On the 25th and 26th of May was the first F3A WorldCup from the 2019 season in Leiria, Portugal. It´s around 130 km north from Lisbon close to the Atlantic.
From our club was not only myself attending this event, also Daniel Setzer who come back to F3A competitions after almost 20 years.
On Thursday we flew with our team from Frankfurt to Lisbon. All except me started 6 A.M. with Ryanair. My flight was around 2h later with Lufthansa, because I took the big box with the 2 airplanes inside.
Arrived in the hotel, we assembled the planes and took the rental cars to explore the area around. For the dinner we found an excellent restaurant directly on the Atlantic, recommended by Rui Ferrera. So the first day was a real success !
Friday was very windy but a perfect day for practice. The competition started Saturday morning.
There were 21 Pilots from Spain, Portugal, Israel, Germany and Brazil. Peter Uhlig was part of the Judging team together with 2 Spanish and 2 Portuguese judges. Roland Podevin from France was there to run his Notaumatic calculating programe which worked fast and excellent.
Daniel flew very well on saturday and ended up this day at 11th. On sunday he went back one position and finished the competition with a fantastic 12th place.
For me it was a tough battle with Juan Rombaut for the win. Saturday I was very close in pole position, after the finals we changed the positions and he won, I became second. 3rd place was 14-year old very talented Yuval Ben Israel from Israel.
It was also great, that my friend and boss of CM-Jets (one of our partners) Carlos Marquez visit us there and spend one evening with us!
At the end it was a very valuable weekend with a lot of fun, nice people, perfect weather and superb food in nice community! We would really like to come back next year!
A special thank you goes to Filipe Dinis Bernardino for driving my box from the airport to the hotel, the support there and the organization of this nice competition!