1999 Lasse
Åberg
I have done slotracing almost 25 year now but this was the first
time I did a 24-hour race.
In the team we had two long-race experienced drivers, Lasse
Pettersson and Kenneth Signal, who had done this type of racing
before. Kenneth has done a 1000 Kilometres race once, which then
took 2 and a half-day to run. The race took place at a lovely
private track. I hope I can write more about that later.
We raced 8 times 3 hours.
We, Lasse Pettersson, Kenneth Signal, Lasse Åberg and Mikael
Landrud formed a team called Carolus Rex (team name chosen by Jan
Ekman, car builder and tester).
The race started on Saturday at noon. We started on lane 6 and
we took the lead already from the first lap. The beginning told
about some of the difficulties we would face. The difference
between the lanes, drivers and cars caused a lot of silly
overtaking, resulting in crashes etc. and those that started on
lane 8 got a big share of crashing.
We had some difficulties the first three hours to pass a Mercedes
CLK on lane 7.
We were faster but sometimes tried to overtake at the wrong
places or tried to pass when the speed difference were to big
which also that resulted in us loosing out on the pass.
You learn a lot during the hours and so did the Mercedes team
who showed strong during the latter stages.
What was interesting to se was how the pace changed during the
hours. Already after the first 500 laps or so you got an
impression between which three teams the fight would stand and
the 1, 2, 3 placed teams after 500 laps were the same after 24
hours.
At 500 laps we had the lead. Team ABB and Elprojekt both had 475 laps.
At 1000 laps team Elprojekt had 946 laps and Team ABB 945.
Those two teams were still close to each other at 1500 laps where
now ABB were second on 1412 and Elprojekt third on 1413.
When we reached 2000 laps, ABB had 1888 and now Elprojekt had dropped to 1807. They, Elprojekt hold the pace for a while but then lost contact to ABB.
During hour 18 and 23 we felt that we couldn’t match the
pace of the ABB-team. They did however crash to often and
didn’t get those laps that they could have.
That was the only time when we felt somewhat unsure of the
outcome of the race.
The last hour our car felt much better while their car seemed to
be more and more difficult to drive.
More facts about the race can be found on the Slotracing
Denmark site.
Images from the race, prepare to wait if you have a slow modem.
Send any comments to Lasse 1999 Lasse
Åberg