Coelho continues to top practice at WC
Bruno Coelho continues to set the pace at the Electric Touring Car World Championship in Beijing, the Xray driver continuing to the top the time sheets with four of the opening day’s six free practice runs complete. Taking things up a notch in FP4, he continues to be quickest from team Alexander Hagberg but with a bigger advantage, his best lap over 1/10th of a second faster and his fastest 3-consecutive laps almost 4/10th better. Behind the Xray’s, after a ‘horrible’ start to practice, Marc Rheinard has started to find some speed with the Tamiya driver completing the Top 3 ahead of Andy Moore, the Team Infinity driver making good use of his black anodised Xray. Unfortunately for reigning World Champion Naoto Matsukura is poor start hasn’t improved and the newly crowned 1:12 World Champion finds himself 44th fastest.
‘We improved the car a lot’ was Coelho’s reaction after the latest practice. He continued, ‘we changed the set-up for the third practice and it was worse so we changed it again for the last one and it was better’. Also changing his Hobbywing speedo settings he said this gave ‘a better feeling’. Runner-up to Matsukura at the last Worlds, the newly crowned ETS champion continued, ‘Every round everyone is improving so we can’t stop trying to improve the car’. Looking to the next practice he said, ‘I now have good forward traction but we are just lacking a little steering so we will work on that’.
With his confidence having taken a visible boost after a strong opening practice, Hagberg said, ‘I’m really enjoying driving out there’. Using FP4 to run used tyres on both his cars, changing between them half way through the 5-minute run, the former European Champion said the car is ‘really good’ on both new and used tyres. He added, ‘I’m really happy with my package at this point’. For his next run he plans to make a few small changes as well as try different diff hardnesses.
‘Getting better’ was Rheinard’s reaction to his improvement. Having gone to the top of the timing screen in the first half of the practice heat on the change over of cars he dropped back to third he added, ‘but Xray’s 2nd cars were faster’. He continued, ‘we still need to find something so I will try a different car with a different set-up for the next one’. Asked what the issue is the triple World champion said, ‘its hard to find a balance. The track is strange. Sometimes it feels like you are sliding on a film on the track and then you have grip’. Having been the lead TRF driver after two rounds holding P6, Christopher Krapp would improve on that time in FP4 but back drop back to P9 ahead of Serpent’s Viktor Wilck who had a spectacular off at the end of the straight in the fourth round and has been unable to improve on his FP2 time.
‘Definitely more at home here than with the 1:12 scale car’, was how Moore summed up his practice so far. Having raced at the recent Nitro Touring Car World Championship in Italy where Team Infinity debuted their first 200mm car, the 2006 World Champion said considering the little running he has done in electric recently he is very happy with how things are going. Adding, ‘It would be nice to have had more time with the car’ he said a spring change for the last one felt better. Suffering an electric glitch, which caused his first car to shut down in FP4 forcing him to switch to his second car earlier than planned he said they are working through the problem. In terms of set-up, the British driver said he has ‘a few more ideas he wants to try out’ over the day’s final two runs. Unfortunately team-mate and 2012 World Champion Jilles Groskamp is having problems and find himself only 23rd.
Finding himself in P5 having started out as the closest challenger to the Xrays, Ronald Volker said, ‘like the others we are still running two cars and while I got some steering I was looking for I have lost traction’. ‘Still looking for a better balance’, the Yokomo driver said, ‘the gap to the guys in front is not getting less so we have got to do more changes’.
Completing the Top 6, Atsushi Hara said his pace ‘is ok’. Competing at the last round of the ETS at the Hudy Arena in Slovakia, the former Champion and legend of the sport said, ‘there I saw a lot what the top guys are doing. I used the information to test a lot of things at RC Addict’. While running his Kyosho as a privateer, the Thai based Japanese driver has the car’s designer Yoshiyuki Chikuba sitting next to him for support. Having put the ‘focus more on chassis flex’ he said their predictions on the traction level has been ‘correct’. Using the first three practice rounds to ‘just drive around and learn the track’, he said for the last one he ‘drove a little more harder’ and it was good but concluded, ‘I need a little more corner speed’. Behind Hara, Marc Fischer took his Capricorn to the seventh fastest time ahead of Yokomo’s Nicolas Lee who failed to better his Fp3.
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