FIA Main Event  - Santa Pod

It’s finally time for the first round of the FIA European Championship and after the good but changeable weather we have had lately we were glad to find on Friday that the sun was shining.  But by Saturday, for our first scheduled two rounds of qualifying, it had all changed and a wet track caused us to lose another two qualifying runs (so far this year we have lost the chance to improve our tune up in four runs out of five due to wet or cold tracks).

Sunday was an improvement in the weather but with only two chances left to qualify and no real evidence from the quicker cars of how much power the track could hold, we had to approach this first qualifier with a conservative tune up.  The most essential thing at this point is to get from A-B with a good enough time to qualify.  Failure to qualify on this one run could leave us out of the competition if the weather should change again.

First qualifying session over we are in No.6 position with a 5.64 et @ 248 mph just about what we aimed at and the track conditions were better than we expected so for the next run we can step up the power to try to improve our time and position.  With adjustments made, we go to the line for our second qualifier.  This time the burnout before the run is much better and gets acclaimed as “burnout of the day” by Eurodragster.com.  Pity there’s no prizes for that!!  The run is a good result 5.42 et @ 265 mph and moves us up to No.4 qualifier.

Looking at our performance so far, compared to our competitors we need to step up our performance for the first round of eliminations.

For the first round of eliminations on Monday, after carefully checking the engine over we find no abnormal wear or problems, part of which I’m sure is due to our change to Red Line Oil this weekend.

Just as the manufacturer’s claim it will not mix with the fuel, it comes out after the run looking like it went in, and provides better lubrication in between than I’ve ever seen.

On checking the data from the first two runs we think we can make adjustments to increase performance enough in the next round leaving us with some options to further increase it in the later rounds.

Good plan, shame it didn’t work!!  We got beaten by last years champion Timo Habermann.

The car did not respond as well as expected after our adjustments and its now becoming apparent that for some reason we are struggling to do burnouts and to make the car respond on the line, but on the positive side we have some championship points, we are taking our brand new motor home in one piece, we have three runs worth of data on it and after checking and more adjustments I’m sure we can do better In Finland.

See you there

Dave Wilson