What started out as just another club race day turned out to be a very intetesting on on a couple of fronts.
Firstly gas. There was a noticeable absence of drivers for both classes today. Especially Open where the number was well down. I had the chance to race my R12 in Gas Tourer again today prior to it being mothballed again until Interclub 3. I qualified 3rd and was sittting comfortably in 2nd with about 3 laps to go in the 10 minute A final until the wheel fell off – almost. Oh well it was a good day anyway.
STOCK
In stock today there was only 12 but what we lacked in quantity we sure made up for in quality. The A final looked something like this – check out these names
1. Keith Mackrill     –  HPI Pro 4
2. Damian Barnier  – Cycone
3. Jason Wakefield – Tamiya Evo 5
4. Bob Vardy        –  Cyclone
5.  Adrian Beggs   – Academy STR4 Pro11
6. John Perkins     – RDX
With names like that in the A, the mere mortals in the B could have been excused for thinking  they had run over the black cat – they were all doing personal bests and still not doing enough. Basically a 17 lapper was required to make the A – it’s not that long ago that you could easily be in the A with a 16 lapper. The other interesting thing about that is that there are 5 brands in the top 6 cars – very good and interesting.
The real interest for me was having Adrian back from his illness and driving again, and as he is between cars I asked him to drive my Academy, just to take the opportunity of getting a good driver into the car and a second opinion on some of my thoughts.
Adrian said “Hey Dave,Thanks again for the car etc for today. Thoroughly enjoyed myself.Thinking about the performance of the Academy it wasn’t to bad. If you take Keith’s FTD and mine there was approx. 13 sec difference. Over 5 minutes that works out to be 2.6 secondsslower per minute. Not to shabby. Over the rest of the field it was only around 1.3 seconds per minute slower and in some cases even less.
As you say a little work on the drivetrain/ bearings and lightening the car up a bit you might get back some of that.
Adrian ”
The car is heavy at around 1600gr and there are some things we can do about that and will. Also some better quality bearings or a flush out of all the bearings will probably help. The weight is more critical at a track like Bayside with all the uphill hairpins to pull out off. Especially on a club day where I doubt if many of the other cars were at legal weight. The car handles well and is as good as the best in most area of the track. I am still impressed and the car is certainly impressing a few others as well. It’s always made the A final at every meet we’ve run it at so far (Brendale Winter Champs, Logan Winter Cup, and the World Titles at Bayside last weekend) so that’s a pretty good recomendation.
MOD
Today there was a good field of mod. Anthony continued to run 4 cell and if you check the results you will see that he TQ’d and won the final by a fair margin and did a time within a whisker of Cookies State Titles winning run last year. Now Anthony, I know we don’t know what weight all the other guys were running on Sunday and I have no doubt some of them would be light but, for a fair test, I reckon you should be running the car as a 4 cell, but at 1520. Within the rules as they stand you can run 4 cell legally but to do so you must run 1520.
Our intrepid EC driver ran out 4th, same as he qualified.
Full results here
  I always manage to enjoy the day at Bayside and again thanks to Mark Richards who puts in so much work on the day, ususally at teh expense of his own racing.