More practise needed as the Xray slides to the back - 14 / 08 / 05

The standard 540 challenge at Kerswell served to severely swell the number of entrants on Sunday as plenty of drivers you’d completely forgotten existed came out of the woodwork for this one off meeting! Even me! ;) It was nice to catch up with a lot of people we hadn’t really seen much of since the indoor season and a big well done to Michael Doody on qualifying 5th and finishing 7th in the 27T ‘A’ Final at the Ashby Juniors event earlier on this month. Nice one mate :-)

Back to Kerswell and the problems started early as Mike’s suspicions that the motors wouldn’t fit in the cars was proved correct and the planned meeting had to be put on hold with a normal meeting run in its place. This proved a complete disaster for us as we’d come equipped with a TC3, thinking the shaft drive option would be better for standard 540’s but now with a normal meeting being run we wanted to continue testing the new Xray.

Factory Team TC3 for sale - £60 See the car at Kerswell next week or e-mail for more info

Unfortunately it was at home and in kit form so Dad was sent to collect it while I stole the electrics from the TC3. I can confirm that you can’t start putting the diffs, bulkheads, suspension and electrics in an Xray at 9:30am and make it to the line for the start of heat 1! We did have a good go though and joined in the race a couple minutes late. Unfortunately I’d missed one of the shock tower mount locations during the rush so we had to retire and fix that.

Onto race 2 then and we made the start of this one. Although I couldn’t help wishing we’d missed it as the car had no rear grip at all. After 5 minutes of rallycross action the race ended with 5th place from 6 cars. We put the awful handling down to the worn out tyres and put a newer set on for the last qualifier. We’d also decided to try the car with a normal front diff which was still in kit form. Managing to lose part of the diff and the miss the last qualifier really summed the day up as we ended up 5th and virtually last on the grid.

Ross' car looking faster than it was ;-)

With part of the front diff missing we had to go back to the locked front for the finals. Much to my embarrassment I managed to crash into Sean before the race even started but fortunately his car was still okay for the start. It was quite an uneventful race as Justin, Malcolm and Michael shot off into the distance leaving me and Sean to fight for a distant fourth. The cars were very equal on lap speed and I kept a small gap to finish fourth ahead of Sean and James but behind Justin, Michael and Malcolm. I’ve never put so much effort in to be lapped! With the locked front I just couldn’t get into the tight corners fast enough. It was the same story in the last race and I eventually crashed at the hairpin under pressure from Sean for fourth place.

GP3300's - £15 a set / £40 for 3 sets		Peak World GP3300's - £20

We plan to get the normal diff in the front of the car for next week and hopefully get it on the pace then so we can look forward to using it in the last few national events of the season. Don't forget we've also got some TC3's for sale at the moment although if you want one you'd better be quick as i'm still faster with a TC3 than I am with the Xray so i'll be keeping them if we can't get the Xray upto speed soon! ;-) We've also got some good cells for sale and a few other bits and pieces. See us at kerswell next week or e-mail for more info.

See you next time!

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