First-ever UK electric rallycross buggy Nationals! May 6th 2012 saw the first meeting recognised officially by the BRCA for Electric RallyCross Buggies. The Truggy section have incorporated the electric buggies and truggies into their Truggy nationals. A strong field represented by some of the best drivers in the world in their respective classes made the trip to Herts Nitro Car Club for a day of what would prove to be excellent racing.
The race format for the electric classes was 1 round of 5 minutes practice followed by 3 rounds of 6 minute round by round qualifiers with your best 2 scores to count. This was followed by ‘bump up' 15 minute finals. The track was a combination of mainly dirt with some astroturf jumps and banked concrete sections. Trophy Buggy Flux, Trophy Truggy Flux and Vorza Flux in Proper Competition This season the HPI team will be focusing on running the Trophy Buggy, Trophy Truggy and Vorza Flux cars with as close to RTR spec as possible. Early pre-season testing showed encouraging signs of power and speed from the HPI Rage and Scream ESC/Motor combination. We had 3 drivers very new to electric 8th scale and none of them had driven on dirt or at this venue. Talk about jumping in the deep end! Practice went well for the team. Ben Cosgrove was an encouraging 8th (Trophy Buggy Flux) with Terry Atkinson 11th (Vorza Flux). Dale Knight (Trophy Truggy Flux) also had a solid run in third on the first time he had ever driven the car. We were all happy with the handling and balance of the cars and the RTR electrics were proving as fast as the mega ££ ESC/motor combinations of other people. Qualifying saw Ben taking a very respectable 6th and 5th positions to make the A final directly in 7th position. Terry had a 9th and an 11th place finish which put him 2nd in the B final (bump up material) which was 12th overall. This was a fantastic result for the RTR buggies against such a high quality field. To top off a fantastic day Dale Knigh put his Trophy Truggy Flux into 2nd place overall for the E-Truggy A Final! We were pretty pleased with that with our RTR vehicles. Dale was up first in the E Truggy final which was run in with the nitro finals. Dale had a mixed start with some nitro cars wanting to have a closer look at the electronics in his car with their bumpers...a few clean laps later and he was up into second but a long way behind the leader. Dale pushed hard for the remainder of the race but unfortunately a slight error on the jumps broke a steering part. This was still good enough to give Dale his first national podium in 3rd position! Fantastic result! Terry was next up in the E Buggy B Final. A strong start saw Terry pull away into a comfortable lead for about 8 minutes. Terry was taking it very easy as he had a big lead and was in the bump up positions (top 3). Unfortunately he drove too steady and under jumped causing a required marshall moment which dropped him into a 4 car battle for the top 3 positions. Holding second place with a couple of minutes to go he was ‘pushed' off the track in a very dirty move dropping him out of the bump up positions. However the Vorza Blur ESC proved to be very efficient as Terry managed to take advantage of the dumping cars to get up into third and make the A final on the very last lap of the 15 minute final! Two HPI RTR Electric Kits in the A Final! This meant we had 2 RTR cars in the National A Final which was an amazing result! Ben lined up in 7th and Terry in 13th. The final started with a damp track and the rain was to get progressively worse throughout the run. Ben had a great start and was fighting with Chris Doughty for 4th place overall. A few passes and counter passes later meant Paul Robinson caught us to make it a 3 way battle. Paul and Ben had a mid air collision and would lose track of 4th place. They resumed the battle for the rest of the final with Paul getting 5th and Ben 6th covered by less than a second after 15 minutes of racing! Terry resumed the battle with his B final nemesis and they had a scruffy affair which saw Terry have a disaster finishing 11th near the back of the field. Ready To Race! This was a fantastic result for the team with the RTR cars. We only had 1 breakage all day with Dale breaking the steering in his final. Many spectators were amazed by the power and performance of the RTR vehicles. Many even dubbed them as 'Ready to Race', not Ready to Run! The series moves to Kent in a month's time for round 2 but before then we will be at the Midland Dirt Masters at Coventry 3/4th June. Please come over and check out the cars for yourself. Link to results http://www.deerdaleoffroad.com/BRCA_Results/index.htm
