The 2011 European Championship in 1/10 electric is going to be held in mid-August in the small city of Traiskirchen, Austria. This is a non-permanent track because it is located in an ice hockey arena. The advantage of this track is that is inside so the weather is not important at all because the race is going to be held in dry conditions. Because the track is non-permanent (except for the Euros), the track was open only for two weekend and on one of these weekends the Euros Warm-up was held.
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Team XRAY was of course well represented at this weekend by Juraj and Martin Hudy, Teemu, Alex, Francesco Martini, David Ehrbar, Zdenko Kunak and other XRAY drivers from Slovakia and Hungary.
The race started on Friday with free practice and continued with timed practice and two rounds of qualifiers on Saturday. On Sunday the other four rounds of qualifiers and the finals were held. The track was very technical and very narrow and it took a lot of time for even good drivers to learn the layout. Even though traction was not very high at the beginning (despite sugar water being applied), the car was handling very well and all XRAY drivers felt very confident. Because there was not a large number of drivers â“ around 50 â“ we were able to use up nearly 20 battery packs and work on small set-up details.
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This race was the first race where the whole team could test the XRAY prototype gear diff. All drivers were enthusiastic about the performance of the diff because it was working very smoothly with no leakage at any time. Moreover, the XRAY gear diff is 10g lighter than the diff which is made for XRAY by the competition. The car had more traction with the XRAY diff, and that is very positive. We were testing different oil hardnesses over the weekend and found out that for this track the XRAY 600 Cst oil works the best. Teemu and I were using the diff in the front as well. On carpet we used the same⦠cleaning gum inside the diff to make it as stiff as possible, but on the other hand Alex preferred using a solid axle as it suited his driving style.
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The best 3 out of 6 qualifiers counted but the layout was so difficult that even top drivers had problems making clean runs without mistakes. Therefore the results were different from round to round and there was no top favorite for TQ. Alex was very fast right from the beginning when he won the first round of qualifiers. Teemu was also fast in the first qualifier and he finished 3rd. At the end of the qualifiers we had three cars in the final: Alex starting from 4th, Teemu from 8th, and Martin from 10th.
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There was a lot of traffic (mainly after the start) because of the very technical and narrow track. The most difficult part was the first chicane after the straight where there was always a lot of traffic right after the start. For the finals we made some changes on the set-up â“ harder oil, no tire warmers â“ and this worked well for us. At the end, Alex finished 3rd with Martin right behind him in 4th and Teemu finished 6th.
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Final results:
1. Christopher Krapp
2. Yannic Prumper 3. Alexander Hagberg XRAY T3â™11
4. Martin Hudy XRAY T3â™11
5. Marc Fisher 6. Teemu Leino XRAY T3â™11
7. Dominik Fleischmann
8. Steen Graversen
9. Rene Klockner
10. Frederik Sudhoff
So even though we did not win, we were very happy with the results because Alex finished on the podium and we had the most cars in the final. We had great service provided during the whole race by Austrian distributor XRAY-Shop. We learned many important set-up things and we are ready for the upcoming European Championship.
