The Nordic Championship for 1:10th Track took place in Oslo, Norway last weekend, hosted by Oslo Modellbilklubb.
The race was originally a 2 days event, with qualifying on Saturday and the finals running on Sunday. Saturday gave great weather but weather forecast for Sunday, indicating over 30 mm of rain. After an extended driver's meeting it was decided that the race was to be changed to a 1 day event, with the last final running half past nine in the evening. This was not a problem since the sun is up almost until midnight in Oslo.
The new rules for 2013 set qualifying back to 5 min give again fuel consumption a very crucial role and with Oslo highspeed and high grip track made many drivers struggled to finish without refueling and running out of fuel.
Adrian was the only driver that refuled during qualifying and although he was flying around the track he lost to much time during pitting and ended second after Helge. After qualifying the top 3 ranking was following:
1. Helge Johannessen 2. Adrian Berntsen - XRAY NT1’13
3. Frank Andersen - XRAY NT1’13
After the semifinals it was Helge Johannessen still first ahead of Adrian Berntsen in 2nd and Markus Hellquist in 3rd, driving himself up from 11th position after having a troublesome qualifying. The starting grid for the final was dominated by Norway with 8 drivers allowing only one Swedish driver Markus Hellquist and one Danish driver Claus Ryeskov to take part in the challenge to be Nordic champion.
Final start order was:
The final took off with a close fight between Helge and Adrian for the first spot, as well as a second fight going on between Markus and Frank for the 3rd spot. The field slowly seperated and Adrian and Helge got a few seconds gap down to Markus with a few seconds more down to Frank. After some minutes Helge had some issues with traction rolls and dropped down to 5th position allowing Markus up to 2nd place some 5-6 seconds behind Adrian who still maintained the lead. Position switched for the lead between Adrian, Markus and Frank during refueling laps since it only differed some seconds between top 3 drivers. Almost halfway in the race Adrian had to end due to mechanical problems and Markus took over the lead. Positions were now: Markus 1st, Frank 2nd, Oyvind 3rd and Georg 4th. Remaining part of the final Markus drove a steady race without making any mistakes and claim Nordic Champion 2013 title and by doing this at the same time set a new Oslo Trackrecord of 190 laps with his new NT1 2013 car and by this beat old record with 4 laps.
Final standings were a great result for XRAY claiming all podium positions and had a total of 8 cars in the final.
