World Champion comes good in Q4

World Champion Bruno Coelho has come good at a critical point of the IFMAR Electric Touring Car World Championships, the Infinity driver posting his first TQ run here at Huge RC Circuit as we get the second half of qualifying underway.  Having two P4 runs from the opening 3 rounds of 6, well off the standard of the reigning 3-time consecutive Champion of the category, he would top the fourth round with the second fastest outright time so far being just 0.079 off the best set by Michal Orlowski the round before.  For Orlowski, it was to be a through 4th effort, a change of set-up making his car more difficult to drive, and pushing to try catch Coelho he had big mistake on the last lap.  Second for the round would go to Jin Sawada, the Xray driver equalling his P2 from the opening round but being just 3/10th off on this occasion.  Having show he had the outright pace to run with the best touring car drivers in the World when he set the fastest lap of Q2 this morning, newly crowned 1:8 Nitro Buggy World Champion David Ronnefalk completed the Top 3 ahead of his Xray team-mate Marc Rheinard.  The first time outside the Top 3 for the Touring Car legend, Rheinard touched the curbing rolling his car twice with it luckily landing on its wheels but it was enough to deny him the TQ run he is keen to secure.  Antoine Brunet competed the Top 5, the round the RC Maker driver’s best result so far after some impressive showings in practice.

Putting it to Coelho if he was back in the game after his TQ performance, he replied, ‘For sure a big improvement, it was a positive also in an important moment in the race so let’s see for the next runs if we can keep it on.’  Asked if the had made a significant change to the car given his form in the opening three rounds, the driver from Lisbon said, ‘Honestly not, as I said before we just fixed the steering problem that I had.  I had a chance to talk with the Sanwa guy and they told me this is a bug that happens sometimes when you switch models and it keeps the old model steering on the new model selected basically.  When we checked in the pits and then when we went to pit lane something just happened.  Now with the steering fixed the car was good.’  Questioned about his car being ‘good’, he replied, ‘yes good, we still need to work on it.  Small changes for sure.’  Asked if things looked more positive now for the remaining 2-qualifiers, one more to run today, he said, ‘I think so and I hope so.  The car gives me the confidence for that, it’s a car I can say I can drive 5-minutes and really fight with it because before I was really struggling with the 5-minute.  Now I felt more comfortable.’

Sawada said his car was much better that round but was left rueing that he hadn’t pushed a little harder given how close it turned out he was to the final TQ pace.  Running in the second fastest heat, the Japanese driver said this is one the disadvantages of not being in the top heat as he is the one setting the pace and not really having others around him to gauge how much he needs to push.  The 27-year-old, who came up in many conversations in the build up to these World Championships, is confident he has more to come for the final two qualifiers as he currently sits 3rd in the ranking.

Joking with Ronnefalk if he was trying to make touring car drivers look bad, the Buggy World Champion laughed and replied, ‘I’m super happy to get a third.  I really needed those points because my goal was to make the main and I have a 3, 8, and 11 right now so probably need to better that 11 a bit but I have a very good chance now in the last two and make it into the A-Main which would be great.’  Explaining his improvement, having shown bursts of speed, the Swede said,  ‘In Q2 the first 10-laps were great but then the car started to do weird things on the track.  It started to jack a lot on power and wobble on to the straight so it was like super hard to keep it on the wheels but I tried my best, I think I was in the lead of Q2 for the first minute, and then I lost 6-second the last half of the race because I couldn’t keep the car on the track.  So that was not a nice feeling and we tweaked the set up for Q3.’  He explained, ‘we a removed a little bit of front end because I felt like it comes from the front end towards the end of the run and that makes it nervous to drive and aggressive, so I made it a little easier for Q3, I scored an 8th which was a good run’.  He continued, ‘I had something in mind I wanted to try for a couple of runs but didn’t really dare too so after Marc did the same change we both decided to do it for this one and for my driving style it certainly helped a lot to make it very consistent over the 5-minute.  Maybe a little understeer at times but just very easy so this is what you need on this track cause it’s easy that it bits you.  You can see a lot of drivers are struggling with that.’