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| Report from Paul Lemieux: |
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| Juraj, Martin Hudy, Alex, David and I all attended the ETS race in Appledorn the previous weekend before the Worlds warm-up. The ETS race in Appledorn did not go great for us, as the team did not get any good results, partly due to some bad luck and some costly mistakes in qualifying. The ETS was over on Saturday due to rain all day on Sunday, so we piled in our cars and headed to Heemstede to try and get a jump start on the next race. |
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| Sunday afternoon we arrived in Heemstede to begin working and preparing our cars for the warm-up. It rained all day Monday as well which gave us even more time to prepare. In talking with Alex and Martin we decided that we should go in a different direction with set-up for this race, we all felt like our cars were really good but none of us had confidence that we had the best set-up cars. Alex and I seemed to feel like we sometimes tune ourselves into a corner with our current set-ups, so we decided to build our cars for the warm-up with some different adjustments and a bit of a new plan to tune them. |
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| On Tuesday and Wednesday practice, the team seemed to be doing pretty well, Alex was struggling a bit with a push but was still running a good pace and I was not the fastest car on the track but definitely running a good pace. We tested many things as a team throughout the week such as hard and med caster blocks, diff positions, shock packages, weight placement, diff set-ups, etc, etc, as well as trying some new test pieces from Martin and Juraj. By the end of Thursday I knew that I had a set-up on my car that was thoroughly tested and I decided to back off on the testing and start refining the set-up. |
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| On Saturday, qualifying started with four rounds. Rounds 1 through 4 four went really well for me: I started off with a 5th overall then backed it up with two TQs and a 4th to finish the day as overall TQ. Alex, despite some really bad luck in two qualifiers, was still 4th overall (which was really impressive) and Martin had some great runs early in qualifying to give him a good chance to make the final. |
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| Sunday saw the first bit a really good weather all week, and the final two qualifiers were run in the morning. In the end I was able to hold on to TQ and Alex was mid pack in the final, with Martin coming up a bit short but having a good starting position in the B-final. The front of the grid was Victor Wilk in 3rd, Naito Matsukura 2nd, with myself on the pole. A1 saw Victor get a great start to get by Naito almost immediately and charge up on me hard. The battle was intense for a couple of minutes, swapping lots of paint but in the end I was able to get back into the lead and hold a small margin to win A1. In A2 we saw Naito Matsukura have really good pace and tail me for the better part of the 5min, but throughout the race I was able to hold a small cushion to eventually take the win. In A3 I got a much better start and with the whole field scrapping behind I was able to pull away for a more comfortable lead. At two minutes to go, Ronald Volker put on the afterburners and combined with a mistake that I made in the chicane, made it a very close race in the last couple of laps. However, I still crossed the line with a small margin of victory. |
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| Final Results: |
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1. Paul Lemieux â“ XRAY
2. Naoto Matsukura
3. Viktor Wilck
4. Ronald Völker
5. Jilles Groskamp
6. Alexander Hagberg â“ XRAY
7. Marc Rheinard
8. Hayato Matsuzaki
9. Marc Fischer
10. Yannic PrĂĽmper |
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