May 28th the MACH track in Heemstede hosted the 2nd round in the 2006 Dutch National Championships.
After winning the first round with a borrowed T1FK05 raining Dutch Champion Bart Wubben was looking to make it two in a row with a privately entered XRay T2. With Jilles Groskamp away to attend the Euros warmup and Niels Koenekoop attending the Reedy race in the US I also felt confident a podium finish was possible.
When I arrived at the track it was still wet, but I did manage to put in a practice run. While grip was still low at that stage the car felt very well balanced with the base setup I had come up with during a club race two weeks earlier. For the first round I built a relatively "tame" motor to make sure I would not have a runtime problem on this very fast track (speeds on the main straight well in excess of the 80kph mark!). With the wind blowing very hard I also decided not to take too many risks and simply put in a solid run to make sure I would at least be in the A final. I was therefore somewhat
surprised to find myself in the TQ spot with Bart down the order a bit with handling problems. The latter was strange as Bart had been very fast during the club race beating me by several seconds.
The second round I left the car as is and simply went out again. In the heat before mine Sven van Essen had shown us how fast the track was by beating my round 1 TQ time by 2.5 seconds and taking TQ with an XRay T2 of his own. I pushed a little bit harder this time but the "tame" motor meant I fell short by about a second.
For the third round I decided to rebuild the diff as it didn't feel quite right to me. While I was at it I also decided to put 1.5mm spacers underneath the rear top links instead of the 1mm ones I was running. I felt I needed a bit more steering and by raising the rear roll center slightly that was exactly what I got. I also changed the motor for one prepared by Frans Heinsbroek. That was definitely the ticket. While behind me many people improved their times and their personal records I missed the 18 laps mark by only 0.5 seconds to take TQ with a new PR of my own! Sven would start in the number 2 spot with the Tamiya of Stefan Jansen in third and Bart in fourth.
The interesting thing here was that the car was going so well that I was still using the set of tyres I ran at the first national in Deventer. With that in mind I decided not to change anything and simply enjoy the two rounds of finals to follow.
The first final I got a got start closely followed by Sven. While I could not get away from Sven easily I had matters well under control when at some point Sven crashed out. At this point Bart got up into second but the gap was large enough for me to stay clear and take the win. Bart took second and Corally's Daan Schuuring took third. Behind them Rob Janssen, reigning Dutch Champ in the 19t class, put his XRay T2 across the line in fourth in only his second modified national.
The second final we started in the finishing order of the first final. Since all finals count for the championship I really wanted to do well again so Frans and I decided to increase the timing advance on the motor just a little. That worked great as after another clean start I now could keep Bart at bay without any real problem. Bart tried a bit too hard after a couple of laps and dropped down to fourth leaving me with a big lead over Daan. All looked in hand when I cut the corner at the end just a little too short. Rather than rolling the car topped lying on its side. After 2.5 seconds I managed to get it back on its feet but now Daan had fully caught up with me and was challenging for the lead. I pushed hard to get a little bit of a lead again, but this proved to be a mistake as my battery slowly started to dump. Daan did a last ditch effort racing full throttle for the line beating me by the narrowest of margins! Behind us Bart came home in third after overtaking Rob who once again finished in fourth.
In the end I took home the overall win for XRay with Bart and Rob taking 3rd and 4th respectively with their T2's.
