Qualifying Report from the Euro Off-Road Series

Qualifying here at the Euro Off-Road Series in Dortmund, Germany saw many hi's for the team with some lows. This is common when it comes to racing and that is part of the fun of racing. The first part of qualifying started with all four rounds on 2wd buggy run in the morning. Then they would run 4wd and 4wd Short Course in the afternoon. This made making changes to the car very hard with such little time to make them. I will say the nice thing about running on carpet is the track doesn't change at all from run to run. The TLR team started very strong this morning with Darren Bloomfield taking round 1 TQ with Teammate Dustin Evans rounding out the top 3. Mike Truhe and Oskar Levin put in a strong performance but not what they were looking for out of the first round. Going into the next round we knew it was going to be hard to pull of the say performance as the first round do to how close everyone on the track was in time. In round two it was Darren out front early again with teammate Dustin Evans close behind that would end up taking the lead with a couple of minutes to go and take the Round 2 TQ of 2wd buggy. In round 3 Darren would yet again be setting the pace out front but with a mistake late in the run it would cost him the TQ for the round and have to settle for another second place. Dustin Evans would find himself in a position he would not like with one too many mistakes. Mike is running very well with consistent runs just shy of steeling those TQ's away from the other guys. Like I said everyone is very close on the clock. For the final round the guys knew what they needed to do to take what they wanted (Overall TQ) Dustin started out strong in the final round but then something went wrong when his car became very hard to drive so it was all up to Darren but some set up changes for the final round did not work as planned so TQ would slip away. Mike would put another consistent run together to secure himself into the main event. Oskar Levin would run consistent all day to put his car on to the starting grid for the triple A-mains tomorrow. 2wd Overall Result: 3-Darren Bloomfield 4-Dustin Evans 7-Mike Truhe 9-Oskar Levin In the 4wd class it was a bit of the same with Darren Bloomfield starting off strong taking a 2 for the first round and teammate Mike Truhe getting a 4 for the round. Darren would stay pretty consistent throughout all four qualifying except for round two when he broke. Darren will start 5th on the grip tomorrow for the triple A-mains. Darren said he will be pushing hard to get to the front quick. Mike Truhe did much of the same as he did in 2wd putting in solid consistent runs all day with his XXX4 buggy powered by Orion to start 6th on the grid. Dustin Evans would nothing but problems in 4wd this weekend breaking the first two rounds and then putting in a good run in round 3 to give him hope going into the last round, to just have more bad luck. Dustin was on a run in the final round that would have put him close to the front on the grid come Sunday but a broken axle would take him out of the race and the triple A-main on Sunday. Oskar Levin would have some rough runs as well that would keep him out of the running for the win on Sunday as well. In the 4wd SC class Dustin Evans and Mike Truhe would do a great job with racing the Losi Ten-SCTE on the Euro style carpet tracks. This i would say is one of the hardest classes of the weekend as short course is not a class that the Euro team runs so Dustin and Mike have been working on the set up at each race and we are pretty sure by the end of the day today that we have got the car working better than any of the other EOS races. We have made a lot of changes to the cars with some set up items that we would not normally run on the U.S style tracks. All in all they did a great job working making the Ten-SCTE much better on carpet tracks. Dustin Evans and Mike Truhe will Start 4th & 5th on the grid for tomorrows triple A-mains. Prumper Bjorn was looking great with His Ten-SCTE being super consistent all day to put himself in front of the two U.S drivers to start 3rd on the grip. All in all today was a very successful day as we learn a lot about all of our cars and what we need to do in the future on carpet tracks. We were also able to really help out our Euro drivers that drive on tracks like this all the time. Look for some photo's tomorrow morning.