SPAIN'S MACLEAN HOPES TO SALVAGE SEASON IN PERTH

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Alejandro Maclean of Spain had high hopes for a long-awaited breakthrough into the top five of the Red Bull Air Race World Championship in 2008, his fourth season in the series. But some early struggles with fine tuning and adapting his new MXS plane to his flying style knocked him off the pace of the ever-improving field and the Spaniard with the Scottish surname now heads to the final race of the year in Perth in a disappointing 9th place.

But Maclean, who had a brilliant quarter-final race in Australia last year before stumbling in his semi-final to take 4th, could jump two spots higher to 7th in Perth this year - possibly overtaking Michael Goulian (8th) and Nigel Lamb (7th) with the right constellation of results.

‘It's always nice to know that you have a chance to gain a few positions in the standings in the last race even if you've been doing relatively poorly most of the season,’ said Maclean, the youngest pilot in the race at age 39. ‘That proves that the race this year has been really, really close. In some races there was less than a second separating 1st place and 8th place. Sometimes it's as little as 3/100ths of a second separating you from the pilot in front of you. How can you figure out what you've done wrong when the gap is like that? People come up to you afterwards and ask ‏What did you do wrong?' And you're like ˜ what could I have done differently to be 3/100ths of a second faster.’

Maclean's best season was in 2007 when he took 6th place after 10th in 2006 and 8th in his first year 2005. He was hoping his new MXS, which he introduced for the 3rd race of the season in Detroit, would propel him into the top five. But after getting 6th and 7th in the first two races in his old plane, Maclean struggled initially with the MXS, falling as low as 10th in Rotterdam before climbing to 8th in London, 7th in Budapest and getting 8th in Porto.
‘To be honest, I had much higher goals for myself even if the results in the last few races have been improving nicely,’ Maclean said. ‘My aim was to be comfortably and consistently on the 5th position. I knew changing planes was not going to benefit me at first and would jeopardize results. I think it ended up being more difficult than I expected to get used to the plane. But once I got used to it the results started rising towards. I'm hoping that next year the plane will be even better-tuned and I'll be even more familiar with it. I plan to just push for the very top next year.’

Maclean is on 15 points going to Perth ˜ just 1 behind Goulian and 7 behind Lamb. Maclean had the second fastest quarter-final run in Perth last year to beat Kirby Chambliss and was nearly a second in front of Goulian in their semi-final before he made a late mistake that cost him that race. ‘I learned from that mistake,’ said Maclean. ‘Perth was a good course for me last year and hopefully it will be this year too. We'll see. Fingers crossed.’