Kato again in Q2 as Iivonen throws it away under the lights at Pine Hills
Racing under the flood lights at the Pine Hills track in Brisbane, Infinity’s Kouki Kato made it two from two in qualifying at the third round of the Asian Buggy Championships. Again it was a last lap mistake that promoted Kato to the top of the timing screens, this time top seed Pekko Iivonen with the costly error. With driver errors the talking point of qualifying so far, Iivonen dropped two & a half seconds as a result of his mistake allowing Kato to back up Q1 with another TQ run by 1.358-seconds over the Finn’s Mayako. Racing under flood lights in order to get a second round of qualifying in the books as the forecast is giving rain for the morning, Jackson Beale would complete the Top 3 for Tekno. After an error in Q1 that left him P10, a clean run in Q2 allowed the 19-year-old to back up his strong showing in seeding. After a P2 in the first round, last year’s race winner Caleb Noble had two bad laps and ended up P5 behind Pine Hill Club President Zac Ryan. Opening with a P3, Jayden Edmunds again had traffic issues but this time it lead to a costly error and he ended the day with a P6. Opening the second round of qualifying with a TQ run in eBuggy ahead of Iivonen and Tyler Jones, Team Associated’s Alex Bernadzik couldn’t repeat in Nitro ending up 7th.
‘Same as Q1, the last lap it changed and I was at the top’, was Kato’s reaction after the second of the currently scheduled four rounds of qualifying. Having made a major mistake himself on the last lap of Q1, asked about his driving this time round and if it had improved he laughed and responded with, ‘no, it was the same’. This time however he said the mistake was earlier in the run. Finding track conditions more loose due to the cooler conditions of the after dark evening run, asked if the set-up change he tested in earlier still bright 2nd eBuggy qualifier worked he said it hadn’t so he ran his nitro buggy unchanged. Should tomorrow turn out to be dry, he said they still need to work on improving the current set-up.
That was much better than the last one. I think i found out the problem I had in Q1, my car was too soft and that’s why it was doing some weird thing. Now it was quite good but I tuned the engine a little bit and it came out too lean and I wasn’t that confident with the throttle so that probably cost me some time and the last lap mistake was probably because of that. Looking to Day 2 of the qualifying, he said, ‘the car feels super good so I think when I get the engine done right it will be quite good.’
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