The Norwegian Championship in 1/10 Electric Touring was held at the spectacular track in Valdres last weekend. This track has around 3 meters of elevation difference.
The weekend started off well with good practice conditions and fast laptimes on friday, however the weather forecast for saturday did not look good.
And on Saturday morning, the race began with seeding and qualification on a wet track. Throughout the day, the track was getting dryer and dryer, until the 4th and last round of qualification for the day where the track was dry.
It was clear that this would be the most important one, as now was the time to lay down a good 5-minute run for a potential tie-breaker. I missed the TQ position in this round by less than a second to Olav Dahle who became top qualifier,
with us both having two TQ runs after all five rounds were done.
The finals on Sunday started off likewise, with a wet track from the morning and slowly drying during the day.
In A1, I made the mistake of hitting Olav from behind while being pushed by Alexander Gjemble starting in 4th position.
Helge Johannessen who was 3rd after qualifying decided to skip the wet racing. I served the stop-and-go penalty and now Alexander was leading the race, before he got electronic problems while I was chasing him. I managed the gap to Olav and took the win.
In A2, we had some extremely close fighting between me, Olav and Alexander, before they made contact after Alexander's electronics malfunctioned diving into a 180 degree turn and I passed them on the inside.
Now it was me leading in front of Olav, but then again with the difficult conditions and some occasional sliding I was hit by Olav two times and ended up in the grass both of them. He was waiting for me,
and we both lost a lot of time. Andreas Bryne, who started from 5th position went on to take this final.
In A3, we started seeing some dry spots on the track, but we were still on rain tires. I made a clean pass on Olav after 1.5 minutes and was able to stay in the lead until the end.
Olav crashed his car and retired, and Alexander finished second in this final after retiring from the two former ones.
(click to enlarge)
Results:
1. Mathias Nedrebo – XRAY X4
2. Andreas Bryne
3. Olav Dahle
