This week the 2008 IFMAR 1:10 200mm on-road world championship is held in Lisbon, Portugal.

The cars raced are gas powered 10th scale 200mm touring cars. Practice and qualifying have finished, and the four drivers that have qualified for the A-main are:

1. Jilles Groskamp (NL) - 32 Laps in 10:11.241 [Kyosho/Sirio]

2. Chris Tosolini (USA) - 32 Laps in 10:11.250 [Kyosho/Sirio]

3. Daniele Ielasi (IT) - 32 Laps in 10:11.904 [Kyosho/IDM]

4. Tironi Francesco (IT) - 32 Laps in 10:12.414 [Kyosho/Sirio]

A really impressive drive by Jilles Groskamp. Apparently it's his fist big gas race! The rest of the A-main will be determined by the bump-up system, so we'll only know after the other mains have finished who will be joining them.

As you can tell, the Kyosho cars are very dominent at the moment, although some competitors have had bad luck, so we might see some surprises in the finals. The track is very demanding for the engines which causes high fuel consumption. This in turn makes it hard for drivers to complete their 10 minute heats. It's either make an extra pit stop, or be easier on the throttle finger to make it to the finish line.

The drivers even got two more minutes of warm up time before the heats to be able to fine tune their engines for the changing weather conditions.

So far I haven't seen any news of shockingly innovative products in the pits, but there are some interesting tweaks and updates to the cars and there is surely more news coming out of the pits in the coming days.

If you want to keep track of the action in Lisbon over the weekend, check out the following links:

The official worlds website: www.world-championship-2008.com

As usual with these kinds of events; for a complete up to date report and lots of great pictures go over to RedRC