Race Report from Geilenkirchen

This Sunday the NRW Offroad Series  took place in Geilenkirchen on another Astro-Turf track.

The very hard track (and some opponents) tortured the Gambler a lot, but everything went flawlessly. Nothing broke, despite other cars having a lot of problems with parts breakage.

Came home 4th after holding the 3rd spot all day but losing it by 3 secs in the last run.

Ran Proline Bow Tie M3 tires all round on Proline-Wheels.

Shocks were filled with 40WT front and 60WT rear. Orange Losi springs all round.

I was again using the modified Blitz front arms and 1.5° aluminium rear hub.

I will miss the next race due to a well earned holiday break, but I'll be back racing at an international race in Holland.at 17th of July.

The Real Deal?

Found this one on Venom's Facebook-site:


Venom's been sponsoring Jonathan Elkins #32 Pro Lite truck. Check out his truck in all new Venom Gambler graphics!

2nd Race of the season with the Gambler

This weekends race-meeting took me to the Duisburg Track, which I know for many years now. Starting with some slight rain in the morning but drying out very quickly and becoming extremely dusty.

I stayed with the mid-motor-setup and the 17.5T Speedpassion motor. Shock-oils were 40WT front and 50WT rear with orange Losi-springs all round.

I did not have a single technical issue the whole day. The Gambler was running flawlessly. Despite that I only reached 8th place, having some very bad racing luck.

As the rear end is nearly perfect now, I will do some more tests on the front-end to gain more stability. I'll keep you posted on that.

More updates

Updated my gambler before the upcoming race on sunday.

First of all I filled the diff with 1000WT oil. No more weight, because I don't want to sacrifice too much steering. Then I installed the 1,5° aluminium rear uprights, which should give more straight line traction on a slippery track (which is expected for the weekend)

Most important and most substantial change are new front-arms from the HPI Blitz, as new Gambler front-arms are not available at the moment. Modified shock mounting position slightly.

These arms are 5mm narrower than the stock parts. I got back 2 millimeters with wider hex-mounts from my scratchbox.

I also use orange Losi springs now, which are a little stiffer than the original springs.

Did I mention that the Gambler has the coolest mudflaps by far..? ;-)

Video from the weekend's racing.

 

Video by Pascal Huntjens

First race with the Gambler

Easter-Sunday was the first race-meeting and season-opener of NRW Offroad-Cup 2011 on the very nice and demanding Panik-Raceway in Troisdorf, Germany





My class is the Short-Course stock-class, which is the biggest class with the closest with the hardest and most exiting race-action.

A Speedpassion 17,5T spec motor with a fixed gear ratio had to be used there to make racing even closer.

In this series we only have one qualifier and 5 finals with the best 4 to count. So you have to be fast in every run to be up there.

I didn't had the chance to use the trainings-session on friday and saturday, so I had to work out the setuo in the first runs - based on what I found out at an earlier training-day there.




With a certain ammount of experience it was no problem, finding the right setup quickly.

The track-surface is artificial turf as used on tennis-courts. Additional sand made it quite slippery.

I changed the rear oil to 50WT (2 hole pistons) and stayed with 60WT (2 hole) up front. Tire-combination may look unusual, but worked very well. I used the stock-tires up front and Pro-Line Bow-ties M3 at the rear.

I would have used some harder springs or maybe stabilizer-bars to reduce the chassis-roll a bit, but missing these I used white Traxxas-Slash springs again as the stock-springs are too soft for this kind of track.

Those jumps are quite tricky there.

I had some very close fights with racing-mate Pascal Huntjens from the Netherlands - as in nearly every race in the last two years before.

Pascal and me fighting

I sadly missed the podium because of a broken front-arm in the decisive run, but had a great race anyway. Came home in 4th place, which is not too bad.

The next race will be on a very slippery clay-track in Duisburg on which I always had good results. Looking forward to that one very much. 

More on that race-series can be found here: www.NRW-Offroad-Cup.den be downloaded HERE

New Gambler pic

Trimmed the shape of the 'face' a little bit to give a sleeker look

The dark side of the Force