The second round of the Winter French Champs was held in Tours, France. The tracks was fast and technical too, with black high grip carpet. The grip increased all the weekend to reach a very high level that we never had on French tracks. Almost 80 drivers attended the race in different categories (F1, 1/10 TC, 1/12), there were 40 stock's drivers and 12 in modified.
The race started Saturday morning with free practices following by controlled practices, my XRAY T4'15 was working very well from the first laps, the handling was perfect. The grip increased slightly practice by practice. All drivers had to change a little their setup in order to prevent traction roll.
Qualifications started in the afternoon with 3 rounds out of 5, in the first one I got a perfect start with the fastest lap (11.9) but after 4min leading a screw on the rear shock got loose and I had to stop. The second one was almost perfect but a little mistake when the car rolled cost me the 2nd place. In the third and the last of the day I changed the diff oil to stop the rolling behavior but rear of the car loosed in mid-corner so I stopped after two minutes of fighting against the car. With one qualification finished out of three I was 19th out of 38 and I had to improve in the last two to try to catch the win!
(click to enlarge)
Sunday morning, after a track opens practice, in the 4th qualification a mistake when the car rolled again gave me a 5th place. I didn't change the setup for Q5 and put my second brand new set of tires and the car was much more easy to drive but not very fast because of a too low roll center, I caught a 2nd place. I get a 3rd place overall with 4 points.
In the first final I get the worst start getting my body block in the rear by a driver, I restarted 10th after the first corner. I passed drivers and I get the 5th place after the 5 minutes. The second final was a lot better getting a clean start 2nd after the first lap two minutes later I passed the first car with the fastest lap of the finals (12.0) and took the lead but one minute before the end of the race a car was stopped in the middle of the trajectory. I lost my 1st place finishing 2nd. After this incident I knew that the victory was already lost but the second place was possible. In the second final I was again blocked by another driver at the start but my car was so fast that passing driver by driver I caught the lead with 3 seconds gap on the 2nd!
(click to enlarge)
Stock Blinky 10.5
1. Jeremy Delalondre 2. Pierre Delorme - XRAY T4
3. Steeve Favrelle
4. Yoann Bukowski
5. Christophe Pyszczek 6. Anthony Rollier - XRAY T4
7. Romain Delaunay - XRAY T4
8. David Moysan 9. Vincent Cavard - XRAY T4
10. Gilles Hendrickx
