This weekend it was time to kick off the 2006 Danish Championship. In all we will have 8 series during the season, and the first round was at the track in Naestved, 100 km south of Copenhagen. The weather was unfortunately not with us â“ the spring has not yet arrived to our country (in the cold north) and the degrees was only around 8 Celsius and during the race we had some rain, but the race was good and after all with ok conditions. At the first round it is very interesting to see the performance of the many different teams and the new drivers coming from other RC classes, e.g. 1:10 Electric off road.
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Team Xray dominated the race with a win and 3 cars in the A final â“ also the fastest lap of the day and fastest 5 minutes run, but we did not take TQ! The first two rounds of the qualifying went to Max Pedersen/Kyosho, the third round to me and my Xray XB8TQ powerd by Novarossi and with the fastest qualifier of the day. The fourth round was won by Claus Nielsen/Xray, who also had the fastest laptime. Two more Xrayâ™s went to the semiâ™s and we were all pretty confident with the performance of our cars.
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The track is in general very open but has some tight corners before the straight where a lot of time can be gained. So we tried a lot of setup things, and went from 2,8mm rear anti roll bar to 3mm, changed the caster from max to minimum which really gave us the needed steering but to still have a car that was stable and with ok rear grip we went from 3000 to 7000 in the center and 1000 to 5000 in the rear diff.
After the 1/8 and 1/4 finals it was time for the semiâ™s, and despite some issues with my tank I managed to win the semi and with my younger brother Janus also going through with his Xray. From the other semi Claus Nielsen and his Xray went to the final.
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In the first corner of the 45 minutes final I passed the TQ man, Max Pedersen and I got quickly a nice gap. Beside a too rich engine and therefore a pit strategy that was not as planned I drove home a safe victory. The positions behind changed a lot and unfortunately Claus Nielsen got problems while he was in second position â“ my brother Janus Harder was too aggressive on the gas and had to retire with a broken car!
The final result:
1. Peter Harder, XRAY XB8TQ
2. Max Pedersen
3. Jan Hansen
4. Tim Culmsee
5. Steffen Culmsee 6. Claus Nielsen, XRAY XB8
7. Lars Alex
8. Rune Gustavsen
9. Thomas Mikkelsen 10. Janus Harder, XRAY XB8
So with a Xray win for the second week in a row and with the fastest lap times we are ready for the next round of the Danish Championship, coming up in 14 days.
