What a weekend Germany was!! After last year brought us such disappointment we were thrilled to run a 6.17 straight off the trailer to take the number 1 qualifying position after round 1.

The track was tricky and quite slippery which was causing many cars to struggle to get a good number on the board. Although later in qualifying outstanding runs came from Mats with a 6.12 and Urban, and Micke Lindhal who also run into the mid - high teens. At this point we were 4th however in the last qualifying run we came out and run a 6.14 to regain our 2nd position. We were very pleased with our runs especially after speaking to other drivers from a range of classes where it was clear the track was not easy to get to grips with. 

Pro mod was not exempt from the drama unfortunately, even though this didn’t involve our car a few other drivers were experienced problems. The Blown Nugget who had previously crashed at Santa Pod unfortunately had another accident which possibly was due to the wheel breaking during a run. This knocked him out of competition on the 2nd qualifying run which was a great shame.
 
Later we witnessed a freak accident which occurred in the staging lanes. Johnny Jorgensen was backing up from his burnout when he couldn’t break, causing him to reverse in Micke Lindahl, who was consequently pushed back into the newly built 1968 Pontiac Firebird of Marc Mehusien. It must have taken between 30 – 45 minutes to separate the three cars, and apart from the obvious cosmetic damage the force also pushed the wheelie bars through the bulkhead of Marc’s car. Lucky both Micke’s and Marc’s car were able to be fixed at the track and they were able to make the final 16 cars.
Micke continued to race well throughout the competition; however the bad luck was not over for Marc when his engine let go in the first round and he came through the top end with a smoking engine. Marc escaped quickly and the car apart from the engine damage was saved with very little fire damage. We look forward to seeing Marc back out next year where we’re sure he’ll be causing a threat to everyone improving on his current PB of 6.21.

As for the Stude, eliminations brought us a few frustrating gremlins, on 3 of the 4 rounds the engine cut out early, and although we were running consistently in the high teens early 20’s, if we were able to sort out this problem we feel we would have been much faster. The first round was against Henri Joosten, a racer we have competed against for many years; he was unable to make the first round which left us with a bye run, something we never like to see however we take each run as it comes.
We took the green and were through into the next round, sat at the top end we were amazed as just after we ran, two absolutely incredible runs came out of Urban with a 6.102 and Mats 6.09.
Mats is officially the first European Pro mod racer into the 6.0’s and has also taken the European record! We are all very gutted we couldn’t be the first (we were so close at the beginning of the year and maybe one more run on the main event track would have changed it all). However there is no double about it, it was definitely well deserved by Mats who has been consistently running into the low teens throughout the season!  (Well Done Mats and the team…we will be pushing to snatch the record back!!)

The second round we were against Bruno Bader who is definitely stiff competition, Bruno is very consistent and seems to be able to get down most tracks, he is also very close to us into the championship. The second round was early Sunday morning and being the first cars on the track, we were all quite curious of what numbers would come up on the board and whether we would see some repeats from the night before. The track in the right lane seemed to have needed a severe clean up due to the nights show which takes place on the Saturday night (this usually involved lots of Jet cars)
The right lane had clearly changed considerably to the previous day and many drivers were struggling to get down the track. This consequently knocked out Micke Gullqvist who was 2nd in the championship at this point and Bruno who we were against and was also a threat in the championship.

Our next opponent in the semi finals was Urban, we had secured lane choice which worked out well for us as it meant we could keep consistent in the left lane. Again the Stude cut out at the top end however we had a large lead from Urban who suffered from some violent tireshake!

So we were in the in the final against Micke Lindahl who knocked out Mats when he was forced to shut down due to low oil pressure. We still hadn’t found the problem which was causing the engine to cut out before the top end, and this would eventually lose us the race, the Stude had much less power through the run and again cut out at approx 5.6 seconds into the run, we clocked a 6.27 which was the slowest we had run all day to a winning 6.20. Micke also caught a RT of 0.001 which meant it would have been very hard for us to catch up either way.

All in all it was a great race to be involved in, we successfully pushed our lead forward and are now 1.5 rounds ahead of number 2 in the championship, which is what we wanted to do before the last race of the championship. We consistently ran in the 6.1/6.2’s and although we weren’t the first in the 6.0’s we know we’re really close! The main thing we can take away from the weekend is a healthy engine and no major damage.
 
The next race is back at Santa pod where we know the Stude performs well. We were so close to a zero before so fingers crossed we may be able to break that barrier. We also feel we may have found the problem with the engine cutting out, so we will be changing some electrical parts before the next round also.
We look forward to taking the Stude back to our home track in front of our home fans, where we aim to also take the championship home.

See you in three weeks time!!