RIO DE JANEIRO – Matt Hall got off to a solid start in Rio in the first timed training session on Thursday ahead of the third Red Bull Air Race of the 2010 season and the Australian ace said he was confident he could improve his time and speed by the weekend’s racing, in part thanks to new data analysis done back in Australia by motor racing legend Larry Perkins.
Hall posted the seventh fastest time of the day on the 5,634-metre track, a 1:25.64 that was only 4.06 seconds off the pace set by Paul Bonhomme of Britain. Hall, who tends to start slowly each race week as he concentrates on learning the track, was pleased with his opening time, which even included a one-second penalty for flying with insufficient smoke in the track.
“I’m happy generally with how it went,” said Hall, a former RAAF fighter pilot who is in a three-way draw for third place overall in the Championship.
“I went out there with a game plan of trying some different lines. So the first three or four training runs I only flew half or quarter of a run. I did have an issue with a couple of warnings for flying low. So I need to review where I was doing that and what I was looking at and to see if I was lower than planned or where I planned to be. So just a little bit of a review there.”
Hall got a career-best second place in Perth three weeks ago after pulling off the improbable feat of turning the enormous pressure of racing at home in front of 140,000 spectators to his advantage.
He said on Thursday he had used the first training flight in Rio to gather data on his plane. Eager to find ways to improve his performance, Hall’s team has sent the data to Perkins in Australia to analyse overnight.
“We’ve got a data logging system that was provided by Larry Perkins,” said Hall.
“We’ve got that wired into the aircraft so I was actually doing specific runs with different G-levels and different movements in different parts of the track. So we can now download that data. Its a whole heap of data and Im going to email that back to Australia to be analysed for me. My team in Australia is now working overnight to advise me on where I can improve, which is pretty exciting.”
Hall also seemed hardly troubled by the myriad of noisy distractions at the Race Airport, which has been set up on the tarmac of Rio’s Santos Dumont Airport. While many of the other 13 pilots complained of the jet noise and complications of waiting for clearance, Hall was not perturbed.
“There’s much less noise and pressure here than there was in Perth so for me personally this is easy,” Hall said with a laugh.
“I’ve always operated in high stress and very noisy environments with jets moving around and lots of activity so all that noise here doesn’t worry me at all.”
Story courtesy of Red Bull Australia
