Hi guys

At last the British National Championship was underway with a new 2 day format which we were really looking forward to getting off to a good start.  The first round was at the beautifully prepared Slough track near London.  The weather was quite cold around about 10 degrees, and the track was surprisingly dry considering the amount of rain we have had over the last month or so.  The new format for the race series this year has 4 rounds and 3 to count for the Championship and an extra point for taking TQ at each of the rounds.  We arrived at the track on Saturday morning with 2 rounds of practice followed by 4 rounds of qualification throughout Saturday and one round on the Sunday morning with finals to follow.

Read more: Elliott Boots - Round One British National Championship - Slough

BRCA MID SOUTH REGIONAL ROUND 2 REPORT

We attended the European Championship warm up race / EFRA Grand Prix in Austria where we were really excited to see how our race package would be up against the best in Europe, in preparation for the main event in August. We arrived at a really fantastic facility and a great looking track at a very picturesque town of Fehring, a couple of hours drive outside of Vienna. The format for the race was practice on the Friday, qualifying on the Saturday with finals on the Sunday. The weather, unfortunately, was not particularly good, very changeable with sunshine and showers, and rain predicted on Sunday, but this was changing on a daily basis, so really it was like home from home for us!

Read more: Elliot's report...

Having raced at  Stonehaven previous, We knew the key to winning was about having the right strategy for the final.

The track is very hard on tyres, and managing the wear rate to cope without a tyre stop was going to be difficult. The high wear rate caused by the full speed banked corner is something we learnt to manage.

Alex qualified 7^th for the main after lots of work getting setup and using the qualifiers as a learning base for tire wear.

Off the start, Alex fought to get past 3 or 4 drivers but got tagged from a driver he had overtaken, as always Alex got his head into gear and drove hard for the first 5 mins and got himself into the lead. Having got there he drove smartly looking after his tyres, slowing slighly to conserve the left rear.

Alex led the race for around 20 mins of the total 30 mins.

With around 7 or 8 mins to go it started to rain and made the track very slippy. We knew Alex had a hard setting and it would be hard for him to hold onto car now.

At this point Alex was 1st ,Joe Kerry  was 2nd, and Mark Green was 3rd. Joe drove well to catch up with Alex. For the last 4 mins they both swapped places several times but Joe had to stop for fuel. Alex didn't ,the strategy paid off and Alex drove to the end in a very controlled manner deserving of his First National win.

Final Results:
1. Alex Thurston – KYOSHO V-ONE R4 – 99 laps
2. Joe Kerry – Serpent – 98 laps
3. Mark Green – Serpent – 98 laps
4. Andrew Hastings – 92 laps
5. Simon Wood – 88 laps
6. Chris Steele – 87 laps
7. Adam Catchpole – 84 laps
8. Dave Gerard – 84 laps
9. Matthew Cook – KYOSHO V-ONE R4 - 47 laps
10. Scott Hellawell – 10 laps

  Alex's KYOSHO R4 Setup

Front Camber   2
Rear Camber   3.5
Front toe -   1 out
Rear toe        in 3
Shocks Kyosho Standard Blues front and rear.
Shock oil front : 500 2 hole pistons
Rear oil  450 3 hole pistons
Droop front -1
Droop rear 4
Tyres Front 40s....  Rear left.... 45 Right right 40

Report by Martin Thurston.

Report From Mid South 4wd Regional.

Due to the rain over the last few weeks it was touch and go whether the meeting would take place. But a lot of hard work from the Stotfold crew meant that it was drained enough to run the meeting, albeit missing a few features that were too waterlogged.

Practice round – My KYOSHO LAZER FS2SP  felt good on Schumacher Green mini spikes although a little edgy on the very greasy track.

Q1 - Changed to Schumacher Silvers and the LAZER felt much easier to push, I made a couple of small errors but it was a pretty good start and won the first round from Jon Spencer
Q2 - Kept the setup the same but had some errors and ended up 2nd behind Jon who just missed my first round time.
Q3 - Decided keep everything the same again as I could not fault the car for balance. I tq'd this round and beat my previous fastest time
Q4 - Changed to Ballistic Buggy greens after feeling I was lacking drive and also seeing other cars working well on them. The balance felt very good like this and the KYOSHO would rotate better but give much more grip to get the power down. I set the fastest time in this run and was over 0.5 seconds quicker on my fastest lap.

The finals went well and apart from a mistake early in the first leg where I lost the lead for a while I managed to win all 3 finals.

We also had 3 other KYOSHO LAZERS in the A final, Stephen Brown, Tony Evdoka, and Matt Perry. All with TEAM ORION fitted.