Oliver Eriksson credited his team’s turnaround between qualifying and race day as he claimed Olsbergs MSE’s first Group E win of the season at Grand Prix Trois-Rivières.
Both Oliver and Kevin Eriksson were eliminated before the final of the Battle Bracket on Friday, but were in a class of their own on Saturday as they locked out the opening heat wins before sweeping the top two spots in the main event.
“We found the details,” the younger Eriksson brother told Nitro RX’s Katie Osborne of his team’s upturn in form on Saturday. “We struggled yesterday to read the track, read the start line.
“Today we figured it out. Kevin did starts that… yesterday he was nowhere in the starts and now all of a sudden he does great starts.”
The win has been a long time coming for OMSE, who with Oliver Eriksson have twice topped qualifying this season (Strängnäs and Phoenix II), but despite looking like an easy victory from the outside, from in the car things were less straightforward.
“I’m just so relieved and thanks to the OMSE guys – the propshaft broke on lap two in the final, [it’s a] lucky thing they’re electric cars so I still had motors to pull me round,” Eriksson said. “But yeah, it was a struggle but maybe it was good when the ruts came, it was more independent.
“[On] lap one, over the big kink coming into the horse track, I heard some weird noise and ten out on the straight on lap two it just escalated,” he added. “I managed to feel that it was probably the propshaft broken. [I] started smelling some weird stuff but I kept going, I’m not going to give this one up easy.
“But yeah, we’ve got two motors in the front, two in the rear, and they both seemed to pull so I just tried to manage that. A lot of noise, a lot of vibration in there, but I think my driving was pretty spotless.
“I did one mistake, went a bit wide once but other than that, I kept in the ruts. As I said before the event, that’s going to be the biggest thing. Everyone can drive in snow, but it’s how we manage the ruts and I managed to do it good this time.”