Massimo Fantini on overnight pole
Italian racer Massimo Fantini, who was TQ after round 1 has gone a second quicker to claim the overnight pole position at the IFMAR 1/8th scale World Championships here in Cordoba. The Serpent 960 driver had to overcome an initial challenge from Lamberto Collari who was the early pace setter, but Max dug in his heels in the partly cloudy run to pull out out the quickest run of the day, a 33 lapper in 10:09.45. Overnight 2nd place is team mate Fabio Domanin who managed a great run in heat 11 to get a 33 Laps in 10:10.15 to give Serpent a provisional 1-2 on the grid. Next up is Italian Mugen racer Andrea Pirani who also managed a 33 lapper in 10:10.59, demoting current World Champion Lamberto Collari, to 4th, who managed to improve but not enough.
Lamberto was not too disheartened however “it was a positive day for me and the team (Novarossi) as we have the 3rd and the 4th position and ok the track is good but changes very fast and could create some problem with the car”, “the biggest trouble in the heat is when you have cold, hot, warm and windy and different weather conditions all in a few minutes of the race”.
In heat 12, some commotion in the pit lane caused a problem for Adrien Bertin and Francesco Tironi who hit a misplaced Keisuke Fukuda coming out of the pitlane. The Japanese driver had a flame out and his enthusiastic pit man placed the Mugen in the path of the exiting Kyosho pairing, causing a delay for Tironi and a large delay and eventual breakage for Bertin. Fukuda was given a stop and go. Bertin stated that “it’s just a very bad day, the first run we had a broken 2 speed and in the 2nd one while i was making my pit stop, in which i would have made not a bad time, Fukuda came out of the pits and crashed my car”, “I just hope tomorrow is not raining because it will be a different story, but thats racing”.
Dropping out of the top 4 and into 8th was Jilles Groskamp, the Dutch driver had his engine get too lean while in a fast 2nd run “the day goes well, because i wanted to start with a decent run in the first one, so in the 2nd one we tried some other things on the car, the car was very good, actually very good, and then the engine was too lean so we had to stop after 4 minutes.”
Not managing to improve, and having to eventually give best on the circuit to Takaaki Shimo, Michael Salven, the German Serpent racer, was getting caught out by the high winds that picked up in final round “I have a high trim strip, but on the big sweeper when you turn in you have understeer and then you have the point where the wind comes on the side and you get more steering and then the wind comes from the back and it pushes up the rear and you have no rear traction”, “somehow i have more problems with this than other drivers and Massimo said he is running the same and on his car it is only a little noticeable”.
Official Standings after 2 ronds:
1. MASSIMO FANTINI – 33 Laps in 10:09.45
2. FABIO DOMANIN – 33 Laps in 10:10.15
3. Andrea Pirani – 33 Laps in 10:10.59
4. LAMBERTO COLLARI – 33 Laps in 10:11.81
5. TAKAAKI SHIMO – 33 Laps in 10:13.71
6. Pietsch Robert – 33 Laps in 10:14.51
7. SEBASTIAN RECIO – 33 Laps in 10:14.62
8. Groskamp Jilles – 33 Laps in 10:15.76
9. ANDREA CRISTIANI – 33 Laps in 10:16.42
10. YUYA SAHASHI – 33 Laps in 10:16.42
11. KEN FURUKAWA – 33 Laps in 10:17.68
12. FRANCESCO TIRONI – 33 Laps in 10:17.76
13. Salven Michael – 32 Laps in 09:57.32
14. WALTER SALEMI – 32 Laps in 10:00.32
15. STEFANO SOLAROLI – 32 Laps in 10:00.80
Qualifying will be run in a similar way tomorrow, (updated) however the drivers in heats 1-6 will be doing their 2 rounds in the afternoon, with the faster heats 7-12 run in the morning and all will be done in sequential order. Be sure to check out our image gallery for plenty of pictures from todays action.
Click here to download the full results (.xls).
View our event image gallery here.