Chassis – HB Pro5
Motor – Orion 4.5T
ESC – Orion
Batteries – Orion 6000 mAh
Tires – Ride (handout)
Radio/Servo – Sanwa
Bodyshell – Protoform LTC-R

Remarks – 2012 World Champion Jilles Groskamp has made the trip over from Thailand to make his international race debut for HB. Running a kit stock car he is working with the expanded team under the guidance of team manager Hiroyuki Kazuya to find the best setup for the car. Currently looking for more steering in the high speed corners, the rear of the car being planted, he has played around with moving more weight to the front of the car which felt better and was possible to go quicker but not consistently.

As we well know, Jilles Groskamp this year has left the Tamiya and has signed a contract with Hot Bodies. Unfortunately because of the bad weather in Thailand, the driver has not had time to test and modify the machine. However, for the moment, he is happy to have found a good set-up.

Jilles Groskamp: At the moment I am happy with the machine. Of course, I can’t compare the Tamiya at HB because they are two completely different and I don’t know if the HB is better or worse. Change machine also means changing teams, new people, new environments. But I like to change. Change to improve the machine.

Jilles uses a motor and controller Team Orion, radio SANWA and the other sponsors are HPI, Sweep, Racing, and PROTOform.

Jilles Groskamp: former pilot Tamiya, I found many differences with the new Hot Bodies Pro5, especially in the pulley that has different size, or in the arms, they, too, slightly different from Tamiya, not to mention the frame itself, which has practically a different form.

But how is it, Jilles Groskamp when it is not in the track with his car? There is a new dad, so his free time he prefers to spend it in the family, with his wife and his two children. When not running, he likes to practice sport, especially golf, but also others, for example he likes to go to the skate.

In addition to Hot Bodies, he is driving a Family car of Toyota.

Regarding the track, he finds her very beautiful. A good media traction, but it might be slightly difficult for the numerous curves that create great changes of direction. “ But it’s fun. Nice track, nice people, nice time”

The HB on-road team was in Italy recently at round 3 of the 2015 European Touring Series. Andy Moore, Jilles Groskamp and Freddy Südhoff were there, plus HB's Hiro from the US, to put the new PRO5 car through its paces at this tricky and challenging track.

Here's the race reports from Freddy, Jilles and Andy so you can follow their weekend in their own words!

Freddy Südhoff's race report:

ETS Rd. 3 was held at the beautiful outdoor track in Riccione, Italy. Nice weather, blue sky and a lot of sunshine welcomed as. With overall more than 300 drivers, this was one of the biggest ETS outdoor events.

Every team has send their factory drivers. This time, the whole European HB team, including Andy Moore, Freddy Südhoff and newly signed Jilles Groskamp were attending. HPI/ HB team manager Hiro Kasuya was represented as well to help the team but also all owners of the newly released HB PRO 5 car.

Practice started already on Thursday morning. Due to the high amount of drivers, ETS organization decided to just ran 4 practice rounds with 4min heats. As team HB was well presented, Andy, Jilles and Freddy worked hard together to find the best setup for Friday’s qualification.

Jilles Groskamp on 7^th, and Freddy Südhoff on 8^th, were able to put there PRO 5 cars into the A-Main after 4 qualification rounds were the best 2 counted.

The finals were exciting as many action was taken by the leading cars. Jilles and Freddy used the mains to adjust the car’s setup. Everything is still new and needs to get used to it.

Overall, Freddy was able to improve his qualification place to 7^th overall. Jilles dropped down to 9^th with some bad luck in the first laps of the finals.

Team HB felt confident after the race. The new team is working very well together and we improved every run. This makes us confident for the upcoming events and we will come back stronger.

Jilles Groskamp's race report:

The first outdoor ETS round ( round 3 of the season ) of 2015 was held in Riccione, Italy. Riccione is located on the east coast of Italy near the famous town of Rimini. The track is a typical Italian Nitro Track but honestly not bad for Modified TC. The track was difficult to drive and to find a good setup due the big bump before the straight and the overall traction being medium to low grip.

Thursday was scheduled for practice and with many participants it was in group order. That allowed us to run “only” 4 runs on Thursday. With Freddy, Andy and I we could test all different things to be able to find a good basic setup more quickly. First I tried light diff oil to get enough rear traction but soon I went up as too light made the car push too much. Due the bump I made softer shock oil to get smoother over the bump. All these things helped to improve laptimes but still we needed to close the gap with the fastest guys. On the end of Thursday they opened the track for free practice and just before the sun went down I made a final setup change. I tried the “old” TCXX caster blocks and this transformed my car a lot and my laptimes where very competitive now.

