Pro-Line Chisels a top 10 finish!
Some of you might be reading this and thinking to yourself, why is Scott writing a blog for Pro-Line? Well, the answer is simple-my heart is and always will be with Pro-Line and I still support them as they have supported my over the past 20 years. So, that leads me to this post and letting you know what’s going on the rock crawling world of Axial and Pro-Line.
The past weekend was the 4th Annual Axial West Coast Championships located in Cisco Grove, CA. This is about 40 minutes outside of Reno west on the I-80. On Friday June 24th-26th was the Last Chance Qualifier (LCQ) where 70 competitors took the rocks for a top 20 spot to transfer into the championships on Saturday. As the 4th place finisher in last year’s event, I qualified straight into the championships. And I’m glad because the 5 courses were some of the most brutal I’ve seen. To top that off, national level drivers were competing for the top 20 spots so the competition was fierce.
On Saturday morning myself, Brad Dumont and Brandon Coonce, all fellow Axial drivers, headed to course #5. In my bag of arsenal were Pro-Line Chisels in G8 compound, Pro-Line two-stage memory foam in the rear and Pro-Line
Oversized memory foam in the front. To top it off, I had the newest weapon in the rock crawling world, the XR10. Combining a mean machine with the best crawling tires in the business, my 6 minutes started.
I finished the first course with a negative 9. Not too shabby but could have been better as I stepped on the 3rd gate and cost me 10 points. Nerves were apparent with the weight of the XR10’s first comp on all of our shoulders.
After all 5 courses I managed -99 score. This put me in the 10th spot overall.
I’m really pleased with my result since I only had 2 hours on the XR10 before the comp, have never really driven a motor on axle (MOA) crawler, and have done very little crawling in the last year. I was only 2 gates out of the top spot. Congrats to Jon Ripplinger and all the winners of the 2010 AWCC.
Here’s a cool video of the XR10’s in action. You’ll see the Chisels in action from the 3:00-5:20 mark.
The one thing that has been consistent on my crawler year-to-year is the Chisels. There was not line I couldn’t do that others couldn’t-side-hilling capability was amazing; descending was amazing; and, climbing ability was 2nd to none. What’s nice about the Chisels in the longevity of them. The set on my rig this year is the same set I ran last year at the AWCC, the World Championships, and have ran throughout the year during the AWCCQ’s. I’d say I have at least 10 hours on them in total. To get just a little more performance out of them, I added some sipes to the tread. This allowed the tread to flex a little bit more making the tires grab harder when climbing and have a great deal more of side-hilling stability.
Thank you to all my sponsors for believing in me and my efforts to give them the best results possible (Axial, Pro-Line, Futaba, Tekin, Lunsford, Oakley)
Photo credit: Tazz Shot-N-The Dark Photography
Video credit: Lisa Budvarson Team Debead Productions
Scott Hughes
