March 17, 2017

Haatanen heads Associated 1-2 with another TQ run

Joona Haatanen backed up his Q1 TQ by again topping the times in the second round of qualifying at the Euro Offroad Series in Germany.  The up & coming Finnish talent would lead a Team Associated 1-2 at Arena33 as elder team-mate Neil Cragg managed to set the second fastest time despite running in the second quickest heat.  Behind the two B6s it was Martin Bayer who was best of the rest, the Xray driver some 5-seconds off Haatanen’s TQ pace.  With top seed Lee Martin getting a P4 for the round ahead of Hupo Honigl, for championship leader Michal Orlowski the second round of qualifying proving to be the Pole’s highest placing on the time sheets so far but the winner of the last two EOS encounters has yet to get to terms with the challenging track layout.

Quashing any doubt that he inherited the first TQ after a mistake from Bruno Coelho, Haatanen summed up his Q2 performance by saying ‘my time was better’.  Suffering a 3-second roll as the heat approached the final minute, the error caused by too much throttle on the landing of the centre double, Haatanen added that apart from this one error he felt overall he drove a better heat second time around. Looking to Q3, when he could claim his first overall EOS TQ honours, he said the plan was to try to repeat his early runs and in terms of his car the only thing he would be doing was to fit a new set of tyres.

‘We are getting somewhere now’, joking, ‘my mechanic was holding me back’, was Craig’s reaction to a much improved run.  10th fastest in Q1, the former World Champion said having copied 80% of Haatanen’s set-up for Q1 after his young team-mate TQ’d he got mechanic Craig Drescher to completely copy it for the second attempt.  Describing the set-up as ‘maybe a little safe’ he admitted it was ‘maybe not such a bad thing for this track’.  Happy to run the car unchanged for Q3, Drescher however thinks his driver could do with more power and plans to give the LRP powered B6 more top end power as well as tightening the slipper. Drescher feels while they have a safe qualifying car from watching his driver he thinks as it is now it will be swallowed up by the pack in the finals.

With Coelho’s challenge ended by a ‘mistake in the same place as before’, Bayer put his P3 down to the fact he ‘crashed less than the others’.  The former EOS race winner continued, ‘everyone is crashing so much you don’t need to be fastest to be on top’. Suffering three mistakes himself, he said, ‘the speed is there because if I look at my best lap time I’m also in the Top 3’.  He concluded, ‘its all about not driving like a monkey’.

‘The car was nervous at the start again. It is not landing great on the jumps’ was how Martin summed his run to fourth.  The Yokomo driver continued, ‘the car was good this morning and now it has dropped half a second.  I’m not sure what is going on’.  Planning to ‘try a few things’ including fitting a new set of tyres for Q3, he added, ‘it seems the tyre wear is back which is strange for a track with not many corners’.   He concluded, ‘I think tyre games are going to come into it’.

Having ‘crashed like a monkey’ in Q1, Hupo Honigl would redeem himself with a P5 run. The Austrian said, ‘this time I tried to get a clean run. I was not fast but it was clean which is super difficult on this track’.  Planning the same approach for Q3, he said on this track layout the car set-up was not key to a good result but just keeping errors to a minimum.

With a DNF in Q1 after he jumped too short resulting in a rear camber link popping off his Schumacher, Orlowski was pleased to register some points but the 15-year-old said ‘again I made too many errors’.  While his car is ‘pretty good’, he said it is unpredictable and in an attempt to improve this they will add weight for the next heat.  Used to running the car light he said hopefully the heavier car will be more stable allowing him to ‘push harder and make a good result’.

View complete event results here.

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