Mahon Wins as Xray Retains Race of Champions Title
Last weekend saw the second running of the Race of Champions taking place at the NNRC track near Blackpool. The event is the end-of-year race off between the top 20 qualifying drivers from each of the 1:8 scale off-road regions run throughout the year in the UK. It is the brain child of Glyn Morgan (the 8-11 series organiser) and is designed to challenge the best drivers from the 8-11 Series, NRS, SRS Series and the Scottish Region. It is a one-off race and is a great way of pitting each region against each other in a fun, but competitive end of season race. The weather for the practice day was amazing warm sunshine however, for Sunday it decided it was back to winter and a very wet day lay ahead for the competitors!!
Qualifying
Round one got underway regardless of the weather and Colin Brennan (NRS Champion) took his Ammo-powered Xray to the TQ spot with a conservative but clean run. Round two went to Associated’s Craig Drescher (8-11 Champion) after a minor mistake on the last lap by Xray’s Stuart Mahon (2010 NRS Champion). Colin followed up his first round performance by taking second place with Stuart taking the number three spot. Round three was a scrappy round, but with round-by-round qualifying, Stuart was on hand to take the fastest time with his now dialled 808 2011 Specs. First and second places on the grid went to Ammo fuel and Xray with Colin Brennan followed by Stuart Mahon and the young up-and-coming driver Oli Evans taking third. RC legend Craig Drescher only managed sixth after a strong start in qualifyng whilst team mate David Bailey was down in the B final along with another few top level drivers.
Finals
The B final saw a very hard fought race by some of the Xray drivers, Lee Bunker ending up taking the second bump-up spot while Carl Richards was running a solid fourth until an unfortunate engine cut while leaving the pits put pain to his battle for the final bump-up spot. David Bailey cruised through to the A final and looked like he just wanted some more track time to compete with the locals.
Just before the start of the A finals, the sun finally made an appearance but it wasn’t going to effect the track enough to change tyres, but a nice break all the same!
The first corner went down in regulation order, but a bobble on the second turn from Colin gave team mate Stuart the lead. Another bobble that went unseen by the marshal saw Colin drop to a lowly last place. At five minutes Stuart had taken full advantage of the clear track powering his Xray to a commanding lead over the hard chasing Craig Drescher. By the halfway point, Stuart’s lead was up to 12 seconds in front of Craig and that was were it stayed for the rest of the final. In the closing laps, Colin had battled his way back to sixth chasing fourth and fifth place and with less than a minute on the race clock, Colin took fourth spot away from Dave Bailey and got within five seconds of local lad Oli Evans. Stuart said after the race that, “the car and engine were just perfect in the tricky conditions – I’m well chuffed.”
Source: RC Disco
