Had a mixed meeting with the 501X last night.
I got the car working very well well come finals time (2 A-finals) but had a few reliability issues.
I won the first final but retired from the second final whilst again leading.
Firstly, I discovered that the kit ball-joints aren't the strongest
On one part of a track you have a section which is basically 2 sets of double jumps followed by a tabletop. You have to get the whole section just right to get through it quickly, or you either crash or roll through a couple of the jumps.
I crashed a few times during the night - and a couple of times the front camber link popped off - luckily no broken parts.
I am going to run the new Ultima ball-joints on the car as the ball size is the same but they are much harder to pop on, so they should be harder to pop off too
In the second final I seized the drive-train up
What happened was one of the screws that hold those little bearings that stop the belt skipping had come loose, and the screw and bearing moved across and jammed the slipper
I think I'd better use some threadlock on those screws!
Finally, one thing I tried which was very successful was running TA-05 plastic diff outdrives in the front diff. There was no wear and the diff was so much lighter!
Our state championships are coming up in about 5 weeks - after that I might try and see how long the TA-05 outdrives will last in the rear diff.