The 2024 European championship tracks: Kristianstad analyzed by Lorenzo Travisanutto

Welcome to Kristianstad, the circuit that, after two years, will host again the OK and OKJ European Championship. The fourth round will take place on the Swedish track that has seen Lorenzo Travisanutto win 2 out of his 3 world titles, the OK world championship and the KZ2 World Cup ,. The Friulan driver won the world championship here in 2018 and 2021 respectively, and who better than him can analyze the track of Kristianstad for us. 

Photo credits: Manuela Nicoletti

Features of the track and key points

There are several key points where drivers can make the difference on this track: looking for grip is crucial and doing good in those parts of the track where there’s more grip is essential. As with other occasions, tyre management is important here as well:

"Knowing how to manage the tires, especially on the gas, makes the difference. [... ] The way the driver interprets the management of the tires, in order to manage them better and carry on with performance is important. Their performance tends to get worse, so managing them, especially in the last heats and in the second half of the final, is essential."

Other points where the teams can make a difference are the chassis and the engine: Kristianstad is a track where we have many restarts, so the engine plays a key role, and it’s on this aspect that Iame made a point at COTF few weeks ago, as well as for the chassis: Kart Republic was one step ahead of the other teams and will be the favorite for the weekend.

Photo credits: Matteo Segato

The track layout offers various possibilities to overtake, especially due to its width:

“the track itself is really wide, especially in breaking, so defending the position is not so obvious: this allows us to see races where you can recover easily”

It’s possible that we’ll witness races full of comebacks, where positions won’t remain frozen and some drivers that start from the back of the field can surprise us with some great overtakes.

Predictions and favourites for the weekend

As mentioned previously and seen at the COTF, the favorites for the weekend are the KR drivers:

“Champions of the future gives us great benchmarks for the European championship. All the KR drivers will be favorites in both classes, they showed a really strong performance, even though Ramaekers had an issue, but they’ll still be amongst the favorites.”

Photo credits: @lrnphoto

Travisanutto highlights the fact that track records will be broken, as we saw in other tracks this year as well: Maxxis tyres are way more efficient compared to the ones used in the previous years and this allows drivers to run faster.

The question mark that, as for the other rounds, can change everything is the rain, which can help the drivers who have more experience on the track and in the category. Weather conditions aside, the predictions for the round of Kristianstad are quite clear, but let’s get ready to live a weekend that could also give us different results than we expect.