Win apiece for McBride & Toia as eBuggy goes to A3
eBuggy at the Asian Buggy Championships season opener produced two exciting A-Main encounters on Saturday that resulted in Kyle McBride and Logan Toia taking a win apiece to send the decider into Sunday’s A3 in New Zealand. With HB Racing’s Toia securing the TQ, the Kiwi’s stint at the front was short lived in A1 as a first lap mistake dropped him right to the back of the field. Up front it seemed for a time that no one wanted to lead the 10-minute encounter with Kasey Dawson, Jayden Edmunds, Caleb Noble and Kyle McBride all throwing away the lead when they got a chance at the front. As the race reached half distance things settled down with McBride hitting the front again but this time the Aussie stayed there for the win ahead of Noble who saw off a number of challenges from Toia as he made an impressive recovery drive. In A2, second place qualifier McBride got by Toia on lap 1 but quickly gave it back before Noble took a turn at the front for 4-laps. Chased down by McBride, the Australians would come together resulting in both getting stuck in the piping. As they got marshalled, Toia went back to the front and despite McBride’s best efforts stayed there for the win with Noble third – the Tekno driver clearly not impressed by McBride’s driving. With his second in A1, Noble still however has a chance at the overall win in A3.
Summing up A1, Toia said, ‘I had mistake on lap 1 and then I got caught up with Kyle again in the whoops, that was just unlucky, wrong time, wrong place. I was dead last on the second lap and clawed my way back to third, my last lap pass was awesome. Clearly delighted and at the same relieved after his A2 win he described the race as ‘phenomenal’. The 17-year-old continued, ‘racing with Kyle and Caleb and all those guys is awesome fun. I was nervous which I don’t get that often and trying to keep it all together for 6-minutes felt very long. It’s all to play for tomorrow. I have a 1 and a 3, Kyle has a 1 and a 2 and then Caleb has a 2 and a 3. On the amount of driver errors in particular in A1, Toia said, ‘you can just make small mistakes and it will push you all the way over to the pipe, there are so many off cambers you just slide if you are anyway off the apex.’
Summing up his A1 win McBride said, ‘I had a super clean run, I had one little mistake at the start but got back in the lead and it was pretty much like flawless from there, no mistakes. The car felt amazing, I did my fastest lap I think probably of the weekend for myself in eBuggy.’ Having taken the final eBuggy qualifier in the morning, asked what the turn around in performance today was after a so so day in the category yesterday, he replied, ‘I changed a couple of settings in my ESC which made the car a little bit easier to drive and gave it that feel closer to my nitro buggy. We were testing stuff in electric yesterday, so using that as a bit of a test class because nitro is my main focus, but I think today I am getting more confidence and for sure the with the rough conditions dialling back the ESC made a big different. Some suspension stuff we found in Q3 with Nitro we just put the exact same on electric and that was it.’ On A2 he said, ‘that was a lot more complex, my car was good but I think the track was a lot dustier, I would have to double check but my lap time was almost half a second slower so going probably have to look at that tomorrow because my car felt more skittish and skatey in the back. I probably could have snatched the win but I crashed to much and yeah Logan ran a great race.’
