Well, my DI made it's "official" debut tonight, at my local off road track.
It really wasn't the best of tracks to debut the car. Besides from me not having raced a 4wd off roader in about 4 years, the track, to put it simply, was the roughest dirt track I have raced on in my 22 years racing
It was nothing short of a joke..... I have plenty of vids and pics from last years Worlds at Collegno, and I can honestly say that what I raced on tonight was a LOT worse
To give you an idea of the roughness, there were several places on the track where your car would hit some rut or bump and be pitched into the air as though someone threw it
You couldn't even use full throttle down the main straight for fear of the car being "tossed" into the drivers stand
So anyway....
In all honesty the car struggled in these conditions (although most other cars did too).
We had 3 heats and 1 final.
In the first heat I was off the pace (bad battery) plus I made too many mistakes over the numerous jumps. On some jumps the car would jump perfectly, with no mid-air throttle correction required, but on other jumps the car was very difficult, though this certainly could have been due to the overall track condition.
For heat 2 I replaced the kit front tyres with some Losi red Taper pins, and made sure I used one of my proper race packs. The car was much improved in terms of steering and grip, but remained terrible through the bumpy stuff. The car was a bit too quick in a straight line, and I unsoldered the motor after 9 or so laps
For heat 3 I moved the rear shock in on the arms and ran stiffer front springs. The front was a bit better, but the back was much worse.
For the final I put in a 19T motor in an attempt to slow it down a bit. This worked, but I made too many mistakes trying to catch the leaders - on this track pushing hard was not the answer!
Some general thoughts-
On the few decently smooth parts of the track, the car was working VERY well.
For these conditions, I had the car set up too heavily dampened, however there was no time for me to rebuild the shocks.
The diff was starting to slip in the last heat and in the final - certainly the lack of slipper and extreme conditions were a major factor here.
No anti-squat adjustment could be a problem. On this track, I noticed a few guys have success by running some anti-squat on the rear, obviously something that I couldn't try.
Finally, one thing I can say is that the car IS tough. I had plenty of big crashes - either flipping the car from jumps or the car rolling end-over-end after hitting the big bumps, and it survived.
The wing (and the wing mounts) copped a battering but the rest of the car held up well. I was especially happy that the drivetrain took such abuse without failing.
The potential is there.... but the car is certainly going to require some different approaches when it comes to setup and driving, and certainly the conditions I encountered tonight are not too agreeable with the car
