Race Report by Martin Hudy

The 1/10 nitro pre-worlds were held between March 17- 23 in Lisboa, the capital city of Portugal. The race started on Monday with free practice and because of the few participants, the free practice continued until Friday and the race was held on weekend. IFMAR rules were followed because the race was a warm up for the World Championship to be held in August. That meant that the qualifiers were 10 minutes, semi-finals were 30 minutes, and the main final was 1 hour long. The race was attended by 60 drivers and the reason for the low number was probably due to the time when the race was held… March weather being completely different than August weather. Even with the small number of drivers, everyone expected a big race because almost all of the best Euro drivers attended. The race was full of the best Italian 1/10 drivers like 2-time European Champion Dario Ballestri, top nitro racer Daniele Ielasi, 3rd from the last Euros Alessio Mazzeo, and many many more. Team XRAY was represented by their top Euros drivers: Teemu Leino, German Champion Robert Pietsch and Vice-champion Dirk Wischnewsky, top Spanish driver Carlos Peracho, Danish driver Martin Lissau, Niki Duina from Italy, Mark Gilliand from Great Britain, Mickael Brandt from Sweden, and of course Juraj and Martin Hudy. Overall the NT1 was the most popular car in the race, with 20 XRAY machines out of 60 cars.

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