Friday night saw a rusty return to 1/24 production metal for this plastic driver. So rusty, in fact, that the first race touring fell victim to the dreaded bent axle bop-ittyi-bop syndrome, something we were aware of already in the nineties but forgotten many times over. Rather than using the now norm of two pins to ornamentally hold the tiny little rubber front wheels, a piece of piano wire was tacked in and bent by a bang during warm up practice.
The wheels were pushed up for the second race and the car kept up for the first five lanes but unfortunately returned to dangle mode on the final black lane, making the donut tedious. Anyway, the Turboflex held on for an enjoyable third place, just ahead of the hard charging Phil, Tony and Erlo.
What was of interest was the first serious run of the newly SAMCA homologated JK Cheetah 11 chassis, with Craig turning in an excellent 152.47 laps in touring, exactly equal to the same winning 152.47 achieved by Ashwin in Sports!
The chassis has a "fast standing still" serious look about it (top left), Craig reporting that the only downside being the soft centre rail. I suspect a harder version will come out later, ala the Mossetti. Probably not an ideal choice for newbies at this stage and yours truly had reverted to the trusty Turboflex after dabbling with other brand chassis, 2006 Nats time.
Whilst quite impressed with the JK, it is quite mystifying that sprint race performance has never quite attained the staggering performance from an Ecurie team built Turboflex that scorched a Natals 6 hour enduro at lap times tween 4.2 and 4.4 seconds for a solid six hours, some years back. One gets the odd spike down in to 4.3 and 4.4 second lap times during sprint races but nothing like that same consistency of that magic enduro car. So here is once last post race look (top right) at that amazing team Sharks (Craig/Lance/Ashwin/Dave) enduro car, which was then used by Craig to TQ for the sprint races, straight after the 6 hour enduro.
It was also magic on Friday evening to have newbie Gordon having a good battle with Costa in their heats. Gordon is Tony Ball's pit mechanic for Tony's rally car and here are some race pics of Tony in action. Click on the right pic for a mini of the poster of his Bulwer Park rally car returning to earth, which he showed us Friday evening. Some more will be posted when time permits.
Hopefully this is the start of some club evening reports for the future.
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