This year the Nordic Championship was hosted by the Norwegian club Spydeberg MK. It is a young club and the track was finished 2007. We have never raced on this track before but we were excited to run on a new track. We arrived on Friday morning and started with the prep for practice. The layout of the track is challenging with a number of fast chicanes and tight corners.
It was a little bit tricky to find the right setup and we tested different shocks and springs. In the end of day we had a setup which was “ok”. The new engine, NovaRossi PTS, was really good so from a performance perspective we should not have any problems J
Four round of qualification was scheduled for Saturday. A quick summery of the qualifiers: Not so good…… The problem was not the car or engine. It was some totally different: Marcus was suffering from something allergy which made it hard to get eye focus. Best lap was really fast but that doesn´t help if you make other mistakes…. We tried different
ways of getting rid of the disturbance but nothing really worked. Ok, end of the qualifiers we were at 8 position…. Not what we expected but workable.
At Nordic Championships we run according to the EFRA rules which mean no direct qualifiers. So, on Sunday, we had a Semi final to look forward to. Marcus started on 4 position and drove a tactical, smooth run to end up as 4th. The car also felt a little bit better than on Saturday although a little bit “nervous”. Marcus was lucky to drive the semi final in dry conditions. When the next semi final started it started to rain and never stopped….
It was clear the final would be run in wet conditions. Marcus started on 8th position in the final and already during warmup we felt that the car was really good in wet. Just after 2-3 laps Marcus was up to 3rd position and a couple of laps after that on 2nd position. It was
Marcus and Mikael Fransson who had a good setup/tire combo for the wet condition as they really pulled away from the rest. Unfortunately Michael Fransson run into issues with the radio gear and had to retire. From now on it was a easy race as Marcus pulled away from the rest and won with 6 laps before Svein Harald Ytternes on 2nd and Christoffer Hedlund on 3rd place
So, in the end a happy winner:
Until next time,
Marcus/Wolfgang Lindner
