The Alastaro track lay empty and quiet in the early morning hours - view from the tower 

The event was included in the FIA & UEM European Drag Racing Championships as round #3 for the FIA Car teams and round #4 for the UEM Drag Bike teams. It was also included in the NDRS Dragracing Series which is administered by Speedgroup.

The weather played tricks and interrupted the two pro qualifying days, but did not intefere with the sportsman qualifications.

The two days of qualifications for the championship teams which should have included two sessions per day per class was cut down to one per day, which made the adjustment to the track more difficult than usual for the teams, which normally use all four sessions to get a good base setup.

On saturday evening a thunderstorm hit the track area with full force and the light struck on several locations within the actual track area. As a result there was a long lastning power cut which made further qualifications impossible although the rain stopped. As it should show on sunday morning, there had been damage to the timing system and internet connection on site which turned out to be severe and meant  FHRA potentially faced cancellation of the eliminations.

But after a delay to successfully repair the timing system, eliminations finally started not long after 2pm. The reporting was done with some delay via mobile broadband by FHRA and Speedgroup in co-operation with Eurodragster.com

Rain was forecast for sunday too but for once it failed to appear and racing continued into the long Finnish evening. The finals were eventually completed at 9:30 pm and surprisingly many spectators stayed until the last run on track was finished.

The track conditions was otherwise good and some real good numbers were put down, both in the FIA car and UEM Drag Bike classes. Read the reports class by class to find out more!

The event was filmed for broadcast on national televsion as well as being filmed for the championship tv-production and web-tv production which will be posted at the Speedgroup website www.speedgroup.eu

Photographer Patrik Jacobsson´s photo gallery from the event can be watched at

www.racebilder.nuclick gallery, the choose drag racing , 2011 and Nitro Nat´s.. a lot of nice shots covering both championship and sportsman racers

Aila, Pirjo and Eva-Karin took turns in being present at the Speedgroup Service Center located in the pits at Alastaro, which had base with Clutch Service at this event.


Tapio Valja FHRA, with Kjell Pettersson who was on site to consult in track preparations questions (Kjell and his crew prepared the track at Tierp a month ago) with Michael Gullqvist (right) managing director of Speedgroup and operationg his own team in Pro Mod the full championship. At Alastaro he ended 2nd



On duty in the tower - Dave Alexander (far) was the expert announcer while the FIA Car classes were on track. FHRA:s Laurie made sure the results lists were posted on the FHRA site and shared with Eurodragster.com Not in the photo the three announcers that covered the finnish live reporting and in addition Speedgroup co-ordinator Åsa Kinnemar who reported all results the championship teams made as they happened via Eurodragster.com service and thanks to Andy Rogers who was standby back in the UK


Tech inspector Peter Larsson (left) and  Jari Halonen who is a FHRA crew member caring for the bike classes as well as being a member of the European UEM Drag Bike committee


The track was wet to say the least when the rain and thunderstorm hit the area saturday evening and put an end to the further qualifications in the championship classes and qualifications and eliminations in the sportsman classes