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UEM Super Twin Top Fuel Bike
Swiss rider Lorenz Stauble made his way to the Super Twin final round in apparently invincible form, cranking out a 6.591/214 to head the field in qualifying, and then dispatching Per Bengtsson with a 6.587/206 and Petri Kalttonen in the semis with a 6.658/206 (although the Finnish rider’s 6.851/204 was a game effort). Having left the line first and set off with a consistent sixty foot clocking Lo appeared to have the race in the bag, but started to spin the slick hard and only just managed to feather the throttle sufficiently to stay ahead of Hans Olav Olstad with a 7.322.
After a season littered with incidents on and off the track (a meeting hasn’t gone by without something seriously going wrong with either the bike or the transporter) Hans Olav Olstad must have been relieved to get to a racetrack close to home. Running big mph on a number of qualifying efforts, a 6.943/213 put him into sixth spot in the field, and the breakage of Greger Johansson after the burnout gave him a competition bye into the semi finals, where a barrier hugging 7.132/209 was enough to get around Gunther Sohn. The break to repair the barriers caught both finalists out, with Olstad shutting off to a 7.596 losing effort as his bike got very close to the barriers at the top end.
Gunther Sohn (below) dramatically dropped his PB in qualifiers to a 6.658 at only 194 mph, the comparatively low TS resulting from the German camp struggling to sort out a malfunctioning clutch downtrack. A first round 6.749/202 suggested that Sohn was on course to meet Stauble in the final, but he slowed to a 7.244 after the bike drifted towards the centreline letting Olstad by just before the traps. Sohn, Olstad and Roel Koedam are now in a tight points battle for second place in the series behind Stauble.
