FinTrack Tour Round Two At Tampere
TQ and Win For Vesa At FTT Round Two
Finnish indoor season on-road nationals aka FinTrack Tour continued at Southern Finland at city of Tampere last weekend. The venue was a huge sport hall with several separated game fields for indoor games. Due to recent cold weather conditions, the hall was pretty cold inside, only about 12-14C degrees during the day as it was -25C outside with blowing wind making it feel like -50C!
The track was pretty bumpy due to plastic carpet on hall floor which had stretched during the years. The layout was good for 1:12 with lots of technical corners and not so high speed as TC tracks usually are. The race day started with two rounds of timed practice, followed by four rounds of qualifiers and triple A mains and double finals for the other mains.
Most of the tops were attending the race with former Euro Champ Simo Ahoniemi leading the well-known driver list including multiple national champion and Euro’s A finalist Teemu Saarinen, multiple national champion from nitro TC Tony Raikas, national champion and top driver Pekka Koivula with most of the top drivers from modified TC such as Viljami Kutvonen, Nordic champion Matias Kuusinen and many more. Come free practice it was Simo who set the pace with lap times as track was getting faster in every run. Vesa and Teemu followed closely in lap times.
In qualifying Vesa started fastest and TQ’ed the first round by a few seconds. The rest of the three rounds were also dominated by Vesa who took TQ by winning every qualifying run. Simo was in second place followed by Pekka Koivula and Teemu Saarinen with Viljami Kutvonen taking fifth with his CR3.0 followed by Panu Vehniäinen in sixth with his Carpet Ripper. Joni Minkkinen joined the A main also with his Carpet Ripper which made it total of four out of 10 cars in A final for V-Dezign! Tony Raikas, Tom Kalves and Matias Kuusinen were the names to fill the rest of the places in A main grid, although not in that order.
In first final Vesa took the lead from pole and led from start to finish followed by Pekka with Viljami taking third and Panu in fourth. That made three Carpet Ripper cars in top four which is best ever.final for the team at the Finnish nationals. In second final Vesa took the comfortable lead after start followed by Simo who tried to catch but couldn’t get close enough to try overtaking so Vesa took the win. Panu and Viljami were bit unlucky in second final but made about fifth and sixth places pretty easily after having crashes. As Vesa had already won the race, he didn’t run the last final. Pekka Koivula took the last final win which gave him second place overall followed by Simo in third on the podium.
Now, after two rounds of the nationals it is Vesa who is leading in championship points in front of Simo Ahoniemi. Next round of nationals will be run in week 11 in Northern Finland in city of Oulu.
Vesa would like to thank all his sponsors again for their superb stuff – Nosram, BlackArt, MobGums, CRC, TQ Racing, Precision Racing, Racer and M-Auto.
Source: V-Dezign
