Seeding & Quals Day 1 @ ROAR Nationals

It’s midnight here and I’ve finally finished all of my “to do” items. So I’ll try to make this quick so I can get to bed.

Yesterday we had a quick round of practice then went into two rounds of seeding. I’ve done this before and it works well. Basically the organizers use these rounds to do a pre-sort before qualifying. The racers are sorted by their 3 fastest consecutive laps. Even though people look at overall times it has no bearings on seeding position. Here was one of my two Truggy seeding runs. Tekno Truggy Seeding

I had decent runs and basically put myself in the middle of both classes. This is the biggest race I’ve ever been a part of so I’ll take it. Back at the hotel I had some issues with the brakes on the Truggy. My throttle settings were way off and I ruined the pads. I’ve done so much work in this hotel room it’s ridiculous. I also had a cooling fin break on the head. Not sure how but fortunately I had a replacement.

So today we started off with another practice round before heading into the qualifiers. Qualifying is based on qual points. If you don’t know what qual points are it just means that all of your runs are averaged instead of taking just your fastest time. There’s more to it but the clock is ticking. Again I put in some decent runs.

We’ll see what happens after the next two rounds tomorrow.

So my final thoughts for the past two days……..it’s way too hot, these marshal vests are kinda cool but made me hotter, Donna has lost her mind, and I’ve really enjoyed the race so far.

R/C Car Tetris

One of my special talents is packing way too much stuff into our car for a trip.
Kitchen sink, check….

Getting Ready For Texas Nats…..

Well last weekend we were in Alabama for AMS 5.0. It was a pretty exhausting trip. 589 entries for a 2 day race make for a long day. We left after watching the Pro Buggy A-Main, which I wish I would of been in instead of watching, and headed to Atlanta to spend the night with my wife’s friends. They treated us to a fantastic breakfast and we were off again to finish our drive back to Florida.

Well it sounds weird but that drive back to Florida was the start to our ROAR Fuel Nationals preparations. I’m borrowing a friends Truggy, thanks Ricky!, and since we were already in the car we decided to push through and drive an hour past our house to go pick it up.

Getting back home Sunday evening I didn’t want to be in the same boat I was in to get ready for AMS, staying up until 1am every night and getting up for work is not something my body handles well anymore. So I unloaded the car and started to tear my Tekno NB-48 apart. Anything was a step in the right direction and I was happy to have done anything Sunday.

So I just rebuilt the nitro buggy for AMS so what should I do? Well being that we were going to Texas and the biggest race in my RC carrier I struggled with how far to take it. I’m not in a position that I can buy a new car whenever and the Tekno’s are made from some kind of unwearable plastic anyways. So I cleaned it, replaced the pins in the CVD’s (I had a ton so why not), replaced the diff oil, and painted a new body (the fiery orange I did for AMS was too hard to see). That was it. I’m picking up the tires there thanks to the JConcepts team and I’ll rebuild the shocks when we get there. The shocks is something I see the pros always wait to do so why not, one less thing on the to do list.

I love my Tekno buggy. I’m running a Werks B5 Pro engine, Radiopost radio and Signature Series servos, Trinity 2500mah receiver pack, JC wing/Bullet rims/tires, and Byron’s 30/11 fuel.

With the buggy done it was time to redo Ricky’s Tekno NT-48. This was a little different. Ricky literally just rebuilt the diffs so I’m satisfied with leaving those alone but the list of “to do” items was a bit longer. First I tore it apart and cleaned it.

It’s amazing how fast you can tear one of these apart. I usually strip it down to the chassis and go from there. My new air compressor has cut my cleaning times to about a quarter of what it took before. Next step was putting it back together which included my electronics, motor, and updated fuel tank. This was not going to look like the same truck. I pulled the Savox servos and Sprektrum receivers pretty quickly but spent a little extra time making the Radiopost equipment look good. I attached the receiver with Kyosho gel tap and surrounded it with foam like I did in my buggy. Nobody will every see it but it looks fantastic. Same deal with the shocks. eh. I painted a new body but I also picked up mud guards, newly released from Tekno, and painted those to match as well.

I’m running a Go engine that was given to me by my good friends Brian and Brandon, I put in a Radiopost receiver and Signature Series servos, Ricky already was using a Trinity 2500mah receiver pack, I added a JC wing with rims/tires getting picked up at the track, and Byron’s 30/11 fuel.

This thing looks bad ass. I got it all stickered up to match the buggy now. Nobody would guess it was the same truck. Fortunately my wife is awesome and agreed to let me buy a Truggy kit for the trip to have for spare parts. It just made more sense to buy the kit instead of guessing on what spares to get. Plus the best part, when we get back I’ll be able to replace whatever and build my own truggy!

To finish off preparations, I stole the servo, receiver, and transponder out of my 4×4 SC and will be bringing the Tekno EB-48 for spare parts. I have the car loaded with as much as I can tonight. One day of work tomorrow then we’ll finish loading up and start on our 16+ hour journey to Hutto, Texas. This is going to be awesome.

I’m going to do my best to document our ROAR Fuel Nationals adventure.