Deutschnofen (ck) - With their 20th career win in the doubles event Patrick Pigneter/Florian Clara (ITA) responded to the intermediate world cup lead of Russia’s Pavel Porshnev/Ivan Lazarev and tied the ranking with 370 points on each side. “Now we can take it easy in Russia. Porshnev/Lazarev are the favourites in their home country, but we know that we can challenge them. After all, we have won there in the past”, said Pigneter and promises an exciting last third of the world cup season. In today’s race in Deutschnofen the Russians could not keep up with Pigneter/Clara. “We had two perfect runs”, said Pigneter. “This counts even more as we have been two seconds behind in the training runs.” And really, the Russians were far away from two perfect runs: “Especially in the first run our equipment was not up to speed. The second run was much better”, said Ivan Lazarev, and: “But we are looking forward to racing in Novouralsk in two weeks. We like the track there”. He does not want to think about the world cup final in Umhausen in Austria in early March yet: “This is far away. Who knows how the weather in March will be”. Not bored at all are Christian Schatz/Gerhard Mühlbacher (AUT) with their steak of now four consecutive third places: “We can go on like that for another two or three races”, Mühlbacher said. “Right now we both are very popular at home, coming home with flowers every weekend.” But they know that for a spot at the very top they have to work a little bit more: “We have had changing conditions between training and race, yesterday for example it was colder which we would have preferred for this track. But we will have to work harder to find the right settings to be fast on all tracks with all conditions. We know that we are not there yet, but tried to make the best out of what we have and so far this has worked quite well.” The singles will start their competitions tomorrow, Sunday, at 9.30am with the women’s first run. Final Result World Cup Doubles (12): 1. Patrick PIGNETER/Florian CLARA (ITA), 0:58,14(1), 0:57,88(1), 1:56,02 2. Pavel PORSHNEV/Ivan LAZAREV (RUS), 0:58,55(2), 0:58,13(2), 1:56,68 3. Christian SCHATZ/Gerhard MÜHLBACHER (AUT), 0:58,92(3), 0:58,76(3), 1:57,68 4. Thomas SCHOPF/Andreas SCHÖPF (AUT), 0:58,99(4), 0:59,01(4), 1:58,00 5. Andrzej LASZCZAK/Damian WANICZEK (POL), 0:59,39(6), 0:59,34(5), 1:58,73 6. Aleksandr EGOROV/Petr POPOV (RUS), 0:59,75(7), 0:59,40(6), 1:59,15 7. Christian SCHOPF/Andreas SCHOPF (AUT), 0:59,31(5), 0:59,88(7), 1:59,19 8. Björn KIERSPEL/Christian WICHAN (GER), 0:59,90(8), 1:00,14(8), 2:00,04 World Cup Ranking Doubles (4/6): 1. Pavel PORSHNEV/Ivan LAZAREV (RUS) 370 1. Patrick PIGNETER/Florian CLARA (ITA) 370 3. Christian SCHATZ/Gerhard MÜHLBACHER (AUT) 280 4. Andrzej LASZCZAK/Damian WANICZEK (POL) 225 5. Christian SCHOPF/Andreas SCHOPF (AUT) 208 6. Thomas SCHOPF/Andreas SCHÖPF (AUT) 206 7. Björn KIERSPEL/Christian WICHAN (GER) 185 8. Hannes CLARA/Stefan GRUBER (ITA) 167 9. Aleksandr EGOROV/Petr POPOV (RUS) 161 10. Stanislav KOVSHIK/Ivan RODIN (RUS) 155