Red Bull Finals Review
Photo Courtesy of www.redbulldriversearch.com

The experience David Jurca had driving a Formula 3 car in Esoril, Portugal was one he shall never forget. Unfortunately, he missed out on being one of the final three to move on to race in Europe. Nonetheless, he would still like to thank everyone involved in the Red Bull program for the opportunity presented to him.

The shootout consisted of a total of 30 laps per driver spread out between two days of driving. Six drivers were divided into two groups of three. In David's group, one driver had a difficult time keeping the car on the track for the first day resulting in a lot of disrupted laps. The enitre group was forced to come into the pits every three or four laps which resulted in David having to focus on getting the car and tires up to temperature rather than finding the limit. This in effect gave the other group of three drivers an advantage of learning the car and the track as their sessions went undisturbed. These three drivers ended up quite a bit faster than David's group on day one.

With 15 laps to be run on day two, David would have to show some more speed to have a chance at getting picked. His group would go out first thing in the morning. This time, only once did a driver go off course allowing for a pretty good run of 10 laps straight. David was able to get much more comfortable in the car dropping an average of 3-4 tenths every lap. By the end of the session, he improved over two seconds from the day before and was fastest in his group by 5 tenths of a second. Group two would go out at noon. Whether that was an advantage or not is unkown, but the cars seemed to be faster in the afternoon on day one. The three drivers would end up beating David's time, but not by a large amount. He only needed 2-3 tenths to be tied for the third fastest time.

In the end, they picked the overall three fastest drivers. Danny Sullivan told David that he had a lot of votes from the judges and was "so damn close", but ultimately not being as fast as the other three drivers on day one hurt his chances.

David plans on taking what he learned from this event and applying it to his future as he focuses on becoming a professional racecar driver.