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Michael's German National Dormagen (18/04/2006)

By:: Michael Salven

Dear racers

After I had my first race in France end of May, I had my first race in 2006 for my national championship. The system in Germany is a little strange: although this is the first race in 2006, it is the third race for the 2006 championship! A little bit difficult to understand, but basically the season starts in August every year.

The race was held on the track of MCK Dormagen, a club near Cologne. The track has a very nice layout (although very dangerous). You enter and leave the straight full-throttle and especially the latter is a difficult task. The other thing is that you have elevation differences, which can cause the cars to get airborne with quite impressive results!
Nevertheless I really love this track, it is quite small, but nice and clean (no grass) and the “frikadellen” (meatballs) are really good!

We had a whole day of practice on Saturday, which was cold, but dry. I could finally figure out my traction problem from the French GP: it turned out that the only difference between Mark Green’s car there and mine was the reason for him having a lot more rear traction: the front offset! Whenever I put a 1mm shim outside the steering-block, I got a lot more rear traction, especially under braking! I still haven’t figured out why, put it was definitely better.

We also used our new wheels, they were equipped with PMT tires, which is distributed in Germany by our Serpent distributor “2-speed” (that’s actually the name!).
As we found with earlier tests with other brands of tires, the new rims improve traction even more.

Qualifying went very well, except that it was wet in the first run on Sunday morning. But it stayed dry and we finally had 2 good runs: Behind me on TQ we had our Serpent SDD driver Sebastian Brixner in second, Christian Wurst in third and “KHM” Karl-Heinz Meister in fourth. Karl-Heinz and me were using the ZX 21 DS2, while Sebastian used the new MEGA MF Masmo.

In the final my car was ballistic! I finished first with more than 4 laps in front, breaking the old lap-record by 0.3 seconds! Sebastian lost his early second position due to a mistake and a chunked tire. Karl-Heinz had several engine flame-outs, one of them at the start where the engine idle was too low (one thing Karl-Heinz does not like is a high idle, he just can’t stand it;-)).

I had some changes in the car trying new stuff; one of them is a new sideplate which stiffens up the left bearingblock around the 2-speed shaft. This improves acceleration quite a lot. Also Karl-Heinz and Sebastian where using this modification.
We had a good race, but we will continue improving the car and the support to the drivers. Hope to see you at the races.

Congratulations to my friend Tom Scheffler, who came home third in class 2!

the track

home of the meatballs!

3 offset shims of 0.3mm each makes (almost) 1mm

the new wheels

top three, am I shrinking?

the modified sideplate

top three class 2