Just for comparison, I ran my Procat indoors last week in our 4WD heats just to see how she faired. I had a Trinity Kinwald 11x4, 1700 SCRCs and a Tekin 411G2 speedo and whilst I was a long way down on the top boys running 5.5 and lipo, the car was plenty capable against the other drivers in my final
There was only 1 car that out pulled me down the straight and I'll sort that with gearing (I was cautious as I didn't know how good the cells would be)
If you can, cycle your cells and use them to get back into the swing. Your cars handling is based on nicads/nimhs so changing to lipo is going to mean you needs loads of weight to set it up properly, which might pee you off in the short term.
Hope this helps and makes sense,
Ian