Stuart Mahon wins 2nd annual Race of Champions
Last weekend saw the 2nd running of the ‘Race of Champions’ event taking place at the NNRC track near Blackpool in the North of the country. The event is the end-of-year ‘Race-Off’ between the Top 20 qualifying drivers from each of the 8th Scale Off Road Regions run throughout the year in the UK – it is the brain child of Glyn Morgan (8-11 series organiser) and is organised to challenge the best drivers from the 8-11 Series, NRS, SRS Series and the Scottish Region. It is a one-off race and is a great way of pitting each region against each other in a fun, but competitive end of season race.
The weather for the practice day was amazing warm sunshine, however for race day it decided it was winter time. A very wet day lay ahead for the competitors.
Round 1 got underway regardless of the weather, Colin Brennan (NRS Champion) took his AMMO powered Xray XB808-2011 to the TQ spot with a conservative but clean run. Round 2 went to Associated’s Craig Drescher (8-11 Champion) after a minor mistake on the last lap by Xray’s Stuart Mahon (2010 NRS Champion). Colin followed up his 1st Round performance by taking 2nd place with Stuart taking the 3 spot. Round 3 was a scrappy round, but with ‘Round by Round’ qualifying Stuart was on hand to take the fastest time with his now dialed Xray XB808-2011.
TQ ended up an AMMO Fuel/Xray 1-2 with Colin Brennan followed by Stuart Mahon and the young up-and-coming driver Oli Evans taking 3rd. Old skool RC legend Drescher only managing 6th after a strong start in quali and his Team-mate David Bailey struggling in the B Final with a few other top level drivers.
The B Main saw a very hard fought race by some of the Xray drivers, Lee Bunker ending up taking the 2nd place bump up spot while Carl Richards was running a solid 4th until an unfortunate engine cut while leaving the pits put pain to his battle for the final bump up spot. Dave cruised through to the A Final and looked like he just wanted some more track time to compete with ‘the locals’.
Just before the start of the A Finals the sun finally made an appearance but it wasn’t going to effect the track enough to change tyres, but a nice break all the same. The first corner went down in regulation order but a bobble on the second from Colin gave team-mate Stuart the lead. With another bobble which went unseen by the marshal saw Colin drop to a lowly last place. At five minutes in Stuart had taken full advantage of the clear track powering the Xray 808-2011 to a commanding lead over the hard chasing now free of traffic Drescher. By the halfway point Stuarts lead was up to 12 seconds in front of Craig, were it stayed for the rest of the final. In the closing couple of laps Colin had battled his way back to 6th chasing hard toward 4th and 5th place – with less than a minute on the race clock Colin took the 4th spot away from Dave Bailey and got within 5 seconds of local lad Oli Evans.
Source: RC Disco [rcdisco.com]
