The Start of Qualifying at The IFMAR World Championships
It’s was a surprising
day to say the least, I thought I would be waking up to a lake outside my hotel
window. It only ended up being a bit cloudy
in the morning but the clouds would clear off rather fast and from then on it
was all sunshine with a nice breeze that came up mid day almost making it beach
like weather. Who would have thought 90%
chance of rain would turn into a perfect day.
We may need to watch out for the
0% days from this point on. :-)
The track
today was pretty consistent for the most part, with it just getting bumpier as
the day went on. The bad part about the
bumps developing on the track is they are the nasty square edge bumps that just
want to stop the car's in their tracks. The bumpy conditions makes
it really hard for drivers to consistently do laps and find their racing groove. The
biggest thing I feel that caught us off guard was the temperature change from round
one to round two, it got a lot hotter outside.
Some of the guys didn’t make the change from the soft tire to the harder
tire. This was the case
for Dakotah Phend with a stellar first run finishing second for the round just
4 seconds back from the TQ. The soft tire in
round two didn't work out so well making his car hard to drive and edgy everywhere. He will start on a hard tire
tomorrow morning.
Adam Drake didn't have the run he was looking for in Q1 with some small mistakes
but was able to salvage the day with a solid Q2 finishing up 11th. He will stay with the harder tire like Q2 but
go much softer with his shock package for his first run hoping it will absorb
more of those nasty square edge bumps. Your
2012 European Champion Darren Bloomfield is having a hard time finding his way
this weekend. He has had his share of
problems with a break in Q1 and bad tires choose like others in Q2. Darren is looking at this like a true
champion and getting the bad luck out of the way early and moving onto
tomorrow. He will make a big change to
his car for tomorrow and put Miguel Matias’s complete set-up on for
tomorrow. Miguel’s car looked solid around the track and he put in two
very consistent runs and is very confident on this
choppy high speed track. One of our
German team members Hannes Kaeufler had some pretty solid runs in today. He went up in his diff oil and went to a very
hard tire making it much easier to drive for him. Hannes plans to make a couple of small changes for the first round in the morning and hopes to get some speed out of his car but more importantly some consistency and easy of driving. I am seeing a good day from Hannes tomorrow.
Tomorrow is
a new day and also three more qualifiers, yes three rounds will be run tomorrow
since there is still a big threat of rain to come later in the week. This is for sure the right thing to do since
we should have no problem getting them done in a descent time frame. Sorry about the lack of videos but I have done
all I can do with no luck to upload them.
I will keep trying but at the moment this is the best I can do. You can follow the action throughout the day
on twitter @TeamLosi_Racing
