Last weekend, I shot the European Steelchallenge in Winterswijk, Netherlands. This match is a fixed entry in my schedule since 4 years now because it’s a very nice and well organized match with a huge price table and because it can be very nice combined with a short holiday in the beautiful Netherlands!
But to the match – I started in three divisions – Revolver Standard, Revolver Open and in Rimfire. In the last years, I’ve been able to make it to the podium in one of the Revo-Divisions so my expectations have been very high! My goal for this match was, to get at least second in one Revo-Division after Mario Siemeling. To win against Mario is nearly impossible because he is too fast and constant in shooting the Steelchallenge. His draw is lightning fast and first shot times close to one second are impossible for me.
I started my match with the standard Revolver on Roundabout. Good stage to get into the match. not too far away and not too small targets. Went fine – 13,49sec. Solid. But then – Outer Limits. Always again a challenge for me – one not too bad run with 6,01 but also two bad ones with 8,02 und 7,92 – 21,95 sec. overall. Too much! Who cares – from there, it went better again. Speedoption in 14,72 and Accelerator in 13,73. And my best result was Smoke and Hope in 10,24 (think, that was my best Smoke-Run ever!). Finally Five to go – again some probs with the draw – 15,51. So I finished standard with 89,64 Seconds. Quite OK. Nothing really good, but also not too bad. At this time first on the list (but there’ve some serious competitors still been missing). Later then, I heard Marios Result – something below 80 seconds – unbelievable! But then, there was something new this time – Chrono! Nobody had this on the list. Minimum power factor requested was 110. I had no prob to make this with my ARES-125grs-Titegroup-load – 120 PF. Easy. Others had more trouble with this. So also Mario. He missed the PF and got DQed! I don´t want to comment this PF, measure, rules, process issue here. Just one thing – I really would have won at the range. Sorry Mario!
With Open Revolver, I started on Five to go. It doesn´t work for me this time and I got a 14,35. Too much to win! Roundabout worked much better – 11,33. An once again Outer Limits. 19,70! Thats definetely not my stage. Speedoption was OK – 12,45 and Accelerator fine for me with 11,79. I couldn´t make some time up on Smoke and Hope with 10,79 so finally, I had a 80,40 and finished third – only 0,21 seconds behind the second. Lost on Outer Limits or Five to go !
The final run for me was Rimfire – totally released from any expectations. Start was on Outer Limits – and guess – 15,24! Even one run below 5 seconds! And also the rest was fine: Speedoption 9,38, Accelerator 10,00, Smoke and Hope 8,33 and Five to Go at 10,17! That would have been a very fine result but unfortunately I had a big malfunction 0n Roundabout and so I had to take a 3,15 for the result ( rest was at 2,03/2,08 and 1,92!). Bt who cares! 5. Place in Rimfire really, really good against all the pistol experts!
Results soon to come!
Edit – at least the results as pics from my mobile:
