Team Report NitrolympX- Hockenheim / Germany
EUROPEAN CHAMPION 2003 !

Holland, August 26 2003Under excellent summer conditions the biggest event of the year (crowd wise) was held in Hockenheim Germany. This state of the art venue has the best facilities by far, with a formula one style pit area, free showers and a smooth & wide track that has plenty of run off area. This year it was the return of the official FIA & FIM/UEM European championship rounds at this event.
It was a real shame however that bad mistakes were made during the preparation of the track. This became clear not before the first qualifying day and it rather looked like an ice skating championship then a drag race event. Even Pro-Stock bikes were having tire spin all over the quarter mile. In fact it was even dangerous. For this reason the event came to a halt several times that day. Well in the afternoon the decision was made to halt from further qualifying and concentrate on the track first. The also present organizer of Gardermoen Raceway (who has the best prepared track in Europe) stepped in by offering his expertise. With a lot of combined efforts they tried to make the best out of it.

Qualifying:

As we were sitting out the first qualifying session anyway it didn't affect us in the first place. We tried to figure out what would be the best setting for our first attempt on Saturday. While the first cars & bikes made their qualifying passes it showed that the track had improved a bit, but traction was still far below average.

On our first pass we "drove it out" instead of "nailing it from the line" in order trying to make the best of it. Despite this and being on and off the throttle several times, it smoked the tire badly twice during that run. A pour 7.1 second @ 337 km/h pass was the result. Still it was the best ET in our field.

The organizers nightmare scenario continued as around noon the timing computer went down as well. This forced them to replace it completely and qualifying again came to a stop for another hour and a half.

Because of all these delays there was only one more qualifying shot remaining. With the data gathered during our first "slipping & sliding" we adjusted the clutch system. In fact we took almost all clutch out.

Because the track was improving (very) slowly our last pass resulted in a 6.65 sec @ 327km/h. Still a lot of tire spin and the bike was real "loose" at the last part of the track which explains the low speed at the top end.

Though this 6,65 is far below our average, we obviously did better (or should we say "less worse") than anybody else in our class as it was the only six second pass and we remained the # one qualifier.

All in all qualifying was not exactly what we expected in the first place, but at least we were able to do better then our competion.

Eliminations:

We won our first round (6.99sec) on Sunday, however we had "detuned" the bike so much that it even misfired (because of the very little load on the engine). The good thing was that we learned that the traction was starting to go in the right direction, so we decided to take a few steps back towards a more "acceptable" clutch set-up.

This proved to be a good decision as not only did we win the next (semi- finals) round, but we also resetted the track record (was already in our possession) to a 6.37sec! The data showed that this was the maximum the track could take. Also because there was little time between the rounds, we left the tune up of the bike as it was for the final round.

When it was time to fire the engine for our final round appearance little did we know that drama would struck this time as the engine refused to run on nitro (Top Fuel bikes are always started up on methanol and once running they are switched over to nitro).

We made two attempts and our opponent Peter Bossert waited patiently (thank you once again Peter!) As we couldn't find a reason why in the first place, we were just about close from throwing in the towel as we discovered that the (lanyard controlled) safety fuel shut off was apparently accidentally hit, therefore totally blocking the fuel transfer to the engine. After resetting this safety valve the engine came to life. Pffffff..... a narrow escape, we nearly had to give away this one!

Despite it slowed down to 6.43, we won the final round.

Another perfect score; number one qualifier, event winner & resetting the track record.

But hold on there's more..... with still one more round to go we already clinched the European Top Fuel Bike Championship title for 2003.
This is our third European championship title.

That last round of this season will be as usual at England's Santa Pod Raceway in two weeks time. Again a record number of top fuel bikes have signed in for this event.

Being relieved from the pressure of the championship title, this gives us a little more room to play. No need to explain what our goal will be for that last round.

Marius van der Zijden