SoCal Bash 2.0, Hot Rod's this time!

Well, today was the day, a meet at Hot Rod Hobbies for some Saturday night racing. Unfourtunately, the turn out for our little gathering was a bit smaller than the SoCal Raceway one, but it was still fun. MetalMan and his dad drove out from Huntington Beach, and he brought his X-Terminator and Rustler. janoob38 came with us, and got a bit of track time with his T3, but had to leave before any serious racing started. Camel brought his drifter TC3, Basher T3, Racer T3, B4, and brushless HPI MT2, while I dragged out my drifter TT01, Twin Force, Ofna, 18MT, and a special new truck......but more on that one later.

Anyway, we showed up around 3:00 to do a bit of practice before the 5pm race time, and I immediately chose the new truck as the first runner. It's a BL Savage with 1/8 buggy shocks (which turned out to be the PERFECT setup), a Feigao 9L, and a Warrior 9920, and ran great all through the practice until the batts dumped after like 10 minutes. From there, I took out my Ofna, it glitched like crazy, but I still pulled off a few laps....very different driving style than with the Savage, the smaller size made it more nimble, but also made it get tossed around on lumpy sections and harder to calculate distance off a jump.....which made for hard chassis slapping landings a few times.

At that point (or somewhere near it), MetalMan showed up, we greeted him, and then camel and I took off for the touring course......with our drifters. It was great fun to slide around on the perfect asphalt, as well as launch over the barriers, got my TT01 airborne quite a bit, and it was no worse for wear than before. Camel then made the mistake of handing the controls off to janoob, who bounced the TC3 off a wall and killed a rear arm. Sure, the thing can take getting airborne, but can't take a light hit on a wall? I spent the rest of the pack over there, then went back to the pits.

MetalMan said that his lipo pack was messed up or something, and had to borrow a couple 6 cells from us; it was nice to help out, but the lack of those 12 cells kept the Twin from seeing anything more than pit table. I took my Ofna back out instead, it glitched even worse, and annihilated the spur for some reason.....with 10 minutes left until the start of racing. I had to pass on racing the vehicle I'm most famous for (people there actually recognized me from the magazine article), and went with the Savage instead; it has a more forgiving driving style anyway. Camel and MetalMan were going to run two classes still though: camel in Monster with his MT2 (managed to convince the guys to let him out of modified class because it had the word "monster" in the name) and his Racer T3 in Sportsman Stock, and MetalMan with his X-Terminator in 1/8 buggy and Feigao 12s powered Rustler in Sportsman Stock somehow......I wasn't there for that convincing conversation.

In my first heat, I was going great on 14 Sanyo 3600's, until they dumped about 7 minutes into the 8 minute main....and they dumped hard too. My poor truck was limping around the track while the other truck (camel broke, so it was just a Jammin' CRT) ran laps around me. Metalman was up next in 1/8 buggy, but he couldn't get his controller to turn on or even work, so he had to re-program and didn't get it out until the last minute of the 5 min. heat. It sounds almost worthless at that point, but he never got to run it in practice, so it was at least a little track time. In the next heat, it was camel's T3 against MetalMan's secretly BL Rusty, but camel broke a rear bearing carrier and was out, so MetalMan got more track experience. I noted that there was a stock 18T on the track at the time, and asked if it'd be okay to run my Mamba 6800 powered 18MT in the next Sportsman Stock with the other guy, they said it was cool.

In my second heat, which kinda came outta no where because not many people were running in the 1/10 gas truck class so the Monsters were back up, I knew I heard something grinding in the tranny, and sure enough, it died half way through the run.....leaving a Revo that I was owning up to that point, and a late comer Lightning Stadium Pro that was ripping it up. I couldn't save it, so I was pretty much done for the day.

MetalMan once again kinda had a late start in the 1/8 buggy heat, but drew a crowd once out there because the announcer drummed up the fact that it was electric. Travis did a great job.....until he killed a battery bar's solder connection and had to bow out, but quickly get ready for the Sportsman "not-so-Stock" class with camel and me. Camel managed to fix his truck, but it was squirrelly, and Travis bombed over the triple with ease on his 11.1v lipo's and 12s motor......raised a few eyebrows too. The other guy with the mini and I were allowed to go about 10 seconds ahead of everyone else, and then got chased by all the bigger cars. The stocker crashed somewhere, but I lead for a good lap, until I got hung up in the funky rythm section and got run over by half the other cars. From there, my half charged cheapo stock pack started dumping, and I barely cleared most of the stuff out there.

Onto the mains! The only guy in Monster (all other trucks broke or had to go home) bumped to 1/8 buggy because he was running a LSP anyway, so suddenly the still not very Stock class was upon us. I charged my 18MT's pack at 1.5a for a bit more punch, which worked to a point, but got a bad start and just couldn't get a rythm going with the jumps: I either over shot or lawn darted or cartwheeled out of the big jumps, and the small size of the truck made it invisible to the turn marshalls I guess, so I had to wait for the Mamba controller to kick into reverse and get out of a jam myself. Camel switched to his B4 for the main to try and do a bit better, which he did, and Travis continued to do great with his Feigao "stock" motor. When all was said and done, Camel got 4th I think, Travis had 5th, and I had 7th......ahead of 2 cars that either broke or were insanely slow and got beat by a 18MT.

To wrap up a SUPER long post, we had a great time, even I did, despite my two main cars dying. After all, racing should be more about fun than winning, but I kinda went into the day knowing it was meant to be a "fun" event anyway. I'm hoping we can get together and have another meet sometime, the more people we can get together the better.

STAY TUNED FOR PICS AND VIDS!!