The next race was a trophy race at CRC Raceway called The Meltdown. Their indoor offroad setup is a carpet track with jumps, ripples, and miscellaneous bumps. It’s very difficult to be fast because the jumps are very abrupt and it is a very short track. No chance to relax. I wanted to take the buggy to the race to test its durability. The traction of the carpet is very abusive to the drive train and the jumps and landings are hard on the suspension.

I left the setup the same from Motorama. In practice the car was naturally a little soft. I thickened the shock oils and lowered the ride height front and rear. The car was fast in qualifying. So much that it still wanted to traction roll. I learned to ease it into the corners. I qualified in the A main, which is a big accomplishment since it was the first time running on the carpet and CRC is always full of fast guys. I finished 6th overall. I was happy. No durability issues all day.

One little modification I did to gain a little more steering travel was shave the steering knuckles down a little. They gave me an extra little bit of steering travel. You will also notice the tires. Being carpet, everyone there was running Schumacher tires. I picked some up as well. They are what they run in the UK, and everyone was having good luck with them. The fronts are so narrow though, that you actually have to narrow the wheel to make them work right. Kevin dremeled off the inside bead of the wheel while I worked on swapping shock oils.

Here’s a video of the A Main. It’s hard to show just how ballistic these buggies are on carpet.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYLP4WoWCsA[/youtube]

More event coverage on the next page!