2002 FIM SUPERSIDE Sidecar World Championship
Round 5 Lausitzring - Eurospeedway, Germany, 8th, 9th June
You easily forget how far away some of these circuits are from the UK,
until you visit them again. The Eurospeedway circuit at Lausitzring, in
former East Germany certainly doesn't hold any favours for the Team. The
18hr trek from Calais last year, resulted in a lowly 17th place, in wet
and miserable conditions.
Completing further repairs following the upside
down antics of Silverstone, the Team set off and arrived at Lausitzring
on Wednesday evening. From arriving at the circuit until the Friday lunchtime
practice session, it did not stop raining.  On
what could only be described as a washed out track, the Team slipped and
slid around during this first session, to post a lowly position of 25th
place. Having not changed anything since Silverstone, the Team had a intermittent
miss-fire problem when accelerating out of corners. Putting this little
problem down to the wet weather, the Team made some alterations for the
second session and first Timed practice on the Friday evening.
The track by now had dried out with the odd
damp patch still to contend with. On intermediate tyres, the Team still
encountered the same miss-fire. This left them languishing down in 22nd
place, and even after changes during the session, the problem still persisted.
After the session, the boys made several changes to components on the
bike in readiness for the final timed session on the Saturday.
With the weather steadily improving, the track
for the final qualifying session was almost completely dry. With full
slick tyres the boys made an asserted effort to improve the lap times
. Unfortunately the problem had not gone away and Chris and Pete could
only improve the times slightly and lift themselves to 17th on the grid,
with only 0.5sec covering 10th to 20th. With an eighth row start the team
would certainly have their work cut-out. With no time for further testing,
the team resorted to changing everything on the bike, for the race.
The forecast for the afternoon race, was cloudy,
with a small chance of rain, fortunately this didn't materialise. So from
the eighth row the Team would have to work hard to gain position and this
is exactly what they did. The lights changed and after a good start (for
the first time this year !) and missing a crash on the first corner, the
Team battled up to 15th position and got onto the back of the battle between
10th to 15th.  The
race was full of incidents and on lap 12 of the 19 lap race, Webbo's engine
expired and dumped its oil around half the track, making it difficult
to pass and dangerous to stray off the racing line. The oil resulted in
other Teams spinning off, with the race pace slowing down by 5secs a lap.
This worked well for Chris and Pete however, as they battled up to tenth
place. Although lapping faster than all the crews in-front of them up
to 5th place, Chris was unfortunately being burnt by the exhaust; a problem
carried over from the crash at Silverstone, and was by now struggling
to change gear with a dead leg. The problem got worse and meant the boys
slowly slipped off the battle for 5th and had to settle for 10th, some
10secs adrift. With race leader Steve Abbott also experiencing problems
on the last lap, Chris and Pete picked up 9th place and 7 valuable points,
maintaining 13th in the Championship table.
So onwards we progress to the next round on
22nd, 23rd June at Misano, for the San Marino round, on the Adriatic coast
of Italy.
See you there……. Or follow the Team's progress
@ www.teamfoundsracing.com or @ www.superside.com…………….
Results :
1 Steinhausen / Hopkinson GER Suzuki 19 laps 35'21.27"
2 Hanks / Biggs GBR Yamaha 19 laps 35'26.47"
3 Schlosser / Hanni SWI Suzuki 19 laps 36'20.29"
9 Founds / Founds GBR Yamaha 19 laps 36'49.39"
Des Founds
Team Manager, Team Founds Racing
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