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European champion (31/05/2006)

By:: Michael Salven

Dear Racers

May is always the month of the first big international race. It is the European championship for “B”-license drivers. Last years winner Steven Cuypers (with a 950-R) has an A-license in the meantime, something that happens to all winners of this championship.
This year’s race was held on the track of Aulney sous Bois, very close to the airport of Paris and next to a real size track.

140 drivers took part, which shows the popularity of the race. I arrived on Tuesday and started to look around and meet old friends. Basically I tried to get an overview over the drivers and their performance.
It was a real pleasure to meet our SDD drivers Kyle Branson and Sebastian Brixner again. Especially Sebastian went quite well, although he would be struck by bad luck later in the week, as was Kyle.

It was also the first time I had the pleasure to meet Andrea Christiani and his father, very nice people and I enjoyed it to discuss technical matters with his father who is Andrea’s mechanic and prepares the car. Initially his car looked quite bad, he had a lot of turn-in oversteer. Later the week it became better and better and finally he was the fastest driver by quite a big margin, also thanks to his Mega MF and Max engines, prepared by Massimo Fantini, the man behind the Mega MF engines.

In the beginning of the week, Jordy Blok did some impressive laptimes; he is a local teenager of our track in Heemstede, the MACH track. It was basically the first time I saw him driving a 960 somewhere else and I was positively surprised by his performance.
But my feeling was that most Serpent drivers were happy anyway and I tried my best to help everybody on set-up and other things. I would have liked to have had a meeting during the week with all of them, but bad weather on most evenings made it difficult.

Technically there were some new things on our car, we provided new rear bearing blocks from harder material for all Serpent drivers, which improves the car as well as the effectiveness of the transmission. Most drivers arrived with the rear shocks laid down as I described in one of my earlier columns. Surprisingly a lot of the drivers moved back to the original position, which somehow seemed to work better on this track. Most popular choice on the springs were blue rears and gray fronts, but also red rear and blue fronts could be seen. Shock oil variety was huge, everything from 35 to 45 oil seemed to work, but then the track had absolutely no bumps at all!

Qualifying was difficult, some drivers had 2 dry heats and other had three. Sebastian Brixner and Kyle Branson both mad a mistake in the first heat, followed by two wet ones and bad luck in the last. Kyle moved up 5 times I think, before he had an engine problem in the last final. Sebastian was even more disappointed, in my opinion he deserved a semifinal, but he crashed into a car that spun in front of him in the warm-up to the 64th final!

I was however quite happy, we finally got 5 cars into the final, more than any other manufacturer! Christiani’s victory never came into doubt, he just took off and won by 3 laps, easy as that! I pitted Jordy, who won his semi-final in convincing style, but I got the idea that I could lean out his Mega engine a bit more. As it turned out, it was a big mistake, because he had a glow plug failure after 4 minutes, already fighting for second place.
But nevertheless a very good result for us, which gives a big boost for the big races this year!

left side of the track, full-throttle sweeper!

right side, rare sun!

Massimo "MF" Fantini, enjoying Andrea Christiani

Jordy in action

preparing for the final

Kyle concentrated

the finalists