Tire problems put a damper on Sebastian Gravlund’s quest for the podium in Eurocup3 at Estoril in Portugal.

The weekend’s round of the new Eurocup3 championship was held at the former Formula 1 track near Lisbon. Sebastian Gravlund had good pace despite never having been on the track before. However, in the qualifying for the first race, the speed was not there.

– In practice, things went really well, and I felt like I had gotten the hang of the track. Before qualifying, all we did was switch to a set of new tires, but I couldn’t set a proper lap time at all, says Sebastian Gravlund, who had to start the first race far down the grid – on tires that didn’t really work:

– Subsequently, we found out that there was a mistake with a couple of the tires. That can happen, but the problem is that we have to race on the same tires we qualified on, so it was just a race where I couldn’t get anything to work, says Sebastian Gravlund.

But where Saturday’s qualifying and race were far from functioning, Sunday was the opposite. The qualification for the race was challenged due to others’ off-track excursions, and Sebastian’s potentially best lap time was interrupted due to a red flag. Nevertheless, he could start the race from 13th place.

From there, Gravlund could drive a good heat, where he worked his way up to ninth place before the checkered flag was presented at the finish line. It also resulted in another second place in the Rookie championship.

– It’s been a strange weekend, where one day was completely hopeless, and the next was actually pretty good. I would have liked to have had a better qualification on Sunday, but now I showed that I can drive fast and move forward if the car doesn’t break, laughs Sebastian Gravlund, who is now looking forward to the next race at the Valencia track in a week and a half.