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Dutch EFRA GP (21/06/2006)

By:: Julius Kolff

Finally racing the 720

After a long winter finally the day came we could show our new ride. After running quite a lot with the prototype over the winter months we'd now be able to see where we stand with the 720. And judging from the results we're not doing too bad! So first of all a great compliment to Rene Cornella for designing a super car.

Practice

I'd returned from work (my real job...) on wednesday so I joined the rest of the guys on thursday for some free practice. I'd done some testing the week before and found a pretty good setup to start with. Heemstede can be a funny track though where grip levels and balance can change quite a bit with changeing weather. But even in the changable conditions on thursday, may car felt very good. I tried some different pipe and header combinations and settled on our new #223018 pipe with the #223017 header. It gave better topspeed without losing too much bottom end.

Friday practice was run under sunny skies and that reflected in the laptimes. I was able to set fastest lap of the day only 0.02 secs of the fastest ever lap in 1:10th. But more important was the ease of setting fast times. The 720 is much more foregiving on the limit, and very controlled over the curbs.

Qualifying

Saturday didn't start too well for me. The car was still excellent. Maybe even too good. I had so much confidence in the car I started overdooing things a bit. Resulting in mistakes in my first three qualifiers.... Fortunately I had 2 left and with the help of a magic 3Hobby.net sticker I managed to sneak back into the direct qualifying spots. That the top 5 places in qualifying were all 720s (of 7 cars in total) is an amazing result for a new car. Rene was so happy I decided to close the trunk of his 1:1 car with the keys inside to temper his enthousiasm a bit.... Oops!

Finals

Sunday brought another nice day with even higher temperatures. It meant the final would be a long battle for the tires and engines. What tire strategy to use was the most difficult question though. Hardness, diameter, change 2 or 4 tires, no change at all? In the end I settled on a 2 tire change after 25 minutes. And run them slightly harder on the outside.

The final itself was exiting for the first 20 minutes. I had a good start and was in third till I made a silly mistake rolling my car on the curb after the straight. Then I made things even worse by doing it again! So down almost a lap I had to start pushing a bit harder than I had planned to catch up. I got back up to 4th when Jilles came out of the grass directly in front of me. I had no chance to avoid and it ended his race. I was lucky to get away with it though. Then Michael had problems too and I was in the lead. After My tire stop I had 2 laps on 2nd place and I took things easy from that moment on. Making sure I kept the distance big enough at the end.

A great weekend

Having our new car taking the top 4 positions after the two other 720s in the final dropped out whilst leading is a dream result. It gives confidence for the upcoming Euro's in August. With the 720 becoming available to the public next month I'm sure we will continue to learn and extract even more performance out of the package. I hope to see many of you with the 720 in August!

720 on a mission

the 223018 pipe

Top qualifier. Not bad for an old guy ;-)

Ok, who decided all finallists get to spray champagne?

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