Coelho Top Seed in Thailand – Seeding Round 2 Update

Reigning World Champion Bruno Coelho is officially the Top Seed at the IFMAR ISTC World Championships in Thailand, the Infinity driver counting the time of his opening seeding run after a crash on just his 3rd lap of CP2 which ending his run.  It would be main rival Michal Orlowski who topped the round but unable to improve his earlier time the Schumacher driver will carry the No.2 on his car for qualifying.  With the heat groupings now set based on drivers best 3-consecutive laps from the first two rounds, the third seeding run will determine how the leave the start line for the opening qualifier here at Huge RC Circuit.  With no change up front, the top improvement came from Marc Rheinard, the Xray driver managing to promote himself to 3rd but the big surprise would come from Coelho’s team-mate Viktor Wilck.  A surprise podium finisher for Serpent 10-years ago from P6 on the grid, the Swede tried a new set-up for CP2 that while he said ‘felt slow to drive’ gave him a quicker car.  He would go on to set the fourth fastest time ahead of top Awesomatix contender Simon Lauter and the impressive Antoine Brunet who is putting RC Maker in the mix – the latter 2 drivers unable to better their CP1 times.  The Top heat will be completed by Lucas Urbain, Soeren Sparber, David Ronnefalk and Ronald Volker, all four drivers getting a better 3-laps second time round.  In Stock, Oliver Bultynck kept yesterday’s momentum going again setting the fastest time in both seeding rounds to secure the No.1 race number for his Awesomatix in the top heat of the 7 groups.

Asked about CP2, Coelho replied, ‘It was a tough round, I did a mistake on the 3rd lap and the round ended there’.  On the mistake he explained, ‘They changed the layout basically.  They moved one curb, there was a painted curb and you could use it and now they decided to put there a big dot that you can’t touch.  So when you touch it now the car just flies, so I basically hit that curb.’

On his second seeding effort Orlowski, who crashed on lap 1 of the first round, said, ‘It was clean this time, I think a little slower than before so we’ll go back and try one last thing in the last one before qualifying.  Even though we went slower I think my pace was still OK.’  Chasing his first TC World title having TQ’d 2-years ago in California, he added, ‘we’ll just try and find the most speed possible for qualifying.  I feel comfortable driving around the whole 5-minutes so the set-up we are running is good.  We just need to keep up with the track changing cause I am sure it will continue changing.’  On the addition of the dot to the curb, asked if it caused him any issue. the Pole said, ‘My whole team was telling me to cut this corner more like the others but they stopped others cutting it but I still hadn’t learn to cut it and I guess I don’t have to anymore.’