[Graham]

DAY 2 Whitchurch Slot Car Club

Final Video Category 3 Procars & Category 4 Trucks

[BAracer]

Welly duely given!

[Graham]

So DAY 3 in the Dakar Rally Slot Car Proxy - Worthing Slot Car Club.
when I arrived Andy, Jeremy and Scott had been busy assembling all the Stages for the Open night Event. But with the main club event starting in 3 hours we had a very busy time completing the proxy on 2 of the 4 available stages in time so as to not interefere with later Club meeting.

I can't really express my gratitute enough to Andy, Jeremy & Scott for setting everything out so well to enable this Proxy Round to be run first on these splended tracks. and I am sure it added extra stress to their day. But looking at the number of attendees arriving for the evening event I think their efforts were well rewarded, I was trully surprised by the number of persons which turned up to participated in what is a rather niche Slot Car event. Truly amazing.
And I stayed on for a while after the proxy to show off our proxy entries to those who was interested and to talk about Raid Slot Cars in general.

So with 4 potential Stages available, I choose 2 layouts which I felt were a little different from the previous Stages we had run.

"Dune of Doom" a Ninco track was run first.
   
Category 1 Ninco vehicles were run by Scott 
Category 2 SCX vehicles were run by Jeremy 
Category 3 Procars & Category 4 Trucks run by Andy 
   

Stage Podium Winners
Category 1 (Ninco) James/ Bowler
Category 2 (SCX) Oxo Cube / VW Tourareg
Category 3 (Procars) Hotlap / Mitsubishi Lancer
Category 4 (Trucks) Roadrunners / Merc  
     

[Graham]

And then we had "Midnight at the Oasis" Stage 5
   
Category 1 (Ninco) driver was Andy
Category 2  (SCX) driver was Scott 
Category 3 ( ProCar) driver was Jeremy
Category 4 ( Trucks) driver was Scott

The Results
   

The Podium Winners
Category 1 (Ninco ) Oxo Cube / BMW X5
Category 2 (SCX) Woodcote / Sandbuggy
Category 3 ( Procars) BAracing / VW Tourareg
Category 4 (Trucks) BAracing / Mann Truck
   

[BAracer]

We were honoured to have you attend, Graham, and to have the opportunity to run the wonderful variety of proxy entries on our tracks! It was a busy day, but if you are going to build these type of temporary tracks, it's great that they get the use once they are up! 

We did rotate the driving duties, but at some stage, Woodcote and myself were always going to end up piloting our own vehicles somewhere. I hope the videos show that we treated all entries the same, but I was not aware that I had driven my Touareg to Pro-car victory on 'Oasis'. I think you have checked the times against the videos, so I am suitable embarrassed about that one! But I did have a giggle at how you automatically had my MAN truck as the victor of the Dune of Doom for the podium photo, having resigned yourself to the bridesmaid slot, only to later discover you had easily beaten me to the line.

With regards to the size of the attendance for the later evening's entertainment, credit must be given to Woodcote and the other club officials who have carefully curated these various events over the years. We make sure there are always club controllers and cars available so that anyone you attends can be sure of experiencing the flavour of the hobby as offered on the night. With regards to Wednesday, there was an hour for everyone to get some idea of how to run these strange cars on these strange tracks, but once the stop watches came out, it was foot (and the occasional club cars) to the floor and everyone's competitive spirit took over as per normal...

[Graham]

We were honoured to have you attend, Graham, and to have the opportunity to run the wonderful variety of proxy entries on our tracks! It was a busy day, but if you are going to build these type of temporary tracks, it's great that they get the use once they are up! 

We did rotate the driving duties, but at some stage, Woodcote and myself were always going to end up piloting our own vehicles somewhere. I hope the videos show that we treated all entries the same, but I was not aware that I had driven my Touareg to Pro-car victory on 'Oasis'. I think you have checked the times against the videos, so I am suitable embarrassed about that one! But I did have a giggle at how you automatically had my MAN truck as the victor of the Dune of Doom for the podium photo, having resigned yourself to the bridesmaid slot, only to later discover you had easily beaten me to the line.

With regards to the size of the attendance for the later evening's entertainment, credit must be given to Woodcote and the other club officials who have carefully curated these various events over the years. We make sure there are always club controllers and cars available so that anyone you attends can be sure of experiencing the flavour of the hobby as offered on the night. With regards to Wednesday, there was an hour for everyone to get some idea of how to run these strange cars on these strange tracks, but once the stop watches came out, it was foot (and the occasional club cars) to the floor and everyone's competitive spirit took over as per normal...

I think you are unduly feeling conscious about your driver role, in every Round we had to involve the entrants who had these cars because of the limited interest in the theme, so perhaps there could be driver bias, but bearing in mind that these tracks are put up in a ad hoc fashion and in with this round the drivers did not have time for any pre runs of the cars beforehand (because of the time constraint), you really have to conclude that any drivers cars being favoured is virtually concidental, especially as all the vehicles will suffer significant time losses on one Stage or another from literally being "off road". 

