Martin Wollanka wins the VRC Pro 1:8 Nitro Buggy Offroad World Championship (with video)

 

 

Starting from 6th position on the grid, Austrian Team Xray racer Martin Wollanka left the other 9 in the dust at the fantastic indoor off-road facility in Italy at IBR Padova to be crowned the very first VRC World Champion 1:8 scale nitro buggy. It was a tough race though but Martin drove a strong tactical race, making sure not getting himself in trouble too much in this 45 minutes long A-Main final. Early leader David Ronnefalk missed focus for this race and as he later admitted, he should have raced his A-Main a lot earlier and not wait for the last moment. Team Associated’s David Joor (US) and Marcin Malinski (PL) completed the podium. Team Durango factory driver Ryan Lutz finished 6th with a too conservative fuel strategy.
 
Fuel-stop strategy turned out to be very important. Ryan Lutz, not raced VRC Pro all that much yet was the most conservative of the front runners refueling every 12 laps thus needing 6 pit stops. Wollanka and Malinski opted for 13 laps for 5 pit stops total, but Joor and Loriot had squeezed their engines to the limit to do just 4 pit stops with 14 lap intervals. At his first pit stop, while leading the race, David Joor got stuck on the pit entrance piping and couldn’t free himself quick enough so he had to drive yet another lap before he could refuel, 15 laps on one fuel load! It dropped him back to 4th behind Loriot. The young Frenchman was fast, as we had already seen during the Short Course Trucks World final, but also too many driving errors which dropped him back 1 or 2 positions time after time. Mid race he had to race Ryan Lutz and only because Nicolas had 2 pit stops in hand he managed to finish in front of the fast Team Durango works driver.
 
Wollanka was never far away from his pursuers Malinski and Joor, at 2/3rds of the race Malinski was just 1.5 seconds behind the fast Austrian but didn’t have the pace to overtake and him. The race for second lasted until the end, Joor last fuel stop was in lap 66 which dropped him 3.6 seconds back on Malinski, but when Malinski had to come in for his 5th and last fuel stop Joor was able to get back to second with a 1 second lead which he managed to defend until the end and to finish 1.8 seconds ahead of the fast Polish racer. Martin Wollanka had almost 14 seconds on David Joor and was able to get a solo last lap in to celebrate his victory.
 

 
 
*Eben Coetzee from South Africa finished 4th in this event, but as his race replay was not uploaded to the VRC server his car could not be included in the A-Main replay compilation.
 
In total 896 racers participated in the first race ever for 1:8 nitro buggies. The Nations ranking was won by USA, with France in second and Sweden in third.
 
Big thanks to Mike Garrison of LiveRC.com for doing an excellent job on the race commentary. 
 
 

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