May, 1 2010

   Headed out to Philip Atondos track in Marysville yesterday for the 2nd round of the NorCal Championship Series.  I hadn't been to this track before but I had heard good things about it! The track turned out to be a lot of fun and the turnout was once again great with probably near 150 entries or so!

  In Buggy my 801X in practice was a bit hard to drive. I still had a setup on it from slicker tracks and this track had more bite and was a bit rougher than what I had been running on. Thus, I decided to shorten up my camber links all the way around and give that a try. I got back out there for a bit more practice and it felt much better. I also decided to run soft Cityblocks all day and they stayed very consistent and just let me do my job!. My job was to take TQ in the 2nd round by just tenths of a second over Philip. We had a good battle on the clock. Come main time I took off from pole position and didn't look back. The first 3 minutes or so were a little sketchy. I had a few mistakes and kept allowing Philip to catch back up but then I found my groove and was gone! I amassed a 2 lap lead after 15 minutes with 5 minutes to go. Then my rear diff started to blow! I slowly lost my rear wheel drive and had to limp around the track. Luckily my lead was large enough and I still came away with over a lap win on 2nd!

  In Truggy my 801Xt was feeling pretty good after I did the camber link changes to it as well. I also chose S Cityblocks for the day and hoped they would last. My Qualifiers were decent just had a mistake here or there on the first one. On the second one they called me done after crossing the line so I pulled off, only to find out after the race that I hadn't finished yet...... So I got jipped on that one and ended up Qualified 2nd behind Philip. In the mains leading up to mine I was asked to help pit someone. I went to warm up his car and noticed a couple of his tires coming unglued. He didn't have anything else to run so we ran over to my pit and yanked my Cityblocks off my truck and put them on his. He ended up taking the win but had to limp around the last lap due to blowing a rear diff in his Kyosho. He then had a 20min race he had to marshal for and then he would be right back up. So I took his truck and began rebuilding the diff and rear bulkhead. I got it done just as the tone was about to go off and got him to the starting line only for after about a lap his steering servo screw to come off. So we fixed that and got him out there so he could at least have some fun. I was hoping to still have some tread left on the tires for my main! haha

  Well I patched up the edges of the tires with some glue and was ready to go. After the Buggy main and then marshaling it was right into the truck main. I went to turn on my truck and wiggled my wheels and noticed a disconnect.  About 20% of my steering left and right was numb and didn't do anything then it would jump to that spot when you turned far enough. I'm like, geeze, I'm going to loose this servo in this race. Well we got out there and man was it a handful at the start. I had no fine steering inputs so it was like I was learning to drive the car full lock to full lock! At the start I fell back to 3rd and just didn't feel comfortable. It was just a handful not having precise steering movements. However I began to get used to it and caught up and took the lead about 5 minutes in and never looked back. I got stronger as the race went on and the servo miraculously held out and I took the victory!

So it was a nice day with a Double Victory for my Tamiya 801X and 801Xt!

Next event is Australia for the NSW championship in Sydney which I leave for on May 17th!