Theodor Jensen had his best outing yet in Eurocup-3 at Portimão, achieving a season-high seventh-placed finish and two rookie podium places.

By Juan Arroyo

Theodor Jensen achieved his best result of the season with seventh place in race three at Portimão, and brought home additional points with 10th-place in race two.

Portimão was the latest example of his improving form, as the Palou Motorsport rookie achieved his top-10 finishes despite being off the pace during practice and qualifying.

As Jensen told Feeder Series after the weekend, struggles with tyre warming and a setup that lent itself to understeer led to bottom-half finishes in all sessions leading up to the races. “I was pushing the tyres too much at the start and not keeping them because it was already hot, so the tires were already up to temperature going out.”

“Because we focused too much on that, we lost a bit of focus on my driving and how the car was rotating on the corners, and then we ended up doing qualifying and practice with a quite understeer-y setup, which I couldn’t really push faster than I did.”

Those struggles resulted in Jensen finishing in 20th and 18th in each qualifying session. He would also start race three in 20th place.

The Danish driver said his team had modified their setup prior to race one as they had found the source of their issues. The changes – made ‘rotation-wise’ – were effective, as Jensen had worked his way up to 14th in the first race after two laps. However, Jensen’s left-rear suspension broke only four laps later from contact with another driver on the safety car restart. Nevertheless, there were positive signals for the rest of the weekend.

Jensen finished 11th on track in race two – which changed to 10th after Noah Lisle’s 10-second time penalty – and seventh in race three. His finish in the latter partly came by courtesy of his four overtakes on the laps of safety car restarts.

“It was quite hard, but I got a lot of guys on the restarts, which I improved quite a lot because in the first race I struggled a bit on the restart.”

“We got a one-lap shootout with the safety car restart, and then it was quite intense. I was defending quite hard and trying to attack the guys in front as well, but that was a good race where we ended up P7.”

Prior to the season, Jensen spoke of the difficulty of learning tyre warming because of his lack of experience in karting. Despite the issues in free practice, the Palou Motorsport driver said he has improved that and other aspects of his racing in his time in Eurocup-3.

“The tyre warming has been going good,” he said. “The thing is I was pushing them too fast in the free practices. The racecraft has also been improved a lot and going from P20 to P7 has been a really good, strong result, showing what I can do, even though I’m not starting that great.”

Header photo credit: Dutch Photo Agency