A Friday race is always exciting and thrilling and all are waiting the race day. Hope you know the feeling. This Friday had one difference⦠rainy days before the race made the surface semi-muddy, and seemed like they were determined to ruin our track, but the guys at the track had done a good gob with the track surface to enable us to race! Well done!
Practice started with a muddy surface so I choose to run with the cubic tires. I succeeded in making very good lap times during practice. The car was handled great and I felt good and drove fast, passing many drivers on the track, making no mistakes. Qualifying heats were a different story. The sun came out and started to dry the track. The track became semi-wet with lots of traction, while some places on the track already became loose. Tire choice became critical.
The first qualifying session went badly for me, making too many mistakes, needing help from the marshals⦠and not all of them were focused on their important duty if you know what I mean. For second qualifying I got my focus back. The car was awesome and I felt I could make the fastest times on the track. I drove fast with no mistakes until last lap, when some other car flipped me while we were both flying over the double jump. Although losing the TQ position from this flip over, I felt great and the car handled perfectly. I was then ready for the finals, positioned in 2nd place.
ISRAELI XRAY TEAM (click to enlarge)
Race Director Avi Yadgar, gives me the second place trophy (click to enlarge)
The finals started with a messy collision at the end of the straight. I always try to avoid this kind of collision (and I guess everybody else does, too) but getting out of this mess dropped me down to 5th place or something like this. I was third in a group of 4 cars, all driving very close to one another, each driver trying to get ahead of the rest. I succeeded in passing some of them but then made a mistake and flipped. After some time and one fast refueling (thanks to Asi) I was located 3rd overall. I had a gap of something like 10sec from 2nd place. I pushed my XRAY harder and succeeded in closing the gap in each lap. After several laps I was 2-3sec behind 2nd place. Another good refueling and fast driving and I finally passed and took 2nd place. The first car was too far from me but I kept pushing. I succeed to close the gap in each lap but the gap was too big to close with almost no time left.
Winner of final B: Dotan Halevy (XRAY) (click to enlarge)
Nevertheless I finished 2nd overall, and I was very satisfied with all my gear. The car performed very well during the race, enabled me to run very fast and accurately. The engine worked perfectly, providing me great fuel consumption with loads of power.
Team XRAY was driving superbly during this race, and succeeded in putting 5 cars (out of 10) in the A final, won Final B (Dotan Halevy) and won Final C (Moshe Yazdy finish 1st and Asi Biton finished in 2nd position)!!!
Final A results:
1 Yaniv Sivan 2 Oren Levy XRAY XB8 TQ
3 Nir Sivan 4 Dotan Halevy XRAY XB8 TQ
5 Dan Price XRAY XB8 TQ
6 Gil Verthimer XRAY XB8 TQ
7 Guy Rinkevitch
8 Alon Meltchov 9 Meir Azulay XRAY XB8 TQ
10 Golan Levy
