Back from ETS Rd. 5. Another special event for me.

I want to thank the ETS - Euro Touring Series orga team for the great effort to make that race happen. In these days we should not take for granted that there are still guys who do all the paperwork, organizes the daily tests etc. to make that kind of event possible in a more or less safe way. Thanks to Toni Rheinard and Uwe Rheinard and the whole ETS crew for that.

I also appreciate so many guys being careful with contacts before the event. While it could have hit anyone with a positive test, the absolute number was quite small, and most of the guys were quite understanding and reasonable with their fate. I feel sorry for you all.

This time I want to criticize the overall driving standards. While we had fair finals in the front of most of the categories, I observed a lot of crashes further down the grid and in the lower finals. This time it really went crazy. Unfortunately I took a few hits in the back of my car myself, and I had also hit one car in qualifying by accident just as he wanted to let me through. I think everybody makes mistakes. Maybe I was spoilt a bit by running always against the same few guys in top of the F1 class the recent years, but really guys, can’t you be a bit patient following other cars? If you are faster than the other car, you can’t just drive through it. In most cases you will have to wait at least for a small mistake to happen for an overtake. It WILL end in a crash that ruins your and the other guys race otherways. I gained so many positions during the finals just by waiting for things to happen. In B final 2, I let 3 cars by early in the race, and still improved by 3 spots from my starting position, without overtaking a single car. Just by waiting for others to take each other out.

Apart from that, the atmosphere at the track and within our team was quite good. As always, I met new and old friends and enjoyed the time. My own racing? I am still learning to be fast in the stock class. I think I did a lot better than last time, and my times in the end were quite competitive. It just took a bit too long to get to speed. Anyways, this time I was solid in the B final. I am also happy I found a simple lightweight solution for the anti-bodytuck system. Seems to be important nowadays 🙂 I still love my Xray X4. And in every test and race I find some details to make it even faster. Let’s aim for the bigger targets next time.

But this race, I also had a new task, and tried to take care of our fellow Xray drivers. What an honor for me, after my long absence. I was a bit worried, because the number of Xray drivers is quite large. And with that kind of background, the expectations are alsways high. I hope I could help some drivers, and I want to encourage everyone to just come over to us and ask for help if you need it. The atmosphere within the team was good. I really enjoyed seeing everyone trying to help others to improve, share setups, helping with tech inspection and watching the others race. Many of our Xray drivers are still running very different car setups. I understand that, everybody has worked on his car and made his experiences, and don’t want to throw away what he is confident with. But for sure that will be something to work on in the future, so we can improve faster at the races. I strongly believe we can all get faster if we find a setup that is a good basis to everyone and then we can work from there on.

I am quite happy that we could still have some good results, especially in the F1 class where Luke Lee and Rene Kölbel dominated the field with one of both winning each round. With some of our top drivers being absent, we still had some nice individual race results also in the touringcar class. In the 40+ class it was Caspar Morgen as 2nd and Mirco Thalheimer finishing 5th on his ETS debut with the X4, in the Pro Stock class it was Lukas Ellerbrock who finished 6th, and Ádám Izsay winning the B final, and in Modified we had 2 A finalists with Antoine Brunet (9th) and Marco Kaufmann RC (10th), with Cyril N'diaye winning the B Final while Oliver Havránek also just closely missed the A final.
See you all next time,

and thanks to my sponsors
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