Much more than last year, when he won the IMCA Worlds, Italy's Salvatore Noviello could count on the admiration from nearly all racers. They saw with their proper eyes he's a tremendous hard worker, needing nearly no sleep. At the IMCA Worlds he set up the track, had to control the lap counter, had to built cars and bodies, and was - despite all this - one of the fastest racers, probably the only one able to beat the Czechs now the mother of that other wonderboy, James Cleave, had her umpteenth hart attack as excuse for not showing. Cleave's mother must have a very special hart, since it is always attacked day before important races. Noviello is a total other temperament, not shy to try even what seems impossible. His approach of things is (a) rational and (b) professional. He has a clear view on the problems of actual slot-racing. With NSR he develops new tracks, new controllers, new tires, etc. The next step could be a new 124 RTR Nascar Model Car, if necessary with an own chassis. There is a tremendous market for such cars, and not only in the States. With the venue of an intellectual as Noviello, model car racing can definitively put an end at the Kurt Petri era, where one person, mainly interested in lucrative business, built a total illegal distribution monopoly of a Japanese car, sold three times above their value, without paying the EEC taxes on it. At the IMCA Worlds the PlaFit racers were so strongly defeated by the new MoMo SW2, that Kurt Petri's Pla-Fits are ripe for the museums. The all-German MoMo SW2 (not the SW1 behaving strange under Nascar bodies!) is the better car of the two but has still its initial shortcomings, due to its fragility. During the warm-up for the team race "Piki" van Rossem crashed his carefully prepared MoMoSW2 and found it totally bent, no longer to race, so that he was condemned to start on a Pla-Fit, having no chances to win against the MoMos with their better road-holding. Noviello, the wokaholic, will now study the German car to discover how it can be improved for international competition. A good thing is that NSR will develop own front and rear tires for model cars, so that model car racing can become totally independent from Petri's Pla-Fit + Scaleauto gang. As soon as the new tire is on the market, we'll present it to our readers. And, please, don't forget one thing: without Salvatore Noviello, there should have never been a 17th Nations Cup at Ostend. More than everyone he was the man of that 17th Nations Cup! Thank you, Salvatore.Pic: Bob Demeyer.