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Nov. 15, 2014, 1:03 a.m.
11/15/2014
By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com
After a week’s worth of burning laps on one of the most difficult asphalt circuits on the planet, sixty minutes of incredible racing ended in heartbreak for some, and elation for a deserving veteran racer who has been close several times to winning his first IFMAR World Championship, now taking home with him the highest honor in RC racing.
“I thought it was pretty flawless,” said Alexander Hagberg of his title-winning drive. Knowing that some of his rivals could go longer on fuel and perhaps eliminate a pit stop or two, he knew he had to push hard from the beginning to make up the deficit. Once Jilles Groskamp flamed out, the Swede felt he had “breathing room,” and even let Yuya Sahashi back onto the lead lap in the last five minutes knowing that “the car was good enough to just finish, and [he] was just counting the minutes while trying not to do anything stupid.”
Starting eighth on the grid, it took Yuya Sahashi over 12 minutes to move into the top five - but the Japanese driver never gave up a position on the track, and he was close enough to the race for the lead to take advantage of his teammate Greiner’s mistake in the waning minutes of the race to advance into the second position. Yuya’s second place finish makes the third straight 200mm Worlds in which a Japanese driver made the podium.
After finishing on the podium in “the most difficult race of [his] life,” first-time finalist Dominic Greiner was disappointed about what might have been. A mistake around the 45 minute mark while close to the lead, in which the German hit the curb exiting pit lane and flew off the track, knocked Greiner out of contention and ended his chances at converting the TQ start into a title. The crash chunked the right rear tire, making his Serpent 748 Natrix “horrible” for the final fifteen minutes, added to the fact he found he was unable to run the six-minute pit strategy he had planned left him feeling as though he “wasn’t at [his] best today.”
The chance for Jilles Groskamp to hold both the electric and nitro touring car world titles at the same time came to an end on the back straightaway around the 47-minute mark, when his Maxima-powered Shepherd Velox V10 rolled to a stop one lap before the six-minute pit window he and his pit crew had used the whole race until that point. The Dutchman chalked up the incident to his prior pit stop, in which his pit man spilled fuel rather than getting the tank completely full, which also caused him to spin out and lose time. Commenting that his car kept getting harder to drive as the race went on, he wasn’t sure he could’ve challenged for the win anyway, and though he was disappointed not to make the podium he was happy how the race went overall - especially with it being his best finish at a nitro race, in his fifteenth IFMAR World Championship.
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