Before the mains got underway on Sunday, they had Concourse judging. Again, weird.. you’d think they would have done this on Saturday before everyone beat up their trucks.. but no harm done. Those that won still looked stellar. Here’s a few nice ones.

Here’s the combined shot. I don’t even want to guess the combined $$ value of all the vehicles sitting there. Overall they had more than 240 entries when I checked, which is actually down a little bit from previous years, but it was still a HUGE event. So many good racers making it out. The place to be in the Northeast for Short Course.

RC Driver writers Tony Phalen and Greg Vogel, along with Pro-Line’s Gerardo Gonzales were the Concourse judges.

So with 27 or whatever heats, and being in the first few, I had a lot of time to kill between rounds. I talked to fellow racers, worked on my truck, walked around.. checked out the hobby shop and other areas of RC Madness.. Here’s a few things I did on my down time.

I discovered this new lipo the locals were running. New Wave is a brand that RC Madness sells exclusively, it’s basically their brand. These new 7200mah 75c 2s packs feature double bullets. This allows for less arching and more consistent current flow I imagine. The guys I talked to running them said they are a MUST-HAVE for 4wd Short Course. No more melted top ports due to heat. I guess they are also only like $85? Killer deal.

The X Factory team was in the house. They looked hard at work so I didn’t bother them for a change. They pretty much killed everyone in 2wd Open Short course. Great stuff.

A couple things I did with my own gear… The SCB was horrible in the first qualifier.. It seemed to pogo stick itself on every jump. The rear end would slap the jump and send it into a front flip, landing on it’s roof. I swear it did this on 3 different jumps every lap. I felt bad for the marshalls. I tried different levels of throttle input. Something had to change. Fellow racer Brian Bush, who was gracious enough to let me pit under his tent, told me I should probably rebuild the shocks. Like I mentioned earlier, this was a last minute add to my race schedule and I borrowed this rig. I ended up going with 40/37.5 for oils and it felt much more plush on the jumps in the 2nd and 3rd qualifiers. I’d never driven an SCB before and it jumps MUCH different than the floating short course trucks I’m used to. Making some driving adjustments, I was able to pull off my fastest qualifier in Round 3 (a sign I was getting faster).

On my 2wd Short Course… I was struggling to find speed every round. I went up and up in gearing until I got to this, which is 29/76. I thought this was extreme.. but really it was still only temping at 120. Our Facebook fans said they’ve seen much higher ratios than this, which is staggering to me. With this I was starting to lose torque to make the in-field double unless I had a perfect run up, so I didn’t dare go any higher.

Continuing on my adventure, I caught up with Gerardo Gonzales of Pro-Line. We’ve met a few times, and he’s great to chat up about all the new hot things going on over there at PL. With him he had the new Pro-2 Short Course truck as well as that AWESOME looking new EVO body.

Look at those vents!!

I also walked around to the crawling section of RC Madness… let me tell you.. I was kicking myself big time for forgetting to bring my CC-01 Unimog to mess around with during the down time. It would have been so much fun. We have nothing like this around us. They have some pretty cool obstacles..

They also have the new paved road course on the other side of the building. Here’s a video of it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8OhdYSo3ek[/youtube]

Then there was this crazy Brushless 5ive-T someone was messing around with.. I didn’t get much footage of it, as they were just putting it away.. but I don’t even have words for how disgustingly awesome this was to watch. SO MUCH POWER.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJco9p7Hcfo[/youtube]

So anyways.. back to work I went.. giving everything the once over before the mains.. Nothing left to do but to do it. I qualified for the E-Main of 2wd Stock SC, and the B Main of Stock SCB (only went to B).

Here she is in all her glory haha. Wonka power.

I was able to grab 3rd place. I was in the lead on the lap before the finish, but a bobble on my part gave it up. Typical for me haha. While we weren’t the fastest bunch, look how close the race was!! .8 seconds separating Top 3. Only .06 seconds between 2nd and 3rd. Wowsers. 4th place was also less than 3 seconds behind the leader. I think this may have been the closest race of the day. Funny how sometimes the lower mains have the closest action. Both 2wd and 4wd A Mains, the winners were 3-15 seconds ahead of the field. Here’s a link to the results of this race.

After all the lower mains were done, they did door prizes. They again gave away a TON of stuff donated by the awesome sponsors. They gave away Futaba coffee tumbles/water canisters, Team Durango shirts, Trinity Motors, Revtech Lipos, Castle esc’s, Vaterra RTR’s, boatloads of Pro-Line tires, wheels, and a few bodies. They also had a Trak Power soldering iron, Durango DESC210R, a few micro heli’s, and a DX3R Pro. Not to mention a Losi SCTE ARR Race Roller.

I don’t go for the door prizes, but my luck continues from last year of getting the most obscure thing there. Last year I won a Futaba Crystal Case (really?!), and this year I won a pair of Core-RC tires for a Slash that made AKA Moto tires look like Square Fuzzies. They had MASSIVE lugs on them. Being only into racing, I gave them away to someone. Kinda funny looking back. Wonder what I could win next year?

People LOVE door prizes.

Finally for me, there was the SCB Stock B-Main. There were I think only 5 cars slated to run this main, and only 4 started. 3 Finished. We all finished in the same spot we started. They took two to the A-main, so I was to start 12th in that.

I ended up finishing 10th in the A. At one point I did make my way up to 4th after a massive pile up, but I didn’t get away clean. Someone’s front tire caught my rear and spun me around, allowing most of the field to pass me while I tried to get back on track with the uber-slow stock Losi servo. Ugh. Oh well. Top 10 got an award, so I was happy to as least walk away with that. Considering how fast those guys were, I probably wouldn’t have been able to hold on to that position anyways.

I did get some videos of the mains. Here are a few of those.

Open SCB A Main

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjOio9tzyV0[/youtube]

Open 2wd SC A Main

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOzP3pp1jTo[/youtube]

Open 4wd SC A Main

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00j4oa2oL3c[/youtube]

Overall, I think it was my favorite event this summer. We had a lot of fun at the Intergalactic race, and of course the Pro Series @ CRC, but rain really puts a damper on things. I had no epic failures this weekend, a lot of downtime to hang with CT friends I don’t get to see that often, and I came home with some hardware (very unusual, haha). I couldn’t have asked for more. Thanks for the hospitality RC Madness. You have one of the best r/c facilities in New England, and I look forward to coming back soon.

For full results, they can be found at the RC Madness results page.