Red RC » R On Road

August 5, 2009

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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August 5, 2009

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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August 5, 2009

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.

August 4, 2009

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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August 3, 2009

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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August 2, 2009

Groskamp is European Champion

‘I have been second so many times, finally I am first’, was how your new European Electric Touring Car Champion Jilles Groskamp summed up his victory here in Luxembourg. Having been a Top Qualifier on two previous occasions at the EFRA Championships, the factory Tamiya/Speedpassion driver made it third time lucky, converting his pole position into victory with wins in Leg 2 & 3. Starting the third leg, with four drivers still in contention for the 2009 title, the Dutch ace lead from start to finish but said another bad set of tyres had made his car loose. Still managing to set the fastest lap of the race, Groskamp believes he would have had his work cut out if outgoing champion Marc Rheinard and 2007 Champion Ronald Volker had not controversially come together on lap 6.

Read the full report on our event site here.

August 2, 2009

Groskamp takes Euros Leg 2 with ease

After his dramas in the opening leg Top Qualifier Jilles Groskamp made it look easy in the second to take the win over Ronald Volker. The Tamiya Racing Factory driver lead from start to finish on the dry track with the only challenge coming from his teammate Wilck but that ended when the Swede hit tyre problems. There was a few tense moments for Groskamp after the race when scruntineers found one of the four tyres on his TRF416WE was registered to title rival Volker. Under the rules this would have meant exclusion for the Dutch driver but the Team Yokomo team came to the rescue and produced all of the tyres registered to the star driver proving Groskamp had done no wrong and the error was down to the incorrect marking of the tyres by officials.

View our full event coverage here.

August 1, 2009

Groskamp on pole for 2009 Euros

Jilles Groskamp is the 2009 EFRA Electric Touring Car European Championship Top Qualifier after a dramatic final round of qualifying that saw the big surprise of this event, Lucas Urbain (17/5:18.436), TQ the final round of heats. With 30 seconds to run on the clock it looked as though Viktor Wilck (16/5:01.046) was going to claim his first ever Euros pole position but on the final lap the Swede lost the rear of his Tamiya. With his teammate Groskamp, who he passed during the run, right on his bumper the pair made contact allowing Ronald Volker (16/5:00.335) to win the top heat. Luckily for the Tamiya team, Urbain’s time from the previous group was faster than that of Volker allowing Groskamp to retain the top spot on the qualification ranking.

View our full event coverage here.