Fleischmann fastest in final ETS practice, Volker is top seed
Dominik Fleischmann pulled a surprise fastest 3-consecutive laps in the final practice at the Yokomo Euro Touring Series but thanks to a faster time in the first timed practice it is Ronald Volker who is the top seed for qualifying, the first of the four scheduled qualifiers taking place tonight at the fahr(T)raum hosted event in Mattsee, Austria. Pulling off to save tyres for qualifying, Volker was third fastest for the second practice behind Serpent’s Marc Fischer.
‘Perfect’ was how Fleischmann described his run as he improved by half a second on his earlier time to get within just 0.121 of Volker’s pace. The Yokomo driver said a combination of getting more used to and confident with the boards together with ‘trying to copy Ronald (Volker’s) driving style gave him the improved time. Having changed nothing on his BD7, he said he has no plans to touch it for Q1 saying hopefully it will again be as good as it was in the final practice.
Volker said he used TP2 to scrub in his tyres for the opening qualifier and that was the reason for him pulling off after two & a half minutes. The defending champion said everything felt good leaving him feeling pretty confident going into qualifying and he will run his LRP powered BD7 as is. Team-mate Yannic Prumper also used the run to scrub in new tyres pulling off after 3-minutes. While the German ended up dropping back to 7th in the ranking having been 3rd after the first practice, he said his MuchMore powered BD7 felt good and for qualifying he believes he is in pretty good shape as the full 5-minutes start to count.
Ending up 3rd fastest in the qualifying seeding, improving on his first time, Fischer said it was the track rather than his car that was the reason for the better time. Suffering from a little understeer in TP1, he said changes made to cure this had actually made the problem worse and for Q1 he will just revert to his earlier setup for a safe run.
The biggest improvement of the final practice came from Xray’s Alexander Hagberg who posted the 4th fastest time. The Round 2 race winner said changes in addition to reverting back to his free practice roll centre set-up had improved his ORCA powered T4, one of the key changes being a switch to progressive shock springs. Pleased to have improved the car the Swede said it still needs work with him looking to try and get the car to rotate better through the corners.
In the Tamiya camp, Viktor Wilck and Marc Rheinard both again used the timed practice to scrub in another set of the controlled Ride tyres. Both improving on their earlier times to improve one position each to 5th & 6th fastest respectively, they seemed relatively coy about their performance, Wilck adding that they would ‘see where we’re at in qualifying’.
For Awesomatix’s Freddy Sudhoff it was a very short second practice as he crashed heavily at the end of the straight on his first lap. The German said initially he thought the crash was due to a radio glitch but on looking at the A700 back in the pits it appears a clip that connects the front shaft to the gear that drives the diff came out causing the shaft to come out. Leaving the car two wheel drive under breaking the car spun out crashing heavily backwards into the track boards. While a number of parts broke in the crash Sudhoff said it doesn’t appear that the car got tweaked but he said having made a number of set-up changes he could really have done with the track time to see how they effected the car.
Ending practice 9th fastest, HB’s Andy Moore said he hoped the run was the start of them going in the right direction. Struggling in earlier practice runs he said TP2 was a culmination of set-up changes they tried over the day and it seems to have improved things. Although he has HB team manager Hiroyuki Kasuya on hand which he said is a huge help, the former World Champion said having no team-mate is a real disadvantage as its difficult to build up data when you have no one to help with trying out potential set-up ideas. Moore has also been trying a number of new parts they have developed since the World’s Warm-up last month.
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