This weekend, RC Soup attended the 17th annual New Year’s Dash presented by CRC Raceway. This is a large carpet oval race sponsored by Spektrum RC. This race is being called the largest stand alone oval race in the world. It has grown in the 17 years it has been run, so much so that the last four were held at the Kallet Civic Center in Oneida NY, and not at CRC’s location.

The racing on both days was broadcast on LiveRC.com. Brian Wynn of Calandra Racing Concepts took care of most of the announcing, keeping viewers on the internet as well as spectators at the track up to date on all of the action on the track. Helping Brian with the calling duties were Mark and Frank Calandra of Calandra Racing Concepts.

There were an AMAZING 238 entries this year. That’s 50+ more than last year! This event is growing exponentially! If they keep it up, Frank is going to have to move this race to the Casino or somewhere where there is more room haha. They was plenty of pit space available. We could have squeezed some more people in there if we needed to.

I attended the race with Team driver Jarodd Goedel, we pitted with Jim and Richard Decker. Door opened Saturday at 6AM and we were there right when it opened so we could get our pit gear set up and get some track time. It was open practice until around 7:30 and then it went into 2 rounds of controlled practice. Actual racing started around 11. We were supposed to do a 2 minute seeding round, where they pull the top 4 consecutive laps and seed the heats with those. When the entries started ticking over 200, the track crew knew it would be a long day. If we ran that round and then the 3 qualifying rounds planned that day, we’d be there till past 3AM. Frank thought quick on his feet and combined the seeding round with round 1. This meant they took the 4 fastest consecutive laps for the round 2 resort, but the full 4 minute round also counted. They do it this way because there is such a varying degree of speed in the classes, that this helps put fast guys with other fast guys early. Some of the top oval racers in the country, maybe even the world are at this event. It’s crazy to think it’s only 30 minutes from us.

So we ran 3 full rounds on Sat, with the final round of qualifying on Sunday and then the mains.

At full disclosure, we don’t pretend to be oval racers. We have no clue what we are doing. Guys there have full chassis dynos, are adjusting motor timing for amp draw in blinky classes, etc. Depending who you talked to, guys were running anywhere from a 4.50 rollout to 5.60? We were playing with gearing so much, I think all of us ran a different setup every round and none of our group made it out of the E-Main in Sportsman Truck haha. Oh well, it’s all in fun right? I feel like I learned a lot. Oval though is a strange beast to me, and at this race I felt way out of my element (as I did last year).

I didn’t get a lot of photos, the cars are WAY too fast for a camera of my caliber. A new one is on the future list of upgrades to help bring you readers some better content. This year’s event also had several class sponsors including Pemberton Raceworks, CRC, Protoform, Darkside-KSKT, Upstate Racing Show, John’s BSR Tires, CRC Rocket Fuel, and Lefthander RC. Spektrum RC was the headline sponsor again, and online media coverage was officially sponsored by OvalRC.com. It’s awesome to see so much support for an event so close to us.

Here are some shots throughout the weekend. Links to racing results pages and more photos on page 2.

A projector showing current round/scoring is very helpful

Below is my Pemberton Raceworks SJ-10 Chief I build almost specifically to race here. I sold the old roller I ran last year. It handled ok. I drove it a lot better at last week’s Billy Leader race. This track was lot bigger with way different carpet. I struggled to say the least.

The RevolveRC stand was awesome for pan car use all weekend though.

You will notice I dropped in a new power plant from the build up. I ran the Viper VST 17.5 motor at the Billy Leader and qualified at top of the D-Main. My truck handled awesome there, I just didn’t have a lot of speed. SEVERAL people told me that to be competitive in oval, I needed the D3.5. I broke down and bought one because I didn’t want horsepower to be an issue this weekend. I hit up oval legend Todd Putnam from RC Speed Shop and he hooked me up with a Putnam Propulsion tuned D3.5. It gave me the speed I needed, I just couldn’t find the sweet spot in the handling and gearing to get me where I needed to be.

Below is Jarodd’s CRC Gen X10 LE w/ Oval Conversion plate. We’ll hopefully be posting the build up on this soon.