Unlim 500+. Greece. Final day.

Our Greek holidays came to an end. Right now when you are reading these lines the cars have already been loaded on a car trailer which is going to take them back to Russia. Unlim 500+ sums up the results of its first trial field event “Destination Greece”.

A few positive aspects to start with: that was a successful first experience. It became obvious that it is not only possible to conduct such offsite competitions but also necessary. New impressions, new people, new tracks, new information. That is why next season we will certainly come up with something as positive as this event or maybe even more extraordinary.

Not everything went as smooth as we wanted it to be. But this is the way it usually happens in the end of the season: the cars are tired, the pilots challenge it all, and that’s why technical problems become a common issue. Besides, as always, many pilots were getting ready in haste and a lot of cars were updated on the last day before leaving to Greece.

The second day brought more difficulties than the first one.

First of all we need to mention that a very strong side wind had been blowing during the whole night and the first part of the day. It was not only interfering with nice starts but caused a lot of other troubles. It brought a lot of waste from the nearby fields to the freshly glued track and morning starts of drag racers tamped this waste into the glue making the surface extremely slippery.

According to Yuri Milayev, “traction was awful”.

But everyone noted the friendly and grateful audience which greeted every car with joy. The event had received great promotion, the posters were all over the city and that is why more than a thousand of spectators came to see it, which is a big number by local standards. The closed park was full of curious visitors and all starts were accompanied by big rounds of applause.

Unfortunately, the majority of cars — both Russian and those belonging to the guests of Unlim 500+ — could not cope with the tension. Torn off driveshafts, cut off drives, engine issues — here’s a short list of problems which came out during the second day. By the evening even the two toughest GT-R cars went down. First was the car of Georgy Pertskheliya with the broken fourth gear, then Yuri Milyaev’s car started having cardan shaft problems.

As a result, only 5 cars from Russia were taking part in the final races: 3 Porsche cars — the ones belonging to Sergey Ignatko, Andrey Nosov and Dmitriy Samorukov, Oleg Belousov’s BMW M6 and Vladimir Ulanov’s Nissan Juke R. Also Audi RS6 from Bulgaria and the local Lamborghini Aventador turned out to be the most durable.

But here is a comment given by Andrey Veremeev: “We have gained experience. I hope all our participants can now realise how important it is to get ready for such competitions in advance. But it has been a good test of our friendship as all broken cars were immediately disassembled to parts which were needed to fix other cars. Now we understand that we are one big family and we can cope with everything when we are together.”

Preliminary result summary. Here you can see the best results in all recorded data collected in all Sunday November 17-th races: