of the South American lifestyle. “I’ve got one of the fastest airplanes and that’s the key to winning races. I’m surprised that Paul’s plane and Nigel’s planes are as fast as they look right now. Looking at the times and the video layovers, you can see I’m not pulling away from them. But they’re not pulling away from me either. We’re all more or less equal, which makes it very interesting to race right now.”
Lamb is still ahead of Arch and Hall, who had a disappointing eighth in Abu Dhabi, is also breathing down the backs of Bonhomme and Arch. Perth marked the first time Hall, a rookie last year, had finished ahead of Bonhomme.
"It was just a great, great race for me in Perth and I'm looking forward to keeping it up the rest of the way," said Hall.
There are at least four other pilots with the speed this year to beat all four leaders: France’s Nicolas Ivanoff, Canada’s Pete McLeod as well as Americans Michael Goulian and Kirby Chambliss are all capable of winning races and making the championship wide open until the season finale in Portugal in October.
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