Windsor Ontario Race Review (By Sergey Rakhmanin)

Red Bull Air Race
News
Windsor Ontario Race Review (By Sergey Rakhmanin)

Windsor Ontario Race Review (By Sergey Rakhmanin)

A difficult race

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - I would like to say a big thank you to all of you who supported us in Windsor. We will try to do our best for good results, however I would like to mention here that sometimes results depend not only on our performance. This race was really difficult and a good example.

The race track in Windsor was probably the most “narrow” track so far this season and therefore very sensitive to wind. I think we were very lucky with the weather this time. Even though wind did make it more difficult sometimes, it was still much better than last year when we were based in Detroit but the track was located at the same place on the Detroit River.

Team Rakhmanin reached minimum weight for MXS-R

We worked a lot to make certain changes prior to the race. Our technician Antanas Marciukaitis with support from Skydynamics and Lycon did a fantastic job on the engine and several other things so we had faster speed on our MXS-R (approx. + 6-8 knots in level flight) and reached minimum allowed race weight comparing to San Diego. We were quite optimistic about these changes but already during the first training sessions it was clear that other teams worked hard as well and many of them significantly improved their performance.

Tighter competition

So after the training sessions we considered ourselves to be approximately at the same distance from the leaders as in San Diego but with tighter competition coming from several other teams that were far behind at the beginning of the season. We tried some minor changes between Qualifying 1 and 2 but it did not help. We finished on 11th position after Qualifying, not getting automatically into the Top12 the first time this season. On Saturday evening we managed to make certain successful adjustments. We performed better on Race Day getting into the Top 12 with a competitive time of 1:12.32, advancing into the Super 8 with 1.45 sec slower but penalty free run which proved to be very important at that moment.

Full of surprises

Our final 5th place in Windsor looks quite good. We got into the Super 8, but that was clearly thanks to mistakes of other pilots rather than our own achievement. With our track times at the moment we are approximately on 7 to 9th position. Unfortunately, we won't be able to do other big changes and modifications on the plane this season anymore. This does not mean that we won't compete for better results during the rest of the season. As we saw in Windsor - a faster time is no guarantee for better result during the race and it might be full of surprises which makes it even more interesting.

Based on what I saw in Windsor, I would like to mention Paul who performed really well in those extremely difficult conditions and I think his first place in Windsor is well-earned.

This article was written by Sergey Rakhmanin and appeared first on www.sergeyrkahmanin.com.