Dear racers

Believe it or not. My 2006 season already kicked of. It did so obviously not in Europe, but in the sunny and warm Hong Kong.
It was the annual Asian Nitro tour that was held on the Fanling track, in the new territories, about 45 minutes from downtown Hong Kong. the race was organised by Mr. Shiu, owner of World Model, our distributor

The European team included our new sales manager and top-class 1/10 scale driver Richard Keur, our Italian distributor Fabio Fantini, who would race 1/10 scale, our top-1/8 scale driver Massimo Fantini, Swedish driver Per-Ola Hard and me. I would race 1/8 with the 960, which we learned to set-up better and better in the last part of 2005.

We all met in Amsterdam’s airport Schiphol and after an 11-hour flight we arrived in Hong Kong. We all where very curious to go to the track and we found a very interesting track with huge traction. My car went very well immediately and I only had to change minor things, like harder front springs. The layed-down rear shocks, which worked very well on our European tracks, worked fine here too, but it took two more days, before Massimo finally was convinced and tried them too.

The 1/10 scale class was a different story. With these kind of traction cars started to traction-roll. Most drivers choose to go for a very hard front diff, or even solid to avoid rolling. That worked, but now most drivers had a little too much understeer.
The Asian drivers have more experience with that kind of traction. The later winner of the race had a tremendous amount of steering, with no traction-roll! But his driving style was very special too, he seemed not to brake before the corners, but carried a lot of speed through the turns. But checking his set-up, it was nothing special!

Anyway, beside the racing everybody had a lot of fun. The Asian drivers always let me enjoy the racing, they are having serious fun, while I often think that we are either serious or having fun. The number of drivers (120!) however made it difficult to do a lot beside the race. We tried however to help everybody with set-up and other things and I really hope that everybody enjoyed the race.

My final was a lot of fun. My car was very good, but my engine somehow had no top-speed. I later discovered a leaking glowplug to be the reason of that. But after a crash right in the beginning I had to catch up and ended as runner-up to Massimo, who was unbeatable that day! Our cars really were flying; I think the new shock position really improved things.
The next race will be the Winternationals in Ft Myers. That will be a tough one on the scariest track of the world. Let’s have some fun again!

Michael