Volker tops Q2 in Scandiano
Ronald Volker continued where he left off yesterday as the Team Yokomo driver topped the second round of qualifying this morning in Italy when he improved slightly on his TQ time set in last night’s opening qualifier for the Yokomo Euro Touring Series second round. Recording the first 12-second lap of the weekend so far, the ETS Champion was 2.4 seconds clear of the field in Q2 with Tamiya’s Marc Rheinard taking second and Kyosho’s Christopher Krapp third fastest.
With Rheinard starting the heat last following his non finish in Q1, Volker said his focus was the World Champion who due to their starting positions was only two corners ahead of him on the track. Happy to run a similar pace as his great rival, Volker said while the run was pretty clean despite some traffic he was not entirely happy with his own driving. Making some very minor errors like riding corner dots he said he will leave his BD5 set-up as is and instead focus on tidying up his driving in the third & penultimate qualifier. Team Yokomo enjoyed a 1-2 in Q1 but a roll in the warm-up would result in a broken transport socket on Yannic Prumper’s car and although the timing picked up his car over the start line the rest of his run, which by track position would have been a Top 3 time, failed to register.
Rheinard said after his DNF yesterday he just focused on putting in a safe run and now that he has points for second in the bag plans to push much harder on his next run. Suffering with a little understeer the lead TRF driver will make some small changes which he hopes will improve things as he says he is going to take a lot more risks to see if he can in some way stop Volker from again dominating this weekends proceedings.
‘Better than yesterday’ was how Krapp summed up his run. Having switched to a thicker sway bar on his Orion powered Kyosho TF6, the German said it was much easier to drive but added that he also drove much better than he had done yesterday. Planning some tweaks to his tyre prep the ETS Round 1 podium finisher said he is too far off the pace of Volker and Rheinard and plans to focus on reducing that gap by focusing on his driving.
Eric Dankel was another who was much happier with his performance on Day 2 of the first ever Italian ETS encounter. Gluing up the tyre walls of his front Ride R32 tyres the Team Yokomo driver said it made the car much easier to drive allowing him to record the fourth fastest time. Planning no changes for his next run Dankel said he is confident he will be able to push a little harder on his next run.
Although the fastest Xray, posting the fifth fastest time for the round, Alexander Hagberg summed up his Q2 run by saying he was ‘too slow’. Still unable to get a good feeling with his car, the Swede said he cant pin point the problem but thinks its now a combination of both his driving and the car set-up. He hopes heavier shock oil will make the car easier to drive and help him get his confidence back to be able to push that bit harder.
Dominic Fleischmann completed the Top 6 with his Hot Bodies TCX but the German said the car is just missing something. Not sure what it is, he said his driving in Q2 was OK and the run was clean but on the time sheets he is just too slow. Factory Hot Bodies driver Andy Moore, who was fifth fastest in the opening qualifier, could only managed 8th this morning in between the Xray’s of Martin Hudy and Zdenko Kunák.
Also racing in the Xray Pro Stock class, Kunák made it two out two as he improved on his Q1 time to again top the time sheets from Steffen Leinburger and Felix Wiessmann. In the new Formula class Swiss driver Roman Pichler is on target for the overall Top Qualifier honours having topped the 40 car field in the opening two rounds of qualifying.
View the complete results here.
View the event image gallery here.
