The past week/ weekend held the 1:10 EP Australian National titles at my home track Chargers RC Race Club. We knew long in advance that the track was going to be held on a sugared surface with a race control tire, that being an X2 Suburb in the rear and X2 Scrub as the front Tire. Practice was meant to kick off on the Wednesday which would be a full day of open practice but as it always is down here in Australia at this time of the year, the weather didn’t agree with us. On Thursday afternoon after the club put a lot of effort into drying the track we finally got two have two practice runs for each vehicle. This practice was almost a bit of a waste of time for trying setup as the conditions were very slippery due to the rain the track had copped but it was a chance to get use to the fast and small technical layout.
Thursday night the club decided to lay down another 100 kilograms of sugar all over the track to try and get the track back to a high traction to suit the controlled tire that was chosen for the race. Come the first race Friday morning the track was instantly at a much higher grip. With the sun hitting down on the track the grip began to come up immensely as we had 1 round of practice for 2WD day (Friday) before 4 round of qualifying began. Changing around a lot of setup from when the track was slippery, my B5M was easy to drive and quick right out of the gate. 2WD Front Tire was actually open to choose whatever you wanted to run but from previous testing I found the X2 Scrubs for the 2WD was also just as good. Before and during qualifying we didn’t change that many things on my car to get it faster and easier to drive. We stiffened our suspension, lowered our roll centres and went down on the ride height and the car was performing exceptionally. I managed to TQ all 4 rounds of qualifying and once finals came around I dominated A1 and A2 to take the 2WD National championship. I was very pleased with how my driving went and how the car handled and the amount we learned on setup for this type of surface. My reedy electronics performed perfect all of the week and minimal changes were made from my standard ESC setup to suit these conditions.
Saturday it was 4WD time, we again were allowed 1 practice round in the morning and straight into the same qualifying and finals setup. By the time Saturday had kicked off in the morning the track had really come up to a very high traction, even more so than yesterday. My 4WD handled very edgy during the 1st practice run and we had to make a bunch of changes to try get the car easy to drive and comfortable for the first qualifier. We again stiffened our suspension, dropped our ride height, cambers and lowered our roll centres and the car ended up being decent for the 1st qualifier and I took the TQ by a large margin. As the track got faster and faster we found it hard to find setup changes to get the car easier to drive and just more comfortable. I managed to take the TQ having won 3 out of the 4 qualifiers and we had the car at a pretty good setup for the finals. With my smooth driving I was able to drive the car a little smoother as it wasn’t as comfortable as I would have liked it to be on the day but I managed to win the first two A-Mains once again to take the 4WD championship!
Overall I was very happy with how the weekend went and it is good to finally have my first two 1:10 Modified nationals championships, it was a great learning curve especially running on this type of surface. Me and my father are going out to the track tomorrow to do some more testing as we want to try some more things on each car (mainly 4WD) to see if we can get the car very comfortable on this type of surface so I can push the car more and more. I will come back to you Brent as to what I find with more testing. But once again I thank all of you for your continuous support throughout my career so far and I look forward to more great results to come!
Sincerely,
Kyle McBride & Scott McBride
