Orlowski takes penultimate qualifier at 1:12 Worlds

The overall Top Qualifier at the 21st running of the IFMAR 1:12 World Championship is to be decided in the final round after Schumacher’s Michal Orlowski took the penultimate round.  After crashing out of Q4 this morning, the 2020 Top Qualifier redeemed himself by putting down the fastest run of the event finishing ahead of Q4 winner Kemp Anderson by 1.6 second.  A starting order error, drivers called to start based on the results of Q4 instead of the overall qualification ranking, would see Anderson lead away the heat and the American, laying down the fastest lap, looked for a time that he might repeat his previous effort.  It wasn’t to happen however as entering into the final quarter of the run his pace faded considerably.  Having started from the back after his DNF, Orlowski took advantage to move to the top of the timing screen to take a TQ run that puts him in contention for pole position for tomorrow’s title deciding finals.  The only driver who could have wrapped up the overall TQ early, defending Champion Marc Rheinard could claim he fell foul of the starting order error as he had contact with Hayato Ishioka and needed to be marshalled having just passed the Japanese driver.  In the end he Rheinard would recover to P4 over 3-seconds off 2018 Champion Alexander Hagberg.

‘We changed the car and I was very happy with how it ran’, was how Orlowski summed up his second TQ run.  The Polish ace added, ‘It was a little sketch at the start but as I got used to the changes and my confidence after Q4 was not high but after a few laps it was all good’.   He continued, ‘It was a good battle with Kemp, I don’t know what happened to him at the end but I was happy to have the 1-second cushion’.  Having the advantage of the fastest TQ time, Orlowski said, ‘It is wide open and it’s going to be a good battle in the last one.  I will probably leave the car the same and stick with what I have.  I feel confident with it’.

Anderson said, ‘It started off good but was super loose at the end’.  Asked if he know what the problem was, the North American 1:12 Champion said, ‘I lost rear grip so we will re-evaluate and make a change for the last one’.

Reacting to his P3 run, Hagberg said, ‘Again I struggled a bit for the first minute so we didn’t solve the problem’.  The Swede continued, ‘It’s lacking steering so we will make it more aggressive and try hang on at the beginning’.  He concluded, ‘I think we are still fairly closer but we need to find something’.

Asked about his incident with Ishioka, Rheinard said, ‘The first problem is with IFMAR and the starting order.  I was all the way at the back because it was done off the last heat instead of the overall order’.   Catching and making contact with Ishioka’s Roche six laps in, the German ace said, ‘I hit the kerb a bit when I was passing him and he didn’t back off enough so he hit me’.  On his car, his best lap almost identical to Orlowski’s, he said, ‘It had a bit of understeer but it was still OK but hopefully we can make it better for the last one, we’ll see’.

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