Lutz is top seed going into Nitro qualifying in Xiamen

Ryan Lutz is the Nitro buggy top seed for Qualifying at the 2018 SIGP as he put in a blistering time to go nearly 2 seconds faster over 3 consecutive laps than 2nd placed Yusuke Sugiura. The US driver putting his time down to tweaks made to the car’s setup to make it harder, having felt that the setup he copied from Jonathan Yeung for Rd2 was too soft. Behind Sugiura in 2nd was fellow Japanese Kyosho driver Wataru Takashiro who finally found his rhythm to demote Hu Weiping who will rely on his CP1 time to seed 4th with Chen Guanxian, Jonathan Yeung and Kaja Novotny all improving in the 3rd round to complete the top 6.

Very impressed with the setup he has copied from Hong Kong team mate Yeung, especially how it handles the bumps, Lutz made his dampers harder for the final round of practice and also applied a rear linkage change from the setup that he hadn’t yet put on his car. Now much happier with his car he plans to go slightly harder in the rear shocks for the 1st qualifier tomorrow morning to make the car better on landings off the bigger jumps and plans to use one of the qualifiers to try a harder tire, switching from super soft to soft AKA Impacts.

Japanese driver Yusuke Sugiura felt his car was quick but not stable enough to be consistent over 5 minutes due to the many bumps on the track. For the opening qualifier the Kyosho driver plans to go softer on his damping to cope with the track conditions and make it more stable and consistent but overall he said the car was ‘not bad’.

Kyosho Japan team mate Takashiro said his car was now better than before, continuing the learn the track as the previous days testing had been rained off. Saying his first round this morning was terrible, it took him a while to figure out how to improve the car but now it was ok. With some ideas on how to further improve the car he said the track is getting slippery but followed that up with ‘but I like low traction’.

Hu Weiping made it three Kyoshos in the top 4 places despite not improving on his CP1 pace. In the final round of practice, the Chinese National Champion admitted to making too many mistakes and with the setup changes he made not working he will now revert back to the setting he started the day with going into Q1, with the exception of the change to harder Sweep Defender tires.

Completing the top 5, Chen Guanxian said the set-up changes he is making to the car were improving his Agama each run but also feels he is getting used to the track. For the first of 3 rounds of qualifying tomorrow morning the Taiwanese driver doesn’t plan any changes, instead focussing on just driving the car.

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