With a change of plans due to weather I made the drive to LCRC for their season opener with eyes set on the upcoming ROAR nationals at the venue. Lots of fast guys from Ohio made the trip and we put on a show. The track was super fast and the facility as a whole was awesome as always!
They offered practice all day Thursday and Friday. I showed up Friday at noon to get my day of practice in. Main things I was working on was going up in diffs for the high speed on throttle track conditions. I also went up one spring rate in the rear on both buggies as there is just so much on power corners and sweepers throughout. For instance my standard diff set-up is 7-7-5 and for this track I ended at 10-12-9 but I think i'll go higher for the next one.
Qualifying was Saturday and out of the gate it was good with a TQ in Nitro buggy and a 3rd in ebuggy. After two more rounds I would find myself seated 2nd in Nitro buggy and 3rd in Ebuggy heading into the A-finals. I was primarily running ultra soft typos during qualifying with temps around 55*. I also tried a SSLW Chainlink in one qualifier in ebuggy and it was still pretty fast but had to be driven hard. My biggest thing with running ultra soft on these on power tracks is that they can balloon too much so I felt I needed something a little harder but with some testing we were finding the LW to not quite have as much grip as the regular compounds on this track.
Enter main day and after a fun afternoon of throwing the football with some youngsters it was time to race. I opted to run regular SS Double Downs for the 25min A Nitro final. The temps were the warmest still in the mid 50's and the groove was coming up a bit. Grip was good in the line and dust outside of it. Overall the tire selection was on point and my buggy was fast. Joe Spencer and I had some great battles in the first 10 minutes until we came upon lapped traffic that was battling and they gave us fits. Joe got into the pipe and I clipped his wing and got out wide. Spencer took the lead, Joe got out of shape and crashed, then I winged a lapped car and fell back. So Now Spencer had a 4 second lead over me and the rest of the race was trying to track him down. I threw down some heaters including the fastest nitro lap of 35.1 and with a mistake of his on the second to last lap I got into the lead but within half a lap jumped off track on the left and gave him the lead right back. He held on to take the win by 0.5 after the 25min main. Great fun!
Ebuggy was our final race and for 6 minutes it was another great one. I started 3rd and running the same set of SS Double downs set out chasing the two ahead of me. I got by Spencer on the left wagon wheel 3 laps in and chased down Joe. He is so consistent in ebuggy though and I did make one pass on the back ski jump and he subsequently got me with a tighter line on the next corner to take back the position. I stayed tight with him for those first 6 minutes before cartwheeling ahead of the center jump which set me back. I still held 2nd until about a lap and a half to go and I felt my batter dumping. I crossed the line for my final lap but could tell it was about to die and it did a few corners later. So I didn't finish the race but due to crossing the line and the time nearly expiring I still finished 3rd. This track was so on throttle I need bigger than a 5600 for it for next time. (Or not take a practice lap, or just drive easier.) haha.
Overall a great weekend of close racing and I learned a lot in preparation for the ROAR Nats. My biggest lesson though is a PSA for everyone. I have liked to clean my car with endust at tracks with a good compressor. Well I was doing that this weekend especially as we got into qualifying and in preparation for the mains. Well I was told after the main by someone who saw my car was clean already and I picked up the endust and they said "do you get the endust squat"? I said "what's that?" They said "when I used to use endust it would make the car squat a ton for the first half of the race." Then I thought about what I was fighting a bit with my car as the weekend went on (And I cleaned it more) and it is absolutely causing me issues. It's like running brand new driveline where the car rolls so much and transfers a lot more weight. So what it boils down to is no more endust for me and I look forward to more consistent results in the future as a result of this revelation!
