One a piece as Canas takes Q2
It is one a piece for the World Champion and European Champion in qualifying at the IFMAR 1:8 Offroad World Championship, the later, Juan Carlos Canas taking the second round of qualifying ahead of Round 1 TQ winner Davide Ongaro. Posting a new fastest time, Canas’ Sworkz would stop the clock 3/10ths up on the World Champions Team Associated as Xray pairing Bruno Coelho and David Ronnefalk joined them on 13-laps runs. While it has been the European drivers leading the way at RC Redovan, TLR’s Dakotah Phend continued to close the gap, the American posting a P5 for the round.
It was a clean run but I had traffic again’ was Canas’ reaction to topping Q2. Asked how much the traffic affected his time, the Spaniard said, ‘I don’t know but maybe 1-second or more.’ With some drivers reporting the track feeling different given timing in the day, the pre-race favourite said, ‘I didn’t change my car and I feel the same grip on everything.’ Pleased with how his car and taking the approach “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” he said he plans to finish out Day 1 of qualifying with an unchanged set-up.
Ongaro was happy with his car but less pleased with his driving saying, ‘I had two stupid mistakes by myself, I crashed outside the pit lane and hit the wall and on the same lap on the chicane in the middle of the lap I lost half a second’. The Italian continued, ‘Overall I am happy, I am super confident with car and can drive easy on 48 (second) pace.’ With three from 6 rounds to count, he plans to finish out the day with the same car and with a good result then use tomorrow to try some changes and ‘find our limits’.
Describing his run as ‘very clean’, Coelho continued, ‘towards the end I felt the car was a bit soft. I don’t know if it was the tyres but now it is pretty hot so the tyre probably got too soft. I also have high tyre wear now so we think they were not the perfect compound for now. For the last 2-minutes the car was difficult to drive’. He continued, ‘it should be colder, for sure we are going to try different things but I think the track is coming where it will completely change the compound of the tyres. From now on I think the game of the tyres starts. The track is getting oily now, you can see people using clays now and starting to get faster. Our set-up is there and it is all about tyres now.’
‘Another decent run I would say’, was how Ronnefalk summed up Round 2. He explained, ‘I told the guys coming into today three rounds in the Top 4 I would be happy then I had a mistake on the pit lane in the first round and then this time I was super careful coming and going out but I still messed it up. The pitstop itself was fast so I can’t blame pit guys but I lost 2-seconds on that pit lane, I got stuck on the tube on the exit. That’s free time you can’t afford to give away if you want to TQ. Obviously it won’t have been enough to challenge for the TQ but I would have been within 2-seconds again. Another Top 4 this round is still a good score I would say’. For Q3 the Swede ‘will try some stuff’ feeling with four rounds left he should be able to get one more strong run to lock himself into the Semis.
Upbeat about his latest performance, Phend said, ‘That was a solid, really clean run, didn’t have a bobble, we are in the ball park where we need to be car wise. We are just kind of fine tuning and tinkering trying to find more speed. I feel like I am driving pretty safe out there so when I know I can get more comfortable and I can hopefully push the pace more. We are just going to keep working on the car and get a third round in and then tomorrow then we can really start to throw stuff at the car and see what we come up with. Asked if he had been on the back foot in practice, the 2022 12th place finisher said, ‘Yesterday was a little bit of a rough day, we made a lot of progress the first two practice days but went backwards yesterday in seeding but glad to turn it around so far today so we’ll try to keep in rolling and aim to get in Semi and go from there’.
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