For Friday one more free practice was scheduled and after that, two rounds of controlled practice which are used for the reseeding for qualification. I stayed with the setup I ran on Thursday night and with the race tires it felt pretty ok but I still lack a bit of highspeed steering and my car on the bump was not easy to drive. On the end of controlled practice I managed to get in 5th position with three consecutive laps. For the first qualification Friday evening I tried to narrow the car by using 4.5mm hex but I failed to finish strong with a disappointing 24th place with two crashes. After this round I found out that the shock ends slightly touch the wheel so maybe this cause made the car feel understeer and loose at the same time. Andy struggled with overall traction as well but Freddy had a nice run which put him 7th after the first round.

On Saturday three more rounds of qualifying were scheduled and in the morning I managed to get a nice 4th position on old tires with Freddy taking a superb 3th spot with fresh tires securing him already for a solid A-main. In the next qualification I ran fresh tires and drove a steady run with a 5th position also to put myself into the A-main. For the last round many driver ran fresh tires and I decided to completely change my setup by running very heavy swaybars to see how this effected the car and especially on the highspeed corners. This didn’t work out but it was at least a good test and also good to feel that a major setup change will change the car dramatically.

On the end I qualified 7th and Freddy 8th for the A-main while Andy still struggled with overall traction finding himself in the B-main.

On Sunday I continued to try different setups in the finals but it never really improved with a little bit disappointing 9th overall position. Freddy had some nice finals and managed to get the 7th overall position.

Final thoughts:
It was a nice ETS for the whole team with 2 cars in the final. We have worked close together to improve the very new car and find some nice things that can be improved for the next race.

Next ETS race will be in Mattsee, Austria. Hopefully a bit more traction and flatter surface and then I’m sure we will be more competitive!

Andy Moore's race report:

Last weekend saw round 3 of the ETS series head to the town of Riccione in Italy and the ‘RC Circuit Marco Simoncelli’. The race would draw another huge entry of 270 plus drivers and would also be the first race to have our full HB electric on road team all together.

Thursday started out early for us with a couple of free practice runs and 4 runs in heat order. For me it was great to work with Jilles, Freddy and Hiro during the day as we were able to test quite a few more ideas than normal which is great as we are still learning and fine tuning the new car. I tested two cars in most runs and felt like one of them had pretty good pace and consistency and even though I felt I lacked steering I was running top 10 times in all but 1 of the practice runs.

For controlled practice 1 I moved the arms position in the front and to reduce aggressive feel around neutral and hopefully increase steering in the middle of the corner. But this made the car push way too much.

Cp2 - changed arm spacing back and tried thicker diff to help on power steering. This felt better but unfortunately my car back flipped going over the bump onto the main straight breaking the car and I wasn’t able improve my re-seeding time and I was pushed way down the heat order for the start of qualifying.

For Q1 I decided to gamble on changing for a different caster block as Jilles and Freddy preferred this during practice, but despite a perfect clean run the change didn’t work out and I was just a little too slow finishing 13^th.

Q2- I chose to run my 2^nd set of new tyres, switched back to the kit caster block and searching for more overall traction softened up the spring to Hpi blue, this was better over the big high speed bump onto the main straight and improved slow speed steering for the left side of the track but was slightly to safe and locked in at the rear still with too much push in the high speed corners. I lost about 1.2 sec on the 2^nd corner with the half spin on the fresh tyre but other than that another clean run but finished up 11^th…..coulda’-woulda’-shoulda’ been a 6^th

Having used both of my new tyres sets in round 1 and 2, qual 3 and 4 would be on used tyres and difficult to improve my disappointing first 2 runs. So for this round hoping to find more initial bite I switched back to my other car, which had a stiffer feeling chassis. I think this was an improvement but on used tyres just didn’t have the traction to fight with the guys running fresh rubber.

Q4 again on used tyres I tested a thicker rear swaybar expecting more on power steering it seemed to give the opposite locking in the rear even more.

So despite 4 clean runs I wasn’t able to find high speed steering I needed for this low traction layout and would disappointingly line up in the B main but still with the likes of current WC Natao Matsukura and Viktor Wilck.

However it was awesome that Jilles and Freddy were able to get the 2 great rounds in and put 2 PRO5’s into the main!!

I used the finals to test a couple of other ideas we had to find the steering and added traction we need to get us where we want to be but with the usual bumping and bashing in the B main I eventually finished up 15^th.