Nissan GT Academy. Final. Day 3. 30.09.2013.

It was 6 a.m., when the instructors came in and waked up us. They divided us into two teams, gave us red and blue t-shirts. We saw gumboots on their feet and understood that the next competition was going to be the assault course. We were lucky with the weather. Two army guys shown us the path, described the rules. As I wrote above, we were divided into two teams. Each team has a balk and we might carry it. We started running. You can find a GoPro video on youtube and understood what we did. Unfortunately our team took the second place. The army men surprised, that we are not tired and said us to run the second lap. At the second run we were the second. In both runs we were 50m in front of another team, but after electroshocks we lost all the advantage.

I could not understand why this happened both times, but then later guys from another team said me, that they did not put a balk to the electroshocks. May be army men asked us to put balk to the electroshocks to hold us a little, but we lost both runs, because of this fact. It meant we lost the competition and one from our team might leave the project. Ufortunately this was Igor Chichaev. I did not know the main reason, why they chose him, but he was quite good in our team in this competition. We were all dirty and we went to bathe.

In the afternoon we had a training on Nissan GT-R on Stowe circuit. Instructor was sitting near us and was giving advices and making notes. I improved my result a lot and instructor said that everything was ok. After the Nissan GT-R we trained drift. There were two 5 minutes attempts. There was a cone and you might drift around it. I have never tried this before. It was not so easy as I thought. However, in 2 minutes I made my first "donuts". Daniil Kvyat was also there. He is very cheerful, lively and friendly man. He gave us advices and capture on his mobile phone our training. Then we watched together our attempts. After three weeks I saw an article that Daniil became Toro Rosso Formula-1 driver. I would like to wish him «Good luck». I will support him in Formula-1. I hope he will become a new Michael Schumacher. 

After the drift training we moved to the military base. The track was built especially for us there. It looks like Ken Block's Gymkhana. We might drive here not only fast, but also beautiful using drift technique. I did not think that I could make this, because I had only 10 minutes of training drift. On this competition there was Nissan 370z without additional electronic helps (no ESP, ABS etc). This was a real racing car. In this competition I tried «heel and toe» technique and I got. I was surprised because I trained it on computer (had not possibilities to train it in real car) and did not think that I made it at once. When I finished Roman Rusinov (Russian driver, who won LeMans24) said me that I was fast and shown a good result. This gave me additional confidence. Roman is very interesting man. He likes to joke and has a nice sense of humor. I would like to say thanks him. Hope he will win LeMans24 else 10 times, may be in LMP1. When the competition was ended Alexey Danilov left the show.