Catanzani from Ripoll in early 1:8 Worlds seeding
Having taken the overall TQ at the 1:8 GT World Championship in Chile back in September, it is Serpent’s Andrea Catanzani who leads the way in early seeding at the IFMAR 1:8 Onroad World Championship from Maxime Ripoll, the French Xray driver impressing onlookers with his speed here at the large Club de Aeromodelos de Chile track in Santiago. With Catanzani the benchmark in free practice, the Italian carried that momentum into the first of the four seeding rounds with a best time of 55.443 over 3-laps with Mugen Seiki’s Simon Kurzbuch his closest rival with a 55.459 as team-mate Shoki Takahata complete the Top 3 ahead of Ripoll. With changing track conditions the biggest challenge for drivers, as things hotted up after the first seeding on a cool track, it was Ripoll who had everything perfect to go fastest with a 55.499 just ahead of Takahata. Making a changed that didn’t do what he expected, Catanzani was 3rd fastest ahead of the Kyosho of top British racer Alex Thurston. One of the pre-race favourites coming into the 44th running of these championships off the back of a championship winning ENS season, it has been a tough morning for Capricorn’s Toni Gruber, the German experiencing engine issues in both runs. While the car runs fine in the warm-up out on track it loses power and when they pit they find the plug is bad leading them to believe, having had the same problem twice, that a bad batch of glow plugs is the issue. The 2023 1:8 GT World Champion will be hoping plugs from another batch will give him a change to seed strongly over the final two practices round for tomorrow’s start of qualifying, each driver’s best two points finishes from the four rounds determining the order for the heats.
