June 28, 2010

New in the pits – Part 1

LRP Pulsar Touch competition

Walking around the pits here in Burgdorf there are a number of new products to be seen. As shown in our news yesterday LRP are here with their new charger, the awesome looking Pulsar Touch competition. This glossy blue charger sports a touch screen with graphic user interface as well as integrated high performance LiPo/LiFe balancer that detects differences in cells and automatically starts balancing and is in use by all their team drivers here.

Xenon Spur

New from Japanese company Xenon is their all new 1/12th scale spur gears. Featuring octagonal holes the new shape helps capture grease and therefore keep the balls lubricated at all times resulting in a better functioning and longer lasting differential. Available in 64P they come in a wide range of versions and are made to incredibly high tolerances. Xenon are also debuting their new ride height gauge with integrated camber gauge. This gauge has a huge number of steps with every 1/10th of a millimetre between 2mm to 8mm available. The ride height gauge also doubles as a quick check camber gauge with 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 & 3.5 degrees all possible.

Black Art Carbon chassis

French company Black Art are here using their updated carbon chassis for the CRC 1/12th scale. Featuring some refinements to the front of the molded tub chassis, it uses a special kind of short fibre carbon that prevents shock from being transferred throughout the chassis in the event of an impact. Black Art, who are best known for their body shells, will release the chassis in late September along with conversion kits to allow it to be used with a wide range of other manufacturers cars.

Serpent 120 Link

Serpent team driver Markus Mobers is racing here with the updated S120 Link chassis. Changes include a new rear end that sees the motor moved more to the right side for better balance. Other differences include the new central stabilising rods that replace the cars previously used floating monoshock, something that was necessary when the car went from a NiMh to a LiPo chassis. The car also sports a new flat mounted steering servo plus other little tweaks, but with the car still in the prototyping phase, no date was given for the release.

View our event image gallery here.

June 28, 2010

Additive switch transforms 1:12 Worlds

Additive switch transforms 1:12 Worlds

Day 2 of the IFMAR 1:12 World Championship at Burgdorf, Germany, has a new air of excitement after it was decided this morning to allow a second tyre additive to be used.  Yesterday the cars didn’t look good on track and drivers complained of a complete lack of traction. Despite a full day of running on the CRC carpet no black line appeared raising concerns about the batch of controlled additive provided by the race organisers.  Following a team managers meeting IFMAR made the decision to allow the use of a second additive and immediately the results could be seen with a black line appearing after just two groups of drivers completed 4 minutes each on the track.

Additive switch transforms 1:12 Worlds

With the grip coming up almost instantly the lap times tumbled with Ronald Volker setting a new fastest lap time of 12.603 compared to the 13.493 set in yesterday’s final practice by defending World Champion Naoto Matsukura.  After the short round of 4-minute practice Volker described conditions as ‘Totally different’ saying it now ‘feels like proper 1:12 racing’.

As a result of the completely different track conditions facing the drivers today Dutch Race Director Frans Heinsbroek has amended the timetable to give the 65 drivers extra track time to prepare for qualifying.  An additional round of 4-minute free practice has been added and what was to be the opening qualifier will now be untimed.  To ensure drivers still get six rounds of qualifying, tomorrow’s Finals day will now open with the sixth & last round of heats.

Simo Ahoniemi

Behind Volker in terms of lap times it was Corally’s Simo Ahoniemi who was second fastest this morning with 12.704 followed by Josh Cyrul’s CEFX on 12.788.

View our event image gallery here.