Nagashima tops seeding at FIRC
Xpress factory team driver Yugo Nagashima is the top seed at the inaugural Foshan Invitational Championship in China, the Japanese driver topping the single seeding round ahead of Yokomo’s Simon Nicholson. The biggest international RC event to be held in China post Covid attracting 129 entries to the newly opened GDC Indoor track, drivers faced tough conditions this morning with Ronald Volker struggling significantly having set the pace in free practice yesterday. Low traction and brand new hand out Sweep tyres saw most drivers out their drifting skills to the test. Making it a good start to the event for Xpress, Hong Kong driver Eric Lam completed the Top 3 ahead of newly crowned Chinese National Champion Rocket Zhang as the driver now face into four rounds of qualifying, with two to count.
Having over half a second of an advantage on Nicholson over his fastest 3-consecutive laps, Nagashima was pleased with how his car working in the challenging conditions. Having run a prototype car from Xpress in yesterday’s practice, he reverted to the Hong Kong manufacturer’s standard production car this morning saying ‘it was really good and suited the conditions’. Describing himself as ‘a fan of carpet tracks’ he admitted to finding the right side of the GDC track layout no to his liking saying it is ‘difficult to get the throttle right in that section’. Asked about changes for Q1, he said ‘there is a big difference between new tyres and the following runs so I will make no changes for now’.
Fresh from his ZeroFive race win over Volker in Hong Kong last weekend, Nicholson described controlled practice as ‘OK’. He continued ‘on new tyres its hand but hopefully it gets better’. The Australian Champion said the track layout is ‘fun’ but like Nagashima said, ‘the right side chicane is difficult, its high speed and its a fine line through it’. Looking to qualifying he plans to leave his car set-up unchanged saying, ‘I’ll leave it and see what second run tyres feel like and then go from there with any changes I might need to make’.
Lam described his Top 3 performance as ‘lucky’ saying it was an above par result for his driving level. The 34-year-old said his car set-up was perfect for the conditions describing it as ‘stable’ with his fast laps ‘so so’ in terms of outright pace. Planning to keep his car the same for Q1 he said the plan is to ‘get it done and then see where everything is at over the 5-minutes’.
Summing up his P4 in seeding performance with ‘so far so good’, Zhang said he took a gamble for the seeding that paid off. Having tested a carbon chassis on his Awesomatix yesterday but found it left him with no grip, he arrived at the track this morning ready to race with an alu chassis. Watching the groups running ahead of him complete their seeding run he could see conditions were difficult so he decided to take the gamble and go back to a carbon chassis ‘just to find some grip, and it worked’. Planning to stick with the carbon chassis for Q1, he plans to make a small set-up change which he hopes with the tyres improving on the second run will give him a good car over the 5-minutes.
Looking like it was his first day driving an RC car or that he is contemplating a switch to RC drifting Volker was clearly shocked by how bad his car was for seeding. The Mugen Seiki driver said, ‘Yesterday I was running 12.4 second laps, today I can only do 14.4. I know the car is great so I hope thing automatically sort themselves out. The balance was terrible’. Asked what caused the huge drop off in performance, the German said, ‘I think I had a bad bottle (of additive) because when I looked at everyone else’s tyres they were much wetter than mine even though I was trying to apply more additive. We have just one set of tyres for the event I hope that was the reason for it being so bad’.
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