Speaking of formats...
I spent the past Wednesday in Tacoma visiting with Tony at Fantasy World with an intended stay-over to go to their weekly race night. As for the racing, it was quite fun and a fun and interesting format.
By the end of the evening we would race two classes of cars - a set with IROC Fly Porsches and then a set with Slot.It Classics - I'd brought my Alfa 33//3 which was unused except for a few practice laps to make sure it ran.
Once out of FW we stopped by Tony's and he set to work adjusting my car so that it would be competitive with the locals. Added a spacer to the gear side, changed the tires and a few minute touches here and there and it was deemed ready. One of those touches - some motor time on his DS break-in box that automatically ramps the voltage to predetermined intervals.
After meeting up with a few of the other racers for dinner it was off to Victor's for an evening of racing.
Victor's track is a larger Scaley Sport 4-lane setup - rather familiar in layout and not too tough to get the measure of. Good thing since I got zero practice laps. Those that know me know that I'm ok with that. Rally men want to experience the track in real time at full tilt. Or something like it...
So here's their race format:
A two-minute "Crash'n'Learn" heat. One off and you are out. They stop the time after one minute and re-slot any cars that have come off. Then restart the heat and race another minute. Once again, one off and your heat is over. As for scoring, just like our Sunday program - laps plus points. And they assign those after each minute. Nerfing, you bet. Taking cars out, yup. No one complains. All good fun.
Though this sounds like a tough format for a beginner I managed the first complete set without a single off finishing 5th out of 13 with the IROC Fly Porsches. Felt pretty good.
The second set was the Slot.It Classics. It was apparent right from the get-go that I had one quick car! Won a heat or two, didn't lose too many laps to the leaders. About halfway through I had my only off of the evening and spent a good part of a minute watching cars go by. At the one-minute reset when my car returned to the track I vowed that wouldn't happen again and it didn't. So I used the off-road mantra - "fast as possible, slow as necessary". It worked out well as once again I was 5th of 13. Not a bad night for the Oregonian!
I enjoyed the format so much that we're going to give it a try at the next NASTE race here.
