Budapest City Challenge press conference

A press conference was held at the Hungaroring on Tuesday, August 25th, to introduce the Budapest City Challenge to the Hungarian media. Tamas Frank on behalf of Ostermann F1 and the City Challenge organisation committee led by Hartmut Beyer gave an outlook on the upcoming event.

City Challenge C.E.O. Hartmut Beyer explained the City Challenge philosophy. "Our specialisation is organising races in cities", he said. "In the previous two years, we acquired a lot of experience in Bucharest. Unfortunately, the race in Bucharest couldn't take place this year, but we are delighted to have found such a great alternative here in Budapest. The people at the Hungaroring, the Ostermann staff and the Hungarian federation have been most helpful in making this event happen at a comparatively short notice."

This weekend's Budapest City Challenge will see a full grid of spectacular sports cars with legendary brand names like Corvette, Ferrari, Maserati, Porsche and Saleen racing each other. The two Ford GTs in the field already give a glance of the future as they have been built to the regulations that will come into force for the new GT1 World Championship in 2010. There will be plenty of GT action on Saturday already with an 80 minutes free practice session's from 9.00 am, another 80 minutes of pre-qualifying from 12.05 pm and finally the qualifying session to determine the grid positions for Sunday's race at 4.45 pm. On Sunday, there is a 30 minutes warm-up, starting at 9.20 am. The two-hour race will start on Sunday at 1.15 pm.

But there is more: the Alpe Adria Clio Cup is the official support category for the weekend, providing some thrilling door-to-door racing in the best one-make series tradition. The Renault Clios will have two free practice sessions and one qualifying session, all of them with a duration of 30 minutes, on Saturday, followed by the first race at 6 pm. There will be another qualifying session on Sunday at 10.10 while the second race of the Alpe Adria Clio Cup will round off the weekend's racing action at 3.55 pm.

Access to the event is free, there is only a small entry fee (1000 Ft or 4 Euros) for the paddock area.