Now for 1/8 track. This is the one that most spectators watch as it is in the Equine Arena with stadium style seating. The track is enormous and built to let those 1/8 scales stretch their legs. Just look at that back straight! This track and portion of the event is directed by the one and only Scotty Ernst. There’s a reason he’s hired to run the biggest races in the world, he does a fantastic job at running events like this.

I didn’t get to spend too much time on the 1/8 track. I was slated to take over a teammate’s 4wd SC entry, but was faced with electronic gremlins all weekend with it. Big thanks to Raul Garcia for helping me try to sort it all out. Eventually I just gave up when I couldn’t get the truck to stop glitching. It kept losing signal and applying the brakes, even at full tilt on the straightaway. I ran out of spare electronics to try and patience to mess with it. What few glitch free laps I did get on the track, it was a lot of fun. The layout I think was much better than the year previous. Keeping all of the jumps close to the driver on such a big track helped with the perception of things for drivers like me with less than awesome eyesight.

Scotty ran a similar practice schedule as they did on the 1/10 track, except his were broken down by class. It was also on a posted schedule, so you knew when Buggy or Truggy was up next. It worked well, but was also plagued by long lines (longer even – see below). I’d imagine at some point the full 40 minutes worth of a session was lined up before the time slot even started. I had the foresight to be one of the first in line once. On another occasion I brought out that glitchy truck to see if it worked and there was like 100 people in line for the class. All I needed was a lap on the track to see if it still glitched. I didn’t want to wait that long so went back to the pits to wait for the next round. I wish they still had the little test oval track they had 2 years ago for simple issues like that.. It is highly discouraged to run your truck in the pits, the hallway, and I wasn’t about to try it in the parking lot.

I did not run the last 2 qualifiers or the Main on this track, so I don’t have a lot of coverage details as to how the track held up or who was edging out who, etc. I did watch a few of the races and the layout still looked great and I wish I’d signed up for E-Buggy to run on it. I planned to add a class before the event but entries closed faster than I anticipated and the race sold out. Don’t wait to sign up guys.. next year it will probably sell out even faster!

This was the big feature of this years track. It’s basically a 6′ tall elevated double table top.

A couple shots again from the RC PhoTog. Seriously go check out his gallery.

A video of the track is below.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3pIgqa5hME[/youtube]

As mentioned, I didn’t have a ton of time on this track to comment on it. It is difficult running on 2 tracks at one event (possibly being in overlapping heats). It can be done though, and that’s what makes Motorama so awesome… there’s a class for everyone. Next year I will plan better to run both tracks.

Next up is some random photos from the pits. Full results from both tracks are on Page 5.