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Lutzinator's race report

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Published on Monday, 24 September 2012 08:22

Written by Ryan Lutz

Gas Champs at Thunder Alley



Sunday September 23, 2012

Gas Champs has come to a close and with double A-mains in the books here is how it ended up for me. In Truggy I would have a solid A1. I was running top 4 for the first half of the race. Then 3rd place had some terrible noise come out of his truck and retired so I moved to 3rd and had a big gap back to 4th. The top two Tessman and Drake were battling it out but after pitstops Drake flamed and fell back so I inherited 2nd and brought it home to take 2nd. Now I had a very good shot at podium with a decent finish in A2. However it wasn’t meant to be as I had a throttle servo go out on me on the warmup bench and thus I wasn’t able to run A2. :-(

In Buggy after all the set-up changes I was hoping for it to all come together. At the start of A1 things weren’t so great. I initiall made it up to 5th on the first lap from my 8th place starting position but quickly got in traffic and fell to the back. I struggled for a while but the car started to come around as the track dried out. I began putting in some fast laps including the hot lap of the race. I also had the fastest overall 10 laps as well so my pace was there, it just took me a while to get there. So I ended up moving up through traffic and finishing 5th in the A1.

Come A2 I did a couple more set-up changes and as warmup started I felt I had gone the wrong way on set-up. However come the tone I got off to a solid start and quickly moved to 4th. I just had to drive smooth and the car was fast. I ended up getting past 3rd and set my sights on Truhe in 2nd. I caught up to him and gave a little side tap after a jump and got him out of the way and pulled away from him and set my sights on Tessman who had about a 5 second lead. I was able to start putting in the hotlaps of the main and was able to catch Tessman before the first fuel stop. After the stop I followed him and launched it over the back single and landed on top of him giving me the worst of it. I fell back a bit and started making some careless errors and fell back about 3.5 seconds. I got my groove back though and started clicking off fast laps again with 5 laps to go and on the last lap was able to get within half a second of him and over the back table he monorailed it on the pipe and I semi did the same and I let up as he tried to get off the pipe so as not to collide with him and I ended up not making the subsequent double and casing it which allowed him to take the win. However I was very pleased with catching him twice with a car I have only ran twice now. This bodes very well for the cars speed and I look forward to getting more comfortable with it in the near future!

Overall the 5th and 2nd place finishes put me 3rd on the Podium! I’ll take it with my prototype buggy!

Next up….Vacation! :-)