CRC 1000 – Short Course Endurance Race Coverage

CRC 1000 – Short Course Endurance Race Coverage

April 9th, 2012

Kevin

This past Saturday (April 7, 2012), CRC Raceway & Hobbies held their 2nd Annual CRC 1000 race. It is a grueling 1,000 lap endurance race on their indoor carpet off-road track. It was 10 teams with 4 drivers each. Each team is only allowed to use a single truck. Anything on that truck can be repaired if something breaks however. Basically, everyone on the team takes turns driving, marshalling, and manning the pits (charging, repairing, etc).

CRC ran this event last year, but we did not attend because we didn’t really frequent the track enough to have all the details on the event. This year CRC decided to move this endurance race to the end of the season (as opposed to the night before the Meltdown). We think this was a fantastic move because with the amount of runtime the truck will get in the one night, it’s probably best to not have an important race in the immediate future. I know our truck will need to be gone through with a fine tooth comb so see what wore out, and have the shocks, differential, and other wear parts rebuilt. For the record… 1,000 laps on this layout took almost 4 1/2 hours of non-stop racing!

Team Soup – Canalside was comprised of RC Soup co-founders, Kevin Crandall & Matt Peterson. Joining us was official Team Soup driver, and owner of Canalside Racing Products, Jarodd Goedel. Our 4th member, Jim Decker, had a last minute schedule conflict and had to forfeit his position on the team. I’d like to thank Jeff Hotaling for filling in on such short notice. It was a pleasure having him on our team!

I’d like to say that our team was dialed and unstoppable on the track… but this was not the case. Our truck (the SC10 from the 2wd Short Course Truck Shootout), handled ok and had decent speed. Our issues came in the form of multiple breakages, costing us valuable track time. Twice we broke the right rear A-Arm. Anyone with an SC10 will know this isn’t the fastest thing to swap out, mainly due to the hinge pin retaining screw being hard to access (and lack of tool organization). The first repair probably cost us 50 laps.

The 2nd right rear A-Arm we replaced a lot faster as we swapped out the hub as well (left unit attached from donor truck). Both arms broke when we didn’t quite clear the Over-Under section of the track and had the rear tires catch the lane barrier. At the very end of the video embedded below you can see where this was happening.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYTjtP1AJM[/youtube]

We also broke a front A-Arm after getting T-Boned mid-air. If those thing weren’t enough, we had the front bulkhead screw loosen and work its way through the tape on the front bumper and rip out. Oh, and we broke 2 ball cups… considering the amount of times we had to pull the truck in for repairs, I’m actually quite amazed that we got the amount of laps we did. I know we’ll be better prepared if we do the event again next year. None of us had ever run an endurance race so we weren’t quite prepared (besides having like 4 parts trucks (which came in quite handy).

Overall it was a fun time, hanging out with fellow r/c’ers and watching the guys who had better luck (less breakage) duke it out for the lead. We did what we could with the cards we were dealt. When we got home, we had an email from Jim Decker, who was able to watch a little bit of the race on LiveRC from home. He said that we should have gotten the Perseverance Award with all the repairs we had to do. Sadly no such award exists (maybe next year CRC??). Still, we got a chuckle out of it:

Onto the official results. I’d like to congratulate Dumpers Speed Shop for taking the win. They were the first to make the 1,000 laps. Their team was comprised of Brian Wynn, David Compton, Dan Holcomb, and Jacob Wall.