Track Focus – DHI Cup Odense

Host Club – Odense R/C Minirace
Country – Denmark
Location – Odense
Venue – Stadium Arena Fyn
Track type – Temporary
Surface – Carpet (Onroad), Carpet & Wood (Offroad)
Direction – Anti-Clockwise (Onroad), Clockwise (Offroad)
Previous races hosted – 16 (Onroad), 5 (Offroad)

After recharging their own batteries and looking to get out of the food coma that resulted from the Christmas over indulgence, for drivers the DHI Cup in Denmark marks the dawn of the new season and for the last 17 years has been the traditional opening event of the international touring car race calendar. While the event may not have its once blue ribboned international driver line up, it still packs a punch in terms of the quality of its driver line-up and it quickly books out proving that it is still a favourite among racers. Based in Denmark’s third largest city of Odense, the famed international Touring Car event has also become an important European offroad event with both the offroad and onroad classes racing simultaneously on two back to back tracks that are separated by a huge drivers stand.

On the onroad track, the entry split into 90 Super Stock and 70 Modified entries, the first thing noticeable about the carpet is that it’s grey, the DHI Cup organisers not following the trend of running the now almost standard issue Black ETS carpet. Heading the large organisation team that put on the event and impressively deconstruct the entire set-up with military precision on Sunday night, Ulrich Rassmussen said the reason for continuing to run grey carpet is that they like that after some running on the brand new carpet a visual race line develops. As for the 2017 layout, defending Champion Ronald Volker was again tasked with coming up with the plans for the track design. While his 2016 design didn’t translate to how he had envisaged it, the Yokomo driver who is chasing his 8th DHI Cup win, said ‘they did a very good job’ with building the track this year. Describing his layout as ‘not too difficult or not too easy’, he added, ‘while it has a couple of hairpins it is quite flowing’. Pointing out the short angled wooden sections that are used to layout the curved sections of the track, Volker said they are a very good system as you can run up on them without flipping the car making them a much better option than the standard corner dots.

The Offroad track, the 160 entries split evenly between 2WD and 4WD Buggy, is made up using last year’s touring car track carpet. A total of 10 wooden jumps, mostly carpet covered, making up a lap of the track, the main feature is the wall section which having been in front of the drivers has now been moved to the front right side of the track. Defending 2WD champion Michal Orlowski said while the layout is fine, the grip is low adding ‘you can hear the wheels spinning as you drive around’.

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