I recently attended the 2016 ROAR 1:8 Nationals held at the world class facility of Thornhill Racing Circuit. With the nationals being held 3 out of the last 4 years in Texas you would think that you would eventually get used to the weather but man is that place humid. Since 2014 when the nationals were at Thornhill last, they had made the track quite a bit smaller and put a huge roof over the track which was pretty awesome.
To start out the day in both Truggy and Buggy I ran M3 Hole Shots as it was still earlier in the day and had a good solid run in both classes.
Starting the week off was Wednesday which was open practice so you got as much running in as you wanted. The day went pretty good figuring out the track and what tread pattern and compound I liked the most in both cars. From the start both cars felt pretty good just making some small minor changes for the most part. Thursday was also practice with two rounds of seeding practice were your best three laps counted. This also went really good in one class and pretty good in the other. My fastest three laps for each car came out of the first round I believe, when the track was still a bit damp and had a lot more grip. My Buggy felt pretty good I was able to get an 11th seed when all of practice was over and a middle of the pack seed for truck in the B group. Really the only thing I lacked was a small push in my Buggy but nothing too terrible. My engines in both cars felt great and the tire situation didn’t seem as bad as it was at the warm up from what people were saying so I was happy. Friday started qualifying and with two rounds that day it was hard to say what was going to happen. But later in the week each day the track crew watered less and less every night so the track was becoming dryer faster and not staying damp for as long as some of the days had been.
To start out the day in both Truggy and Buggy I ran M3 Hole Shots as it was still earlier in the day and had a good solid run in both classes.
The second round was also good just making slight changes to my Buggy to try and get the push out of it and had a few bobbles in the run. As for truck it was also a decent run so no complaints for the day. After the reseed after the first day of qualifying I was put back into the A group for truck and was 14th in both classes. So for Saturday I would get last pick on the drivers stand and this put me on the complete opposite side then where I was in the previous days and took a bit of time to get used to. The third round of qualifying everything was good just made some minor mistakes getting used to driving on the other side. I knew for the 4th round in both cars I needed another really good run to give me to really good runs in both cars and I did just that. I made sure in both my Buggy and Truggy runs that I had no mistakes and it payed off giving me good runs which put me 12th in the truck main and 7th in the odd semi for Buggy. Saturday evening racing got finished pretty early so we went into the air-conditioned tent and completely freshened up both my cars. As for my Buggy I was still looking for a perfect setup and Ty had said that his buggy was really good in the last run so I put his setup on to try for the semi warm-up.
In warm-up for Truggy most of the Pro-Line Team all tested different compounds of the Blockade Tire to figure out what had the best grip. As for the Buggy warmup everything was good my car was really good it had smallest push still but it was very easy to drive and controllable so I was happy confident in both cars for the mains. In the buggy semi everything started off pretty good I shuffled back a spot on the first corner and then two corners later gained 4-spots back so it was going well but had a racing incident coming onto the straight breaking a tie-rod end. My dad was able to get it fixed and put me back out to test tires to see if anything was better then what I was running. Overall for Buggy I finished in the 26th spot which was an improvement from last year but I think I could of made the main my cars were good tires were good and engine was good as well just unfortunate racing incident. In Truck I had a pretty laid back race nothing spectacular just kind of held my own and ended up finishing in the 8th spot after it was all finished.
Overall it was a pretty good weekend and we move onto the next race. I would also like to take a second to say thanks to all my sponsors that helped me out at the race my cars, Tires and engines were all great the whole time.
