We headed to İzmir for the first round of Turkish Gas Nationals on 19th of April. We had 2 days for free practise, followed by controlled practises and qualifiers on Saturday and last qual&finals on Sunday. My 733 was fast right from the start, and I already broke the track record at practise from 19.056 to 18.770. This indicated a promising weekend.

Participation was not so high but we still had some fun with friends.

On qualifiers I had a perfect run of 31 laps at 10:09 with a 18.406 fast lap. I took the TQ and there were two other Serpent drivers at top 5 who bagged their main final grids.

On sunday, B final was run for the remaining spots for the main final. Ates Billur, who was a 1-8 scale driver and had lots of problems in qualifiers getting used to the touring car and finding the right setup, showed a good pace after transferring my setup to his car and won the B final. In fact, all the bump up positions were covered by serpent, resulting 8 serpent cars at A main.

Final started without any trouble for me. I opted for very hard and big tires for the 45 minute final not wanting to change them. My car was obviously slower but still easy to drive. After 45 minutes, I finished first from start to finish with a 10 lap gap. Best time was 19,05 and race average was 20.2 seconds including pitstops.

2nd place went to B main winner Ates Billur, who drove his own race without getting into any trouble. Çaghan Turna was 4th, he missed the podium with a couple seconds.

We enjoyed the race a lot and I want to thank my sponsor Serdar Aytemiz(Evilhobbyshop) for providing perfect support on Serpent and Xceed products. These results would not be possible without him.

Report Below.

I primarily run electrics but since I started distributing the Serpent Brand I started racing Gas cars as well and I have been trying to get used to the Nitro cars.  As usual I arrived at the track with my car not built, and started on the car.  I managed to build the car by the last qualification on Saturday but the car was not setup right so the times were not good.  Lucky for me Michael Salven have shown us how to setup the clutch and 2 speed so I had no problems with those.  on the other hand I was apperantly a sleep while Rene Püpke father was showing me how to setup the engine as I had problems all weekend.

Since I am not very familiar with 1/8 scale and havent finished a race yet, I decided to have a car thats not very fast but have lots of traction and drive the car like I do my S411.  The car was easy to drive but I had some engine problems as I couldnt set up the needles correctly in time I had to make due with what I had.  I started at the end of the field in first corner and patiently started following the faster traffic.  I had an engine flame out early that cost me 5 laps.  after that I kept running smooth with no mistakes and moved all the way to 5th position.  at 29th minute the car caught on the dusty section an slided in to the soft borders and stripped my servo horn.  My pitman tried to fix the car and get in the race again but there was  too much to remove so I called it quits.

Serpent Turkey Driver Görkem Gür had a great day and won the race. He set the track record as well.  another Serpent Driver, Alpasrlan Ozantürk placed 2nd.  which gave Serpent 1 -2 positions in both the 1/8 and 1/10 classes.

I hope I will finish the race next time