Last year, Gábor Kismarty-Lechner could rejoice in the title of the ESET V4 Cup champion in the TC-3500 endurance ranking, which he and his co-driver Csaba Toth dominated. However, this year also gave reason to pleasure, because he has gained overall victory in the sprint races of TC-3500. He marked this year as his most successful in our interview.
You have won the TC-3500 category title in Sprint races and you also had some success in the Endurance races in the same class, where you took the 2nd place overall together with Csaba Tóth. Are you happy with the way the season went?
I’m very happy with this year. Our strength comes in balanced racing. Besides this title, I also won the Hungarian Championship as well and finished 2nd in FIA-CEZ. And in my first year in the Rallycross Hungarian Championship, I finished 3rd in Hankook Racer Cup. So this year was tough with a lot of races, but in the end, I can say it was one of my best years.
Which race of this season was the best for you? What is your best memory of this year?
My best memory is from Brno, with that heavy rain. There was a big fight with Mark Jedloczky, we had changed our positions more than 15 times. And in the end, I won the race by 0.1 sec. That can show how tough this category is.
And what is your worst memory? The worst race?
There was no bad race. There were races where I was not enough good, and there were some small technical difficulties. But race is a race! I love all of them! In Grobnik, I lost my windscreen wiper in heavy rain. That was really tough, but in the last 3 laps, I overtook 8 cars and finished 6th overall. So I cannot say that was a bad race.
You and Csaba were beaten by Jáchym Galáš in Endurance. What kind of an opponent is the Czech driver, who experienced a great debut season in TCR this year?
Youngsters are youngsters! They are really fast! Jáchym is a great driver, but I have to say that all of them were really good. It‘s clear for us, that racing with a DSG car against sequential cars is getting more and more difficult. If we want to be competitive, we need to upgrade our car. But Jáchym deserved to be a champion, congratulations to him.
What about your plans for the next year? Do you want to continue in the TC-3500 category or somewhere else? Like ESET TCR? And are we going to see you also elsewhere besides ESET V4 Cup or FIA CEZ? You have competed in 24 Hours of Dubai this year…
For sure we will start 2020 in Dubai again. It will be my 8th Dubai race and 12th 24 hours race. This year we were unlucky because our car burned out after 17 hours. We will do our best, and we would like to finish the next race! And then we will see. I like this category and the ESET TCR category is getting more and more popular as well! But for sure I will be on the grid. Where? This is still a secret.