Orlowski again in Q2 at EOS Slovakia

Michal Orlowski has opened the final day of action at EOS Slovakia with another TQ run in the second round of 4WD qualifying.  The Schumacher driver would once again top the times ahead of Martin Bayer as top seed Bruno Coelho had another difficult run, this time ending up P5 behind Daniel Kobbevik.  With two big errors in Q1, Lee Martin’s second attempt was much better and the Yokomo driver posted a P3 time albeit over 5 and a half seconds off Orlowski’s TQ pace.

Commenting on run, which was 7/10th of a second fastest than his Q1 time, Orlowski said, ‘It was a good run but it’s always tough to get into a good rhythm first thing in the morning after a good night sleep’.  Chasing another double here at the Hudy Arena having secured his first 2WD win of the season yesterday, the Pole continued, ‘I had a bobble on the first lap when I over jumped the final jump which lost me about half a second. Once I had a comfortable gap over Martin (Bayer) and Bruno had a mistake I was just looking to put in clean laps and I was hoping I would not have trouble with traffic’.  With 4WD wins at the Nurburgring and Warsaw, the championship leader said, ‘That was the second run on the tyres and I think it felt a little slower than yesterday. We will make a small change to the car for Q3 for the 3rd run on the tyres’.

‘Just another run without mistakes and the others crashed’, was Bayer’s summary of Q2.  The Xray designer continued, ‘I am doing 5-minutes without mistakes that need marshal but I am still not happy with my consistency as I am making little errors’.    Top Qualifier of the race last year, the Czech driver said, ‘I don’t have the speed to fight with Michal and Bruno but I’m aiming to lead the other group. It’s a bit like in Formula 1’.

Martin described his Q2 run as ‘the same as Q1 but without the 2-mistakes’.  He explained, ‘I had two mistakes in Q1 and one was a big one. I ended up in another section of track’.  On his P3 time, former champion said,’I could have pushed a little harder but it’s risky when I do’.  The British driver also had a problem with his rear diff going off over the run saying, ‘there is a new diff going in. Shin is on the case now’.

‘Another rough round but this time it was because of the slipper’, was how Coelho summed up his first qualifier of the day, two more rounds left to run before the A-Mains get underway.  The Xray driver continued, ‘yesterday I traction rolled because of the new tyres but now the slipper seized and it was hard to make the jumps. The throttle was sensitive and I was over jumping.  I knew something was wrong from the start but I know from yesterday the car is good so we will just fix the slipper and should be good again for the next one’.

View the complete event results here.

View our event image gallery here.