“I never give up wanting to win”, Balestri says 1:10 World Title “the missing piece”
The first ever event Red RC covered was the 2007 1:10 Nitro Touring Car European Championship in Madrid, Spain. The class was still the new kid on the block and there was plenty of hype about the category. The race would be Xray’s first venture into nitro with them bringing in star names Teemu Leino and Jilles Groskamp from electric touring car in their quest to win with their new NT1. Dario Balestri was the defending Champion and the real star of nitro onroad. He was Italian, he exclusively raced nitro, and he was one of chosen ones for iconic Italian engine manufacturer Novarossi. This was a time when your engine sponsor was the most important element of your race package – without the right power you weren’t going to win and the makers of these little engines were very selective about who got one of the ‘special’ ones! The market also had a newcomer in the engine department in Team Orion, headed up by a certain Adrien Bertin, who to this day is still the only driver to have achieved the double of being World Champion of both 1:8 and 1:10. This was a golden era of 1:10 nitro onroad.
