On October 30th the small town of Stapelfeld witnessed a one-of a-kind Mini-Z Guinness World Record. Alex Zink and his team did a great job organizing a Mini-Z race on the world´s longest track for this class. Congratulations! It´s unbelievable how much love, effort, development and money Alex invested in Catz-Sports Center! Never before I've seen such an outstanding race management center: Four computer monitors for lap counting lord over the race track. Simultaneously two large flat screens on the opposite wall and another two small flat screens in the cafeteria display live results of the races. Nicely designed graffitis on the walls complete the great atmosphere at this race track. Very impressive!
Michael and I really were looking forward to join the race in Stapelfeld in order to continue testing our new vehicles and challenge some real Mini-Z professionals. Altogether almost 80 racers took part in the race and yes, some of these dudes are really fast! We thought that we might be able to make it to the midfield. We arrived on Friday afternoon to get to know the track and find a set-up. Due to building measures we could not start practicing immediately. But I had to do some work on my own and the car of a friend anyway.
The track itself was huge but rather reminded me of an abstruse labyrinth than a nice race track. We had to practice a lot to find a relatively nice line. However the most important fact was not to be very fast in the first case, driving without mistakes was of a lot more concern. This was not too easy due to the track´s dimensions and the fight for the best places on the driver stand.
My car felt very bad. It was the first time for me to run the Aston Martin DB9 body which was supposed to have a nice handling. Well, not for me! I had serious problems finding a good set up driving this body. The regulations constituted to use a Kyosho body. Since the DB9 was my only body from Kyosho I had to use this one. It turned out that only very few drivers chose this body which didn't surprise us at all. It had quite aggressive driving characteristics and tended to get stuck in the soft side rails very easily. The last fact turned out to be a serious problem which made me remove to whole front wing. The result was an extremely ugly looking DB9. Furthermore I had to remove the rear diffuser because it touched the ground giving the car a very loose rear.
Michael could choose between a DB9 and a Yellow Corn McLaren F1. Finally he also decided to drive the DB9 because the McLaren F1 GTR pretty much felt like a brick. At the end of the day we were not really happy with our driving skills and decided to go home in order to sleep as much as possible (5 hours…).
On Saturday we arrived at 8 a.m. To categorize the heterogeneous driving field the organizers decided to carry out a timed practice run. They took the fastest lap times and divided the drivers into groups according to their fastest times. Surprisingly at this point of time it went very well for me. I found myself in the fastest group. Michael had traffic and didn't manage to get a clean lap.
The qualifying went quite OK for me but Michael found himself in the E-Main. He made a very stupid mistake (me too, but I was lucky): Switching bodies like underpants he forgot to move his transponder! Thus, the lap counting system wasn't able to count some of the laps. Thankfully the race management center was deign to manually correct his result. Nevertheless it was not clear in one case if Michael had a bad time due to a mistake or the transponder. Although he claimed that it was not a driving mistake the whole situation was too blurry to be clarified. In the end he dominated all three E-mains.
After qualifying I found myself in 10th overall position. I was really happy but the it turned out that the finals consist of only 9 drivers. Thus I only was TQ in B-main. I was a bit concerned about this fact because my car tended toward strong understeer. In the first main it went quite well until the driver in the second position decided to outrun me by shooting me off the track. I lost around 7 seconds and ended up 3rd. In the second main I stopped driving. The understeer made it impossible to drive. I left the driver stand in order to change the slippage of my ball differential but it didn't helped at all. Before starting in the third final I asked some other drivers what I could do. The answers were extremely heterogeneously and most of them were inconsistent with each other. I the end I decided to completely clean my tires which was supposed to be an absolute ‘No-Go’. My car itself was OK, the set-up was OK, so this was my last opportunity and it turned out to be the right decision. I had to reduce the steering travel a lot to avoid rollovers but the car´s grip was back! Anyhow the last final was not of great success. I was hit in the first lap and had some accidents during the race. Nevertheless I was able to drive my personal best time in that run. I ended up 13th overall, a place that I´m quite happy about. It was my first race in that class and the fourth day of running a Mini-Z in general.
What did I learn from this race?
1) The DB9 is a nice-looking body … but not on the track.
2) By keeping your tires clean you have the possibility to control a variable and keep it relatively constant in order to find a good set up.
3) There are some extremely fast drivers! Congrats to Oliver Winkler!
