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Michaels EFRA GP France 06 (05/04/2006)

By:: Michael Salven

Dear racers

To start a season in Europe end of March is a little dangerous, even if it is the south of France. While it was freezing in Holland, we where very curious how the weather would be, the forecast was changing every day, so.......
Anyway, as I said, it was the south of France. It was the French EFRA GP on the track of Beaumont Monteux, which is located about 90 km south of Lyon.

The track itself is nice; a very fast sweeper leads onto the straight, full throttle. At the end a sharp hairpin is hard on the brakes and the technical infield needs a lot of traction as well as front-end grip. The track looked very slippery, and indeed it was, at least at the beginning. Weather was cold on Friday, but improved steadily and reaching 20+ degrees on Sunday. We all felt very lucky!

I started with my set-up from the winternats, and basically the car was fine. I tried a few things with the engines, did some running-in etc. I took out the front offset, which improved steering, and I tries some shocks. I ended up with 3 holes all around combined with 45 oil and at the end of the day was quite happy. Mark Green’s car was very similar, but he still had 1mm front offset and harder rear shocks (2 holes).

Qualifying was good, for us Mega users it was funny to see everybody running out of fuel at the end of the heats while we were still running. I managed to end on TQ, but still struggled a bit with rear traction. Mark was a little unlucky, but still in 4th place, a place which young French talent Jeremy Cardot hold until the last round. Anyway, this young driver is somebody to watch for the future.
After qualifying we had some free practice. I lowered the rear rollcenter and now the car felt perfect! I was very confident for Sunday.

The semi-finals ran good for us, the solely Serpent of Marcus in the first semi made it through into the final, although Markus was very ill and could hardly stand up! The second semi had 7 (!) Serpent, but unfortunately Jeremy and Franck Bestel ran into engine troubles and so did Oscar Cabezas. Serpent SDD driver Sebastian Brixner and my Spanish friend Carlos Peracho made it 5 Serpent in the final.
Unfortunately I made a mistake when I fixed the car with the quick-change levers. The spring caused one side to bind up the drive-shaft and the car was terrible in the 15 minutes practice for the top 4. I repaired that and looked forward to the final.

I took the lead in the beginning, but found the car still hard to drive; basically I had too little traction. I could hardly open the throttle and braking was even worse. Mark was a lot faster and after passing me just pulled away. I also had to let Hanauer past; he always caught me under braking at the end of the straight. Mark and I had also quite bad tire change stops, mine was very slow, my front wheel didn’t want to go on, while Mark’s engine flamed out and needed a glow-plug change before they could re-start it. He recovered back to second while I finished 4th, a little bit more than 1 lap down on the leader.
So the first race we were very competitive, but unlucky. I still have to find the reason, why Marks car was so much better than mine, while the set-up was very similar. You can ceck both set-ups in the download section of this race.

Good luck

the left side of the track, full-throttle sweeper

right side, full braking!

Caught on camera!

My stressed mechanic, sorry Bertram!

Picking up my TQ-trophy