Orlowski from Volker in Q1 at MIBO International
Schumacher’s Michal Orlowski has kicked off qualifying at MIBO International with a TQ run in Modified Touring Car ahead of Mugen Seiki’s Ronald Volker. Making his debut at the Czech race, the very much on foam multiple discipline racer survived an up on two wheels moment to top the 5-minute qualifier by 1.8-seconds ahead of the defending Champion. Following up on his pace in practice, Pekko Iivonen completed the Top 3 while Patrick Gollner lead the charge from Xray with four fastest time ahead of team-mates Jan Ratheirsky and Martin Hudy.
Summing up his TQ run, Orlowski said, ‘It was good but I was a little nervous for the start but I mixed my sets of tyres after the problem with my first set and I wasn’t sure how the balance left to right was going to be. I made quite a few laps in the warm-up to break them in and from the first lap it was very good’. He continued, ‘the track is still developing and we know there is a faster option for us with tyre additive but the problem is that additive picks up dirt and offline this track is quite dirty. One it gets dirty it’s on for the run. It would for sure be faster but the other additive is safe so we need to see. I will work with Pekko on making a decision’.
‘I made the car a little too easy but I wanted to learn from my mistakes from the last two races’, was how Volker summed up his opening qualifier. He explained, having had bad opening qualifiers at GP3F and ETS Daun that put him on the back foot, he wanted to bank a good solid start and that was why he made his MTC-2R safe here after seeding practice. He added while you are always trying to adapt to the track conditions for Q2 he will not change a lot but the set-up will still be different and from his side he will ‘attack more to close it (the gap to Orlowski) down.’
Asked about his first qualifier, Iivonen said, ‘I tried a different additive and I have too much grip, so to get third is a good finish’. Planning another additive change for Q2, the Finnish Champion said this should give more corner entry steering which he was missing in Q1. Describing his Q1 performance as a clean run he added ‘I’m am quite happy with that. Maybe once I touched the curb bit otherwise it was a good run.’
Gollner said while he had a good finish to the first of the five scheduled qualifiers, things were a little difficult for the first 2-minutes. Changing to a different set of tyre with just one previous run, he said they still were not fully broken in. In the second half of the run he was able to catch back some of the time lost catching cars ahead of him. Feeling another factory to his early struggles was that he not working the rear tyre enough and so for his second attempt, 3 of 5 to count, he will make a set-up change to make the car more aggressive in the rear and get heat into the tyres so they work quicker.
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