Saturday 29th of October saw the first round of the Winter Cup, which is indoor buggy cup held predominantly in the south of Sweden. The first round was held at the very nice HB/Orion race track in the small town of Kallinge. The venue is operated by David Ronnefalk the newly crowned 8th scale buggy world champion, and he had done a great job fixing everything up for the track to be able to host its first major race.
For Alexander this was the first trip ever to a track that had the EOS style of carpet, so we were a bit apprehensive about how it would be and work out for us with a completely different type of grip level than we had ever raced on. The good thing was that we had a lot of good setup info from all the XRAY team drivers that have been competing in the EOS, so we picked a good starting point that the team ran in EOS round one and worked from there.
In the first final the start was quite uneventful, but Jessica made a first lap mistake on one of the jumps so Alexander could pass, Malin was stretching her lead and created a comfortable margin and was able to take the first round followed by Alexander and Jessica.
Second round saw an early incident in the start where Alexander was taken out and came out last after the second corner he was never able to recover fully and finished fourth. Malin made a mistake and was also handed as stop and go so she would finish third. The win went to Jessica followed by Johan who was really picking up the pace. This meant that there were four drivers that could take the overall win going in to the final round.
The third round started in the worst possible way for Alexander. Another driver made a mistake on one of the jump sections during the warm-up laps so he and Alexander collided mid-air and Alexander broke a front wishbone. We were allowed to take a time-out and do repairs which was very generous of everybody. The time out though meant that Alexander would line up last on the grid for the final round. The start was quite uneventful and Alexander was able to quickly get passed a few cars moving up the order and was soon running fourth. By this time all of the front runners made mistakes and Malin and Jessica came together at the end of the straight and Alexander could pass and pick up the lead. Jessica and Malin got locked into a fight and Johan Balsberg was able to pass and pick up the hunt for Alexander. Alexanderâ™s lead was too big though so he was able to safely bring the car home in first place and by that securing the overall win followed by Malin in second and Jessica in third overall.
The XB4 worked great all day and it was a nice first experience running on the EOS carpet and we have learnt a lot.
