Carpet Wars 7 Round 1

We went to Carpet Wars this weekend for the first round of the winter championship for 2009.  Back indoors, back on carpet… back to 12th scale :)

I ran the car in practise on Saturday and found a good setup and tyre combination to run with which made the car very consistent and very easy to drive.

I’m running a single cell lipo in the 12th now instead of 4-cell packs of nimh batteries, so I was very interested to see how far off the pace of some of the really quick guys I was going to be.

I found out in round 1 where I was 2 laps down (which is about right for me), but more importantly, I was simply charging it up between races and going out again.  That’s the biggest change other than a softer centre spring as there’s at least 100g difference between running the car on cells vs running it on lipo.

This means that the car is quicker to accelerate, quicker to handle, but as you’ve not got the voltage anymore (4.2 vs 6 fully charged) there’s a compromise there as the Lipo cars are slower.

I qualified 5th on the grid for the A final and had a good run in the final until the penultimate lap where I made a HUGE mistake and got in the leaders way as he was lapping me.  This cost him the win as the 2nd place runner was able to make his way through and take the win.  I was running 3rd at the time as a couple of the other quicker guys had dropped out with problems during the run.