Proper tires … finally :)

After quite stressful a summer, having passed exam time finally eased up things a bit. Doing some proper preparation, building two identical cars, testing speedo firmware updates, a new Graupner transmitter, all that sorts of stuff was on schedule.

15-17^th of August was German Nats weekend in Braunschweig. With Daniel and Florian attending too, a fun weekend was guaranteed. The track was lovely, quite big but still very technical.

Control tires of choice where Ride REX34. Unfortunately them still seem to have huge consistency issues. The inserts on some tires are glued to the rim at some point within the gluing process. This leads to good and bad sets. And you never know in advance if the next set of tires is going to be a good or bad one.

Marc Rheinard cut his 2 sets of race tires open. 6 of 8 where ‘broken’

I had one set that was only just soso, but still made the A-Main in a super competitive field of drivers. Evo was running well, the HOTT radio was good and so was the speedo.

Braunschweig itself on the other hand didn’t really have much to offer at first. Mainly built to house al the employees Volkswagen need to build your next Golf it is pretty much ‘made’ rather than grown.

I went looking for a proper restaurant and Daniel found one on the way to the city centre. It was called ‘Parlament’ and basically full on amazing!

So good in fact, we went there twice. Florian had the world’s longest Currywurst while I kept going for fancy salad stuff J

Saturday night was city centre time. Having successfully escaped from a just-about-to-start bachelorette party we had some lovely Italian food at ‘Vapiano’. An awesome brand really!

I unfortunately had my knee-cap spontaneously reposition while dancing @ pacha club in Munich ahead of the race. Sounds awful and trust me on this one: it is!

Writing this two weeks later with a knee that is still very much broken, I cannot foresee how long it is going to take to be ok again. But I’m doing my absolute best to make it a quick recovery.

From the mixed weather affair that was Braunschweig I went straight to Madrid the Wednesday after. Euros time. Sorex. My UK Teammates. Really been looking forward to this one.

Since I didn’t have time to convert my wet car for the german nats back to an alloy-dry-lovely version it consumed all of Wednesday night. Aaron from Schumacher did just so with his race car.

It took us an aweful long time to get the stuff all ready to go.

In the end I didn’t even run the alloy car as thursday’s practice soon highlighted, that the super bumpy and unbelievably abrasive surfaced track was not as high grip as one had expected. Alloy is easier to drive, but if it is maximum grip you are after, it’s got to be CF really.

I struggled all through practice mainly because my shocks kept going terribly wrong making the car near undriveable.

I fixed that issue half way through qualifying. At this point I realized I need to invest more time into toy cars again as one or two additional practice weekends could have uncovered that a lot earlier.

But that’s life. Ended up in the C-Main with Grainger making the B. Racing in my finals was …. not very good. Trying to keep it clean I was pretty much last within the first lap. Not really good this. But I tested a lot of stuff I wanted to reinsure on anyway, so all was good.

Unfortunately, the knee that kept getting better at a good rate fully went on Friday night. So bad in fact, that I passed out by pain and took a taxi from central Madrid back to the hotel (27€ one way since Alcobendas, where the race was taking place isn’t really Madrid).

This sort of overshadowed the euros as it was getting a lot harder to focus on keeping it neat and tidy. But let’s not complain shall we? At least it was sunny, reasonable warm, very very funny and well worth a trip. Jeff (who’s name used to be Gordon) did and awesome job as a teammanager, and having a conversation move from ‘u believe in god?’ to ‘didn’t bring my purse, so might I borrow yours for cross-dressing?’ made for really good a laugh.

Setup sheets will be attached to this blog post. Should be good for pretty much any tarmac track that is sort of flowing.

Next up: a weekend in Berlin, then carpet prep is about to kick off.

Next race: ETS Pilot Race @ the prestigious Nürburgring

Very much looking forward to that one.

In case any of you would want to get updates more frequently, follow me on instagram (@martinhoffer) J

This is pictures, impressions and random stuff coming up.

Have fun racing!

German Nats Setup (Ride): Mi5evo_gernats_braunschweig

Euros Setup (Sorex): Mi5evo_euros2014_madrid

Pictures (beware: fully random 😛 )