One thing I did notice in this Round was how well Oxo Cubes cars appearantly run on both your Stages getting on Winners Podiums for different Categories for the first time in this proxy, but he was not one of the drivers and I am pretty sure that no money passed hands during the course of the evening 

So have no worries, with relatively few cars in each category which are all very similar and with the difficulty of the Stages causing them to fall off the track with regularity,
my impression is that sometimes you get lucky....to make up for the other times

As for my Merc Truck, when I was doing the podiums my mind was pre-occupied with what had caused my truck to come to a halt on the 2nd run, and assumed that the issue had started previously so not read the timing results correctly, so it was a pleasent surprise when I got home and found that it had been running well enough on the first stage.

[woodcote]

It was fabulous to have you join us Graham! And a very fitted warm-up to our first ever Rally-Raid club night.

Here are a couple more proxy pictures...

   

The trucks - albeit on the two stages we didn't use for the proxy

   

Scott driving Midnight at the Oasis...

   

Plus loads more of the club night here. 

We already have a date for our 2027 WHO Dakar Rally-Raid night: Wednesday 25 August.

[Graham]

Day 3 Report (Worthing Slot Car Proxy)

Dune of Doom (NincoTrack)
Category 1 cars (Ninco) Driver Scott 
I could have chosen the easier of the 2 SCX tracks available, but I like a challenge for our proxy vehicles and this circuit certainly was with a heavy duty Camel hump to negotiate. 
It was Scotts first experience of running Raid vehicles and if that was not stressful enough it was his first participation (and possibly his last) in a Slot Car Proxy   But he appeared very professional as an off road driver, perhaps he had been secretly practising at home. The Ninco cars all ran very well, the top cars ran clear or with one deslot apart from NERC / Mitsubishi Pajero which had 2 deslots.
Category 2 Cars (PoCars) Driver Jeremy. These cars tended to run slower, with fewer deslots.
Category 3 (Procars) & Category 4 (Trucks) Driver Andy. A little more varibility with these vehicles with a couple having more than one deslot, and the Mitoos chassis cars looking very heavy around this track. The Merc Truck initially appeared to have running issues, so was run again and was quite smooth, BAracing Mann trucks had a couple of deslots on the loop corners.

The "Midnight at the Oasis" Stage review and Series results tomorrow.

[Graham]

Midnight at the Oasis (SCX Track)
Category 2 cars (SCX) Driver Scott.As the track had been set up with all the SCX obstacles and higher level bridges, we ran the associated SCX car Category cars first. It appeared that mostly the cars were able to negotiate these quite well, with most deslots occuring with the twin sand dune hump sections. However 3 vehicles did get bogged down on the bridge sections as well. 
Category 4 (Trucks) Driven by Scott were run next since we thought these with the long arms could cope with the full set up, in effect BAracing truck made it round with minor assistance, wheareas the Roadrunners Merc Truck soon got into difficulties and after a coiuple of higher leevel drops from the humps it came to a halt due to a gearing issue and had to be retired. 
Category 1 (Ninco) Driven by Andy was run next (minus the high level bridges) with the fastest running times on this stage, the BMW X5 cars  seemed especially suited to the humps, whereas the favourites like the Bowlers and thee VW Tourareg struggling moreso.
Category 3 (ProCars) Driver Jeremy, the simpler constructed VW Tourareg of BAracing and the Landrover of Bangers racing seemed to run faster than the more elaborate but heavier Mitoos chassis cars.

Series SCOREBOARD after Day 3
   

So after Dakar 3rd Day, the leaders are:
Category 1 (Ninco Cars), Oxo Cube / BMW X5. The leading car seems to change at every Round.
Category 2 (SCX Cars) , PaulC / VW Tourareg. Still maintains a 5 point lead after a less succesful run than previously.
Category 3 (ProCars) , NERC / Mitsubishi Lancer, also still out in front with a 3 point lead after a less sucessful run than previously.
Category 4 (Trucks), BAracing Mann truck has a 1 point lead over the illfated Roadrunners Merc. I have attempted to fix the gearing for the next Rounds but not confident that it will be enough to avoid another retirement.

Dakar Rally Proxy Day 4
This will be on Gpa113 Raid home based tracks for Stages 6 & 7 (both Ninco track ) layouts within the next week.

The Day 3 videos will be uploaded soon, although some of the earlier Stage 4 ones are missing (my phone seems to fail to record sometimes, probably due to myself being distracted)

[Gpa113]

Hello all  

That looked a great evening at Worthing 

Day 4 of the Dakar Rally will take place on Thursday this week..
As it is midweek it will just be me, no other club members around, plus its club racing Saturday anyway. 

The plan is.....

The twisty, tight, up and down Ninco Off Road set layout, as per the set instructions, with a good number of the clip in obstacles.   This provides lots of turns, ramps up and down, and isn't about speed.  Accuracy over the obstacles and the compact nature of the layout provides the challenge. 

Next will be a much bigger layout,  incorporating some decent elevation changes,  hopefully my SCX suspension bridge,  and maybe the 'Ladder of Doom', as long as the weather is good


Looking forward to a good day of building tracks,  and getting to run all the different RAID vehicles once again.

Pip