Round 7 - France (Magny-Cours)
ACE SERIES Qualifying Starting Grid Race Report Finishing Order Fastest Laps Driver Comments Download Mixed Logfile Action Replays Semi-Pro Results
	1995/96 Pole Position:  1:06.984 (Rene Smit) 1995/96 Race Time:  1h28m43.791 (Rene Smit) Race Distance:  71 laps

Qualifying

While both Ant Hill Mob drivers have rejoined the championship, two other drivers have announced their retirements for this season: Jan Svehlik (Bolgani) and Gary Leighton (S.RS Turbo) from the Semi-Pro series. Good luck boys and hopefully till next season!

Race

Meanwhile not only both Ant Hill Mob drivers retired but Reinhold Schatzer dropped out of the group of front runners after an accident in lap 27 that broke his front wing.

During the next series of pit stops around lap 54, Michal had the lead for two laps because he was the last of the front drivers to visit his crew. Later, Michal came close to Oliver in lap 63 with only 2.8 seconds behind. But this was mainly due to a driving error of Oliver and didn't meant that Michal was consistently faster than the leader.

While the driver on fourth position, Steffen Diener, proved that his qualifying performance was no fluke, a second group of drivers had formed behind Steffen. It consisted of Alan Strang, Axel Bruns, Robert Schaftlein and Markus Kruggel who, especially from lap 59 on, were fighting very hard for 5th place. The most interesting confrontation developed between Alan and Axel, who were within tenths of a second between lap 59 and 70. Axel lost this battle due to a bad 71th lap were he was 6 seconds slower than Alan.

Although the seventh GP of the season ended with a win for Oliver again, the runner up wasn't closer this season. It looks like the opposition is forming up just in time to make the race for the world champion title interesting.

Fastest Race Laps

Some of the driver statements

Markus Kruggel (Wild 13): "Just too many little mistakes, most of all those spins that cost 10 seconds. Although I like the track, I don't like the CCs on it. I think it's the worst track for overtaking them because they have their weakest point exactly where I don't dare to overtake (the chicane before start/finish) and they do quite well in the other corners and bends."

Oliver Roberts (Digitech): "A boring, but fast race. No big mistakes - just loads of little ones :-) I split the race into 4 equal segments using C tyres throughout - the tyre wear still got me though, as I overran onto the grass on the lap before my 1st and 2nd stops (both at the same location as well!). I had 2 silly little spins towards the end of the race - that's what I get for trying to go too fast ;-)"

Robert Schaftlein (Digitech): "I could have shaved about 40 seconds off my time simply by avoiding spins and one broken front wing which occurred while I was screaming into my pit position. I didn't brake. I simply executed the Grant Reeve pitting method. However for some reason the car was flung so violently that I smashed into my garage wall. Hrmph. there goes another 15 seconds... the other 25 seconds were lost on being a bit zombified from my first day of work. I hit enter to enter the pits at the end of lap 17 and lap 34. On both occasions I completely forgot I was coming in and simply hooned past the pit entrance to have myself flung violently to the left as the computer tried to make me enter the pits."

Alan Strang (Team Ecosse): "This was a very uneventful race, although I'm definately not complaining. The only incident worthy of note was an unbelievably stupid error on the last corner of the last lap. I mean, how else can you describe driving straight on into the wall? For one horrid moment I thought my engine was going to cut, but thankfully it didn't. I don't think I could have raced again had that happened! Oh yeah, the computer cars were awful in this race. They were slow enough to lose you significant amounts of time, but fast enough to make passing them rather tricky."