This past weekend I made my annual no layover flight to Atlanta to attend my favorite venue for R/C racing the Wicked Weekend event. I love this venue because it’s a large covered pavilion where we are guaranteed to race yet have the open air to still feel more outside and have a bit better air quality than fully indoors.
Tire wise I had two new treads to bring to this event this year that weren’t at my disposal last year, the new Lux and SuperNova. I brought more Lux but with them only watering at night and the track left to dry all day, there was generally a bit of dust just outside the line and a bit more on the line in the top right section. I felt the SuperNova in SSLW ended up handling this a bit better as I now find it to be our best tire for these hard packed tracks with some dust on them. Unfortunately I only had two sets of SSLW SuperNova and two sets in SLW to make use of thru the weekend. I used one set of SSLW for a couple practice runs and then all but one qualifier in both buggies, saving the other set for the main if I would need that compound.
Qualifying would start pretty well with a 5 in Ebuggy and a 3 in nitro buggy just behind Kyosho teammate Phi! Q2 would be Saturday morning and the track was a bit wetter and my LW compound wasn’t as good with moisture in the track. Either a standard compound or saucing would have been beneficial but I only had the 1 set so I just dealt with it and took the slower round. Event though I was around 10-11 in all 3 classes in the round it at least put me into the Amains where I could push a bit harder in Q3 to improve positions. I was able to do just that with a solid 4th in Ebuggy where I tried the SLW compound which were decent just a little too hard resulting in a bit of a lack of acceleration out of corners. In nitro buggy I had a good run overall with just a few blown corners and came away with a 5th. This would all culminate in me starting 4th in both buggies and 11th in nitro truggy where I didn’t have the new SuperNova and so ran the same set of SSLW Diamanté for every practice and qualifier.
Now it was main time and while they didn’t water as much over the night the track held a decent underlying bit of moisture because it was a more rainy day. The grip was still good though just not as high as last year. I opted to go from taping just my rear foams to taping the fronts as well as the grip was good and I was ballooning the front tires a bit especially in Ebuggy so I opted for the consistency.
First was the nitro Truggy main where I opted for my one set of SSLW Gridirons on this one. My truck was the best it had been all weekend and the Alpha Falcon was running well. However 18 trucks on a 32 second track is too many at starting 11th, well, let’s just say the start was not good for me. I quickly found myself in 17th and it was just an uphill battle from there. But as mentioned my truck felt pretty good and I was able to move up a bit. However with 10min to go my inner bead of my front right started coming apart and I toned down my driving to hopefully keep the tire to the end of the race and I was able to do so even moving up a spot and in the end finishing 9th.
Next was ebuggy A1 where starting 4th was much better and I clung behind Maifield the first couple laps. I ran my SLW SuperNova in this one and while they were pretty easy to drive they were a bit too hard and so just lacked a little pace. I would be a few tenths a lap slower than most of the field but I was able to keep it clean and capitalize on others mistakes and get into second and hang on the final 5 minutes for a
solid 2nd in A1.
Next was our 30 minute Nitro buggy Amain and in our warmup for the race I already felt my buggy was the best it had been at the start of a main in a long time. I used my one new set of SSLW SuperNova in this one and they felt very good on the hardpacked track with some dust outside the line and a bit on the line in some places. I escaped a close call on the top left on lap one as car 3 hit the pipe and jumped back into the line and hit me but my car had a forcefield it seemed and he ricoched off of me and I kept going now in 3rd. I would hold that 3rd for the first half of the race with just a couple mistakes before having a bit of a back and forth with Maifield for 2nd midway through the race before he made a bigger mistake allowing me to pull away in 2nd the last 5 minutes of the race so an excellent finish for me on a condition I have struggled with in the past.
Finally we ended with A2 of Ebuggy in which I opted to use the same set of tires from my Nitro buggy final as I thought my pace could be a bit better with the softer compound. It worked too because my top 5 average was 8th in A1 but in A2 I was 2nd even with not finishing the last 3 minutes. It was an eventful main hwere I got into 3rd on lap 2 and tried to stay with the lead pair until they made a mistake together on lap 8 on the top right and as they got marshalled I was right with them as the 3 of us tried to take the last corner onto the straight all together. I got inside Phend and we bumped and I got a little out of shape and my front inside diffed out causing me to shift a bit which got into Seth who went cartwheeling and it was just momentary chaos. I came out of it in 2nd but would make a mistake on my own on lap 11 and loose 5 seconds falling to 5th. I caught back up to the 3-4-5 battle I think and got tagged in the top left and a number of us went over the back double together and got tangled and I landed square on front arm and snapped it ending my race. Fortuntely my 2nd from A1 was good enough to take 3rd overall in the class.
Overall a great weekend of racing. I feel if I would have had more sets of the SuperNova with me the results could have been even better and so this is my reminder for next year to bring more of them! Two podium finishes is best showing of the year I believe and is a good feeling as we build towards the worlds in just over a months time.
Set-up Notes: In Nitro buggy we are testing a few new parts for Worlds and so I do not have my set-up posted here, but you can use my Ebuggy set-up as a reference to go off of as usually I would be running the same set-up in both cars. In nitro buggy the one main difference I did was with shocks. In ebuggy I like the 1.2x6 front and 1.2x8 rear but in nitro buggy in the limited set-up time I like the 1.2x8t front and 1.5x5 rear with 450/700 oil.
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