Hi all,
this was the last race for the Finnish championship and also for this season. After 22 races it's good to stay at home again for the weekends (for a while). The whole week prior to the race it has been raining regularly. The track was very soft and heavy but ride-able. The Orimattila track is half sand, half clay. With reinforcements from Estonia and Sweden 12 teams arrived at the paddock. The exemption of the entry fee for foreign teams had attracted their interest. Maybe this example will be followed by other organizers next season and hopefully there will be no overlapping events as many as this year.
Back to the race; as expected with the short stroked Husaberg engine there's not much to prove when confronted with a soft and heavy track. 10th position in the training and one team crashed and was out of the race already.
Before the first start the organization cleaned the worst mud from the track and that helped a lot.The start was as expected, we just followed the others in the first corners. The positive thing of arriving with a little delay is that you can avoid the first corner pile-up and pick up a few places. But in this soft sand and clay it's not taking very long before the faster teams start to re-pass. We ended up behind the Swedish team and started to push for a pass. They used a fat two-stroke Zabel and at every straight they made a gap we were able to close in the corners but didn't get the opportunity to finalize it. After the first lap the rear brake pedal was blocked by mud and didn't operate anymore. Then after 2 laps we started to hear a strange metallic noise that became more and more frequent the next laps. And after four laps a tube from the cooling system popped off. That was the end of our part in this heat. Luckily it happened on the starting straight, short walk back to the paddock.
We pushed the hack back to the paddock and found that Pöllänen/Lehtinen were also there with a boiling engine. When we checked the sidecar we noticed that the rear sprocket was completely worn out and the chain had jumped causing the metallic noise we heard. The wet sand had shortened the sprocket's life remarkably.
The second start was a repetition of the first. 2 teams got technical problems in the first lap and we held the last position during the whole heat. There was never a real change to close the gap with the teams in front of us. I decided to save the engine and just finish the race. Behind Pöllänen/Lehtinen we ended at the ninth position. In the total standing we dropped one position and the fifth spot is the result of our efforts this year. 2 DNF's did cost us points but also a problem was that all the races this year in Finland took place on muddy and heavy tracks where our engine wasn't the best choice.
For now we continue with training sessions and Mikael starts to drive by himself with a friend of him. I'm going to have a good beer and intend to test some other team's equipment. Next Saturday we've planned to have a test day on a farming field in Porvoo. Hopefully we'll see some new faces interested to give sidecar motocross a try.
Regards,
Stephan
Results Orimattila 10.09.2011 (sv = sidecars)
trip Orimattila 10.09.2011
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