Carisma GTB dominates Micro X
The famous Micro X meeting this year moved to a new venue, the cracking Midlands Raceway at Cradley Heath in the West Midlands.
A permanent indoor venue for both on-road and off-road, they put on a really testing track with plenty of features to challenge the drivers, and along with the Micro X crew ran a smooth and massively enjoyable meeting for all.
Although the racing surface was fully carpeted there were a couple of different types to mix up the grip, and the big quad section at the back was to be the trickiest part and separated the men from the boys. The only quick way through it was to double-double, anything else would prove to be way slower.
The meeting’s sponsors, of which CML and Carisma were proud to be amongst, had put in plenty of prizes for the raffle and there were some proper happy faces when their ticket came out – especially the young racer that walked away with a brand new Carisma 4XS kit!
With this being a two day meeting there was practice and four rounds of qualifying on Saturday, finishing at a reasonable hour to allow for pleasant evening socialising, followed by three more qualifying rounds on Sunday morning. Round by round scoring was in use and it was to be the best four from seven to count. Then Sunday afternoon saw three legged finals for all.
Current Micro national champ Ben Cosgrove took the coveted pole position, with the A final lining up like this:
- Ben Cosgrove
- Craig Harris
- Phil Sleigh
- Keith Robertson
- Andrew Jones
- Tony Bishop
- Eugene Galley
- Jamie Beasley
- Ben Pugh
- Ben Smith
It was great to see some new faces there, and well done to Eugene and Ben Smith on making the top ten at their first major micro meetings.
One racer who found himself extremely busy was Ivan, the main man behind the Carisma brand. He was constantly bombarded with questions on Carisma products and requests for photos, and even managed to fit in some racing himself. One important factor of Ivan’s attendance was to launch the new prototype 2wd micro buggy Carisma are working on.
The finals proved to be as frantic as expected and even in the A final there were mistakes aplenty in the heat of battle. Pole man Ben took the first leg comfortably from Craig and Andrew. In leg two a couple of mistakes from Ben dropped him down the field and although he fought back to third, he wasn’t able to catch Keith in second or Craig who took the win in an extremely close finish. The final leg was a nail biter too with Ben this time able to hold on to take the leg win and overall victory. Craig was second and Keith third in the leg which was exactly how they finished on the podium.
- Ben Cosgrove
- Craig Harris
- Keith Robertson
- Andrew Jones
- Phil Sleigh
- Tony Bishop
- Ben Smith
- Ben Pugh
- Eugene Galley
- Jamie Beasley
Along with the podium lockout for the Carisma GTB, Ben, Craig and Keith were all using the new soon to be released Carisma sensored motor with Craig and Keith also using the brand new V70R ESC.
Keith had this to say about the new Carisma V70 Type R ESC and motor:
“The price tag on this belies its quality. Although there are other ESC’s in this price bracket that can be used in this class they don’t have anything like the features of the V70R. Craig and I spent a bit of time playing with the settings over the weekend and you could really feel the changes. We only scraped the surface of what it can do, the features it comes with mirror the top end ESC’s in other classes and it really shows on track. It’s just so smooth and fast.”
Many thanks to the Micro X organisers, Midlands Raceway and Ivan Carisma for a great meeting, a great time, and assistance with this report.
