The annual Jens Memorial EFRA GP was held at the very nice facility of the club in Eskilstuna, Sweden. Some 100 drivers from all over Europe attended the race. This year it served as a warmup for the upcoming 1:12 scale Euros which will be held here in early April 2007 so many drivers from the Corally team (including German star Marc Fischer) had applied for this class. In touring cars some of the best European drivers were represented, including Christer Andersson, Simo Ahoniemi, Alexander Hagberg, Bart Wubben, and Jonas Andersson. The hand-out control tire for this event was the VTEC 27R.
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The qualifications were best 3 out of 5 round-by-round format. As always I used a very simple setup with spool and all parts very standard. The car was already quite fast in practice and improved for qualifying. After qualifications it was Christer Andersson who was TQ in front of me with 1 round win, and Swedish XRAY driver Alfred Widmark in third position. For the finals I made a few changes, first taking advantage of the simple XRAY Quick-Saver™ and changing the Ackermann to a more forward position, giving the car better cornering speed through all turns. I also put a bit more anti dive up front to make it a bit more aggressive on corner entry. The car was now perfect and I could push it even harder than before. The other XRAY drivers also had good handling cars; Alfred Widmark, Jonas Andersson, and Bart Wubben from The Netherlands all qualified for the A-main.
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The mains were all very close. In the first one I tried as hard as possible to get close to Christer and wait for a mistake; I finished only 0.5sec behind him and was happy with my performance. The second main started out pretty good, I felt that I had the speed already from the first lap and was closing the gap on Christer. He then got into a slide just before the chicane and unfortunately I hit him in the side and got a stop-and-go penalty which seems a bit unfair. The rest of the race I had to catch up my lost positions and would eventually finish in 2nd position after a remarkable catching up while pushing the car to its limits. Bart Wubben had a good run and would finish 3rd just 1sec behind me. As the race was already decided for the third, I just tried to enjoy myself and we shared a really good battle once again with Jonas Andersson sharing the lead for a couple of laps. On the last lap, my BL motor suffered a heat shutdown so I had a DNF. The whole crowd was amazed however of the fantastic speed that my car carried around the track.
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The result for Team XRAY was of course very good putting four cars in the main and that I was so close to the winner in all rounds. My car was definitely the best set up T2 car I have ever driven on carpet. It was simply amazing and I hope that it will work as well if not better on other tracks. We are proud of the teamwork of course and a big thanks especially to Bart, Alfred, and Jonas for a good result.
Top 10 results
1. Christer Andersson 2. Alexander Hagberg XRAY T2'007
3. Simo Ahoniemi 4. Alfred Widmark XRAY T2'007
5. Jonas Andersson XRAY T2'007
6. Bart Wubben XRAY T2'007
7. Tommy Bergfeldt
8. Sakke Ahoniemi
9. Magnus Vässmar
10. Sebastian Trzaska
