March 8th 3 Hour Slot.It Group C Enduro

[Dogsbody]

Finally! I mean it took forever and a day but I got the club to bite on a 3 hour Enduro. It'll be run at one of the best hobby shops in Colorado, Colpar's Hobbytown in Aurora on the club's four lane Carrera track. There'll be a fainting couch for those in need. A full time masseuse for those achy legs and trigger fingers and an on call nutritionist to make sure their needs are taken care of. Temperature will be a constant 70 degrees and the bathroom will have soft ply toilet paper for those delicate tushes. Heck, maybe even a heated toilet seat... But I digress. The cars can be modded as long as all the parts are from Slot.It. Tires will be SILICONES... All will have lights. Teams will consist of at least three drivers and teams will be pulled out of a hat. So, stay tuned for photos and race recaps.



This is an older picture from another race.

[Dogsbody]

Well, the enduro is in the books and not without a bit of controversy. We all ran the same car (one of mine) for qualifying and I somehow qualified fourth in my own car... Don't ask. Teams were assembled from the fastest four qualifiers (they became team leads) so 1, 2, 3, 4 then 5 went with 1, 6 with 2, 7 with 3, then 8 with 4, then 12 with 1, 11 with 2, 10 with 3 and finally 9 with 4 then and they went about picking a car with which to run the enduro with. Rules were any Slot.It part was legal and most ran the car from the earlier Group C series we ran a while back. One team chose a Lancia and this thing was a freaking rocket. Way, way faster than anything else out there. I was initially a little suspicious (we didn't, nor have we ever done tech) but we kept our heads down and raced on. I was told it was an anglewinder (assumed it was a big can) and everyone else was running an S-can so I made a mental note to be a bit more specific in the rule set but then again I did say anything Slot.It was legal. I wanted parity in the enduro or as close as I could get it but this wasn't it. The Lancia had 20 laps on second place by the end of the first 45 minute heat then over 50 by the second heat. The rest of us were fighting for a distant 2nd place and covered by around 10 laps difference between the three of us (my team, Team 4, was in 3rd place, 2 laps down from 2nd). Just before we started the 3rd heat I picked up the Lancia and lo and behold it wasn't a big can motor but a Piranha 21.5 motor with non Slot.It motor adapters. To be fair (?) the owner was not well versed in slot cars (he once asked me if an F40 was a DTM car...) and sometimes has a fellow from out of state build his cars which invariably do not meet the rules of a particular class and we've had to tell him, no dice. Yeah, I should have done tech, I know but... So, his Lancia was illegal on two fronts and the Piranha was probably rewound or tweaked somehow because it was essentially untouchable on the track. His two teammates were ready to walk and he was a bit embarrassed and there was a bit of a pall cast over the event. Some of us had a quick conference and decided that they could continue to race but had to use another car. They still kept the 50 or so lap lead they had on the rest of us (I didn't know what else to do) and we started the two final heats. What a difference that made! Now we (my team) used a bit of strategy and matched our drivers with their like drivers and me being the slightly faster driver split my driving by starting and finishing the heats. My teammates were awesome they both were within hundredths of each other and we started to chip away at our deficit. We had slighty stronger heats than the rest. It also helped that I had probably the two youngest guys on the team, one was 13, and I could see the others were getting a little tired and oddly enough, no one was in the 6 second bracket any more. My teammates were averaging 7.3s and I was averaging 7.0s and I managed to get into the 6s once in a while (all teams were almost all in the mid to high 6s in the earlier heats - Team Lancia was running low 6s). Most of the other teams were now slightly slower than us. As an example, the last heat, which we won, we had 358 laps, the former Lancia team had 356 laps, third place 355 and forth had 344 a far cry from the roughly 20 lap difference per heat of the previous two heats. At the end of the enduro we managed to claw back some laps to finish in 2nd 40 laps down from 1st. They "won" with 1466 and we had 1422, third had 1402 and 4th had 1378. Overall, everyone had fun and all benefited from the extended seat time and as I learned, we must do tech