Rick V & D’Hondt win at Dutch Nats Rd5

Last weekend saw the 5th round of the Dutch 1/8th scale championship take place at the Raco2000, a new track in the Netherlands. Actually this track was one of the first RC tracks in Holland but was closed in the early 90’s due to several reasons. After a lot of work by a few people in the past years it is fully up and running again and boy, what a track to drive. Sadly the weather decided to let it rain during the whole qualification and so only 41 drivers were trying to set a time to get into the finals.

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Sebastian Kunz wins final Central German Regional

Last weekend the final round for of the Central German Championship 2009 1/10th scale touring car took place in Wiesbaden. Team Shepherd was attending the event with two V10 pre-production cars. Also newly crowned European Champion Dirk Wischnewski joined the race so it was a good possibility to compare the performance of the V10 with another good driver. In the qualifying it were Novarossi backed drivers Dirk Wischnewski and Patrick Schäfer with the fastest runs. Dirk secured himself the pole-position followed by Patrick Schäfer who raced the first time with the V10. Second V10 racer Sebastian Kunz had some bad luck as his transponder didn’t count correctly so he had to go through the Semi-Final. If it had counted correctly Sebastian would have ended up on 3rd place after qualifying. The fastest lap of Patrick was only 0,1 sec slower than Dirk’s fastest lap, so the performance of the V10 was already quite good.

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Kyle Branson wins BRCA 200mm Nats Rd6

Fresh from his showing at the Euros in Italy, Kyle Branson was back in the UK for the 6th round of the Nationals and sent us this report. “On saturday the weather was overcast in the morning, the track was in Brighton on the South coast in a place called Adur. We got to the track and ran the 720, as we had no spares for the 733, but we found the track had hardly any traction, it was very slippy. We just drove round to learn the track as there was not much else we could do with track like this. All we tried was tyres, we tried some Kronos tyres off a friend which seemed to be the best around this track. The traction didnt improve much, but by around 12:30pm it started to rain and that was it for the day. Sunday was a much better day with a lot of blue sky, we had a round of practice in the morning and the track was not very good still. In the first round of qualyfying I TQ’d by 3 seconds in front of team mate Johnathan Dobney with a few mistakes, I kept TQ after 4 rounds gradually improving my time. In the end I TQ’d by just over 4 seconds in front of Johnathan Dobney but I could have made a 20 lap run if I hadn’t made any mistakes in the last round. It was quite hard in qualifying because of the lack of grip and if we went off line it was basically like hitting water. In the final I got of to a pretty bad start, as we started from the side of the straight where there was no grip, I spun and went on to the grass, going straight down to tenth position. I worked my way up the field and went into first again, I stayed there for the remainder of the race with Johnathan finishing second and Robin Hammett finishing third. I was running the new Sirio XXX V Engine which ran really well all weekend.”

Thanks to Kyle Branson for the report.

Richard Hicklin wins BRCA 1/8th Rd6

Round 6 of the BRCA 1/8th scale Nationals was back at the Halifax track in Yorkshire last weekend. The weather forecast for Saturday was overcast and showers all day which made for little action on the track. All the Championship’s top drivers decided not to run, so Sunday would be a testing day for all concerned. The Committee decided to allow 2 practices sessions in heat order to allow all drivers to find a base setting and get engines tuned to suit the circuit.

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Second win for René Puepke in Western Germany

Mugen team driver René Puepke has captured his second win in the fifth and ultimate round of the Western German Championship 1/10 nitro 2009. On the track of the 2008 German Nationals at Hamm near Dortmund the E.C. (B) finalist took TQ and won the 30 minutes final in style. Already seven laps down was Bernd Rausch who lost three laps when a spring cap trailed away following an incident. For the Kyosho driver it was the fourth visit on the podium with two second and two third places. The last spot on the Podium went to local hero Daniel Thiele who pushed his Mugen at the end to pass the Xray of Claus Nauth in the very last lap.

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Campbell & Steele take Irish Nats Rd5

Round 5 of the Irish Nationals took place in Dublin last weekened and in 1/8th scale qualifying it was Shepherd driver Ian Campbell that took the TQ spot for the final ahead of Austin Elliot and Michael Byrne, while in the 1/10th scale class it was Chris Steele that would start on pole ahead of Chris Lawlor and Thomas Ward. The 200mm A final saw Chris Steele hold his lead throughout, but 2nd place man Chris Lawlor retired when his transponder failed on lap 39. 3rd place qualifier Thomas Ward retired from the 30 minute final on lap 49, allowing Darren Gibb and Robert Boylan to take the remaining podium places. The 1/8th A final saw Ian Campbell set the fastest lap of the race, finishing in 1st ahead of 3rd place qualifier Michael Byrne, with John Delaney coming up through the field to finish 3rd overall. From 2nd on the grid, Austin Elliott was holding his position until he retired on just lap 21 with an electrical problem.

Thanks to Ian Campbell for the report.

Christian Wimberger wins South German Rd1

The opening round of the 2010 German regionals took place for the Southern group at the tricky Zollhausring track near Nürnberg. After the qualifications it was Maximilian Vogl (Novarossi/Velox) on pole, setting a time of 24 laps in 5:05,700, 1,2 seconds ahead of Christian Wimberger (Novarossi/Mugen), with Dominik Mayer (Novarossi/Velox) and Christoph Pietsch completing the Top 4. All drivers had a good start in the final race, but the young driver Maximilian Vogl couldn’t bring his qualifying pace into the final and fell back to 7th place. German 1/8th scale Junior Champion Christian Wimberger jumped straight into the lead from the first lap and opened up a gap, eventually taking the win ahead of Nicolai Bähr and Christoph Pietsch in 2nd and 3rd respectively.