Orlowski cruises to A1 win

Michal Orlowski cruised an easy 6-seconds win in the opening 2WD A-Main at the DHI Cup this morning. Starting from second in the grid, the Schumacher driver went to the front on the opening lap after an error by Top Qualifier Tom  Cockerill on the first run down the main straight and quickly pulled clear of the field.  Behind Orlowski the main battle for the first half of the race was between Xray’s Martin Bayer and Team Associated’s Joakim Nicolaisen with Serpent’s Joern Neumann in close pursuit. With Bayer & Nicolaisen tripping up it was Neumann who was the benefactor, the German going on to finish second 8/10ths in front of Bayer.

With a smile Orlowski described A1 as ‘a nice morning run’. The Polish ace said after yesterday’s 4WD qualifying on the track he expected traction would be low but it turned out to be ‘much, much lower’. Leaving his car unchanged from 2WD qualifying he said with the low traction it was difficult to drive but with everyone else caught out by the conditions he was able to drive a safe race and encouraged by how easy he was able to build up a gap over his rivals. Expecting everyone to be better prepared for the conditions in A2, the 14-year-old said he will make a small change to his KF2 SE going from 1 to 1.5mm of rear camber.

‘The car had zero grip’ that was Cockerill’s reaction. So bad was the traction after just a few warm-up laps the British driver raced back to his pits to change tyres thinking the problem was a bad set of tyres. The 2014 Champion said the only change he made to the car was to tighten all the screws and he will loosen them for A2. Commenting on his roll on the straight he said ,’I just clipped a dot coming onto the straight’. Recovering to 5th, further mistakes would see him finish 9th.

Another driver surprised by the lack of grip, fourth place starter Neumann said once he got by Bayer & Nicolaisen and pulled a gap he just kept it safe saying Orlowski was ‘too far gone to catch’. For the second final, the former two time champion will make a shock change to his 2WD modified SX4.

View the complete 2wd Buggy results here.

View the event image gallery here.