As I’m sure many of our regular readers and supporters are aware last weekend the FIA European Finals took place at Santa pod. For us this was our last round to defend our lead in the points, unfortunately it would not turn out as planned. It would be unfair to say the crew are not all gutted that we were not able to take home the championship. Unfortunately in racing, luck plays a part sometimes and this was not our weekend.

Although people may think for us this was the weekend from hell to lose the championship after leading it for the whole season it really wasn’t. After the first zero in European pro mod history was run in Germany 3 weeks prior to the finals, we realised we really needed to start experimenting to try and move forward as the competition was getting extremely tough. So that’s exactly what we did, with some great advice from a number of sources the team had a plan of action to try to chip away at the times. The only problem was you have limited amount of runs at a meeting and if the tune didn’t go to plan we would be taking a great risk. So on the backburner was plan B that if it doesn’t go well on day 2 we’ll be changing it back to the 6.10 tune from ‘The Main Event’.

Leading up to the first run, some of the crew were sceptical if this would work, especially after seeing many cars get out of shape. However we needed to try something different and it paid off.  Mats Eriksson was out in front the whole run and made the run look really quite slow in comparison, so when 6.07 came up on the board we were all kissing the ground with excitement. It was also a huge achievement for Mats, as he upstaged us massively by running the first 5 second pass in Europe (5.98). We are proud to be part of a run which will undoubtedly be history for the class.

After this round of qualifying the Exhaust Coating shootout started, this took place during the 3 remaining qualifying sessions. Even though we got through to the final (where we were beaten by Bruno Bader) we were struggling with little problems with our new set up which meant we weren’t able to repeat our first round performance.
Watching Mats run effortlessly with a string of 6.0’s caused us to feel a lot of pressure to get things sorted for the first round in eliminations.

Sunday morning came around and we were against fellow Brit Roger Moore. We had a considerable advantage over Roger with being almost a second faster than him. The car left beautifully and we clocked our best 60ft of the weekend. Unfortunately just as Andy shifted to 2nd gear the blower belt slipped back off the top pulley and the Stude lost power. This is where our luck was lost and we were knocked out for the day’s eliminations.

With Mat’s and Micke Gullqvist being so close to us in the points and our early departure we have ended up being 3rd in the Championship. This might not be the result we wanted, and should the blower belt have stayed on we’re confident that would have been another 6.0 and we would have been able to go far in competition and hold on to the championship. However the championship was so close this year that we could have potentially got knocked right down to 5th.

So we are proud! Proud to have come 3rd!

There is nothing like the competition that takes place in Pro Mod, the class is moving forward constantly at such a fast pace, to be at the top of the pack is a real achievement.  In total there were 36 cars competing in the championship which is really incredible.

This year we also ran 3 personal bests, won our 2nd FIA meeting and were in the final of another. We’re the 2nd out of only 2 cars that have run down into the 6.0’s and what’s more is we have all our engines with no damage.

So for us we have one more race, the National finals in just over a weeks time where we will be looking to do a bit more testing before next season and tie up the British championship which we are still leading.

We’re looking forward to it, See you there!!