Orlowski again from Rheinard in Q3
With the first half of qualifying complete at the IFMAR Electric Touring Car World Championships it was again the Schumacher of Michal Orlowski who took the third round TQ at Huge RC Circuit. The fastest round so far, the Pole knocked 3/10ths off his Q2 topping time despite coming upon heavy traffic towards the end of the 5-minutes. Behind, it was again Marc Rheinard who was closest, the Xray driver halving the gap to his rival, & good friend off track, to just 3/10ths of a second. Impressing from the second fastest heat group in Q1 when he set the second fastest time, Jin Sawada completed the Top 3 after a P5 in Q2. For defending World Champion Bruno Coelho it was another P4 run but the Infinity driver took some confidence from the run given he had a radio settings issue in the run after switching to his second car. Axon’s Akio Sobue, another running in the B Heat would complete the Top 5. After his dramatic exit from Q2, although not as destructive as Naoto Matsukura’s exit from the heat before that completely destroyed his Infinity, Q1 pace setter Simon Lauter would be the best of the Awesomatix drivers with P7 with Lucas Urbain having a bad run and ending up 34th for the round.
On his second TQ run of the day, and much happier on this ocassion, Orlowski said, ‘The traffic was crazy at the end of the run and for sure it cost me some time, and Marc, but everyone moved out of the way the best they could.’ On his car he said, ‘the balance of the car was really nice, it was very easy to drive but I think it lost a bit of speed that we had before so we need to look for it again. It was super easy and I could do what I wanted with the car but we need to find a bit more raw speed to increase the gap.’
On his run Rheinard said, ‘This time we tried something. The run before was better in the first laps so I was a bit slower but then I picked up pace again. He (Orlowski) had a 13.5 on lap 16 and that was his two/three tenths advantage so it is pretty similar.’ He added, ‘With a 2, 2, 3 now I am free so for the next one we might try something but I mean want to have one TQ to be at least in P2 because there is still three chances for everyone to pick up a TQ so I think I am going to make one more change.’ Asked about the traffic at the end of the run, the German said, ‘I just had to pass Ronald (Volker) so for me it did not really effect much. I know Michal said he had a lot of traffic but still we did 13.7 the last laps so it didn’t effect too much.’
Very good was how Sawada summed up his P3 run. 1.2-seconds off the TQ pace, the Japanese driver said while he had no mistakes the biggest issue was traffic and watching what was going on ahead of him with some cars suffering spins. On his car he said a change to the set-up for Q2 was not to his liking so they reverted back for Q3 and it was ‘much better’. Expecting much higher traction for Q4 he said they have no choice but to change the set-up for this but overall he is happy with his Xray.
With Coelho gesturing to his radio with his mechanic Francesco Martini on coming down from the drivers’ stand after Q3, asked had he some radio issue, he said, ‘Yeah I had some weird problem because we changed to our second car (for Q3) and for some reason, there was no reason because we used it in practice fine, the car was completely turning to the right side.’ He continued, ‘So before the start I had to adjust everything but randomly, nothing was really perfect. When I start I had zero steering to the left and a lot of steering to the right side so I will take the positive side of that and say the car was actually pretty good for the condition it was.’ Explaining he would normally just switch between models on his radio no problem, he added that everything on the radio was zero like it should be so it was ‘really a random stress’.