Coelho tops opening seeding round in Bakersfield
As things start to get official here at the IFMAR ISTC World Championships in Bakersfield, California, it was Bruno Coelho who set the pace in the first of the 3 seeding rounds, the reigning World Champion’s closest challenger continuing to be Michal Orlowski. With yesterday’s wind having died down and the morning sun bringing some extra temperature, drivers posted their fastest laps of the event so far around the Finishline RC Raceway with Coelho’s advantage over 3-consecutive laps 1/10th of a second on Orlowski. Behind them it was Warm-up Race winner Akio Sobue who was 3rd fastest ahead of Marc Rheinard with Infinity’s Jin Sawada and Schumacher’s Mattia Collina completing the Top 6.
A run that contained a number of mistakes, Coelho summed SP1 with, ‘It was OK, I was fast but not really consistent.’ The Xray driver explained, ‘I traction rolled two times, the traction is pretty high now so we need to find something on the car to avoid the flip.’ Asked about the evolving track conditions, he said, ‘It is not windy so the track is more clean so I would say now it is 100% what we were at at the Warm-up’.
Reacting to his run Orlowski said, ‘It was good, the 5-minute pace is good, the car is nice, not perfect, but the conditions keep changing but now it’s more to what we know.’ The Schumacher driver added, ‘We have two more chances to make some adjustments. I am confident with the 3-laps I have done so we can experiment a bit. Mattia (Collina) went really fast now so we have two good working cars and we can test a few things on both cars. He ran something I didn’t have on my car which I might try for the next one.’ On his rival, the Polish driver said, ‘Bruno is quick on 3-laps, he has good pace but keeps making mistakes but I am sure they are going to get the car easy to drive. We just need to take advantage of the last two practices and find the best 5-minute pace possible.’
Axon’s Sobue was pleased with how the track is today but openly admitted there is a gap to the two ahead of him. The Japanese drivers said, ‘Finally we are back to the conditions we know but Michal and Bruno after a few minutes have a very strong pace. I think for 5-minutes I need better management of my tyres and to improve my driving to be with them.’
Reacting to his P4 pace, Rheinard described his opening seeding effort as, ‘Not that good’, adding, ‘I think my tyre prep was wrong.’ He explained, ‘Saucing the tyres twice I think makes it too stuck so the car wasn’t free anymore. We will change this and maybe one or two car changes and see how it goes. Right now the pace is not where I want to be.’ Asked about track conditions the 3-time ISTC World Champion said, ‘Luckily, the sun helped a lot.’
In the Spec Class, it was 2024 TITC Open Brushless Champion Simon Lauter who set the pace ahead of Xray pairing Jan Ratheisky and Stefan Schulz. With a new Champion of the class set to be crowned this week with inaugural champion Alexandre Duchet not travelling to the US, asked about his practice so far Awesomatix’s Lauter said, ‘Overall I am super happy with everything, we expected difficult conditions like or not used to compared to the warm-up and the testing we did and for sure that’s what happened. I think grip was even lower than ever when we were practicing here but now today it’s quite high guessing the right amount of traction that the track will get is most important for now because set-up choices can depend on how much grip has to have so as not to flip or snap oversteer, but for now we are quite happy & quite confident.’ On his rivals he said, ‘Jan is super strong and I expect some other guys to come up even more who you don’t see on the timing right now for example Ollie Payne and Shin Sawada as they were super strong at the Warm-up.’ Planning to test only little stuff for his next run, the German driver explained, ‘I just want to drive clean and not smash the car, one big thing is the rule of only one marked chassis, because it you smash it or bend it you are kind of f**ked to be honest. I think I am very close the where I need to be, Jan and myself didn’t do 5-minute runs because we saved some tyres but I think it should be good on 5-minutes based on yesterday.’
View our event image gallery here.
