Having raced at  Stonehaven previous, We knew the key to winning was about having the right strategy for the final.

The track is very hard on tyres, and managing the wear rate to cope without a tyre stop was going to be difficult. The high wear rate caused by the full speed banked corner is something we learnt to manage.

Alex qualified 7^th for the main after lots of work getting setup and using the qualifiers as a learning base for tire wear.

Off the start, Alex fought to get past 3 or 4 drivers but got tagged from a driver he had overtaken, as always Alex got his head into gear and drove hard for the first 5 mins and got himself into the lead. Having got there he drove smartly looking after his tyres, slowing slighly to conserve the left rear.

Alex led the race for around 20 mins of the total 30 mins.

With around 7 or 8 mins to go it started to rain and made the track very slippy. We knew Alex had a hard setting and it would be hard for him to hold onto car now.

At this point Alex was 1st ,Joe Kerry  was 2nd, and Mark Green was 3rd. Joe drove well to catch up with Alex. For the last 4 mins they both swapped places several times but Joe had to stop for fuel. Alex didn't ,the strategy paid off and Alex drove to the end in a very controlled manner deserving of his First National win.

Final Results:
1. Alex Thurston – KYOSHO V-ONE R4 – 99 laps
2. Joe Kerry – Serpent – 98 laps
3. Mark Green – Serpent – 98 laps
4. Andrew Hastings – 92 laps
5. Simon Wood – 88 laps
6. Chris Steele – 87 laps
7. Adam Catchpole – 84 laps
8. Dave Gerard – 84 laps
9. Matthew Cook – KYOSHO V-ONE R4 - 47 laps
10. Scott Hellawell – 10 laps

  Alex's KYOSHO R4 Setup

Front Camber   2
Rear Camber   3.5
Front toe -   1 out
Rear toe        in 3
Shocks Kyosho Standard Blues front and rear.
Shock oil front : 500 2 hole pistons
Rear oil  450 3 hole pistons
Droop front -1
Droop rear 4
Tyres Front 40s....  Rear left.... 45 Right right 40

Report by Martin Thurston.

Report From Mid South 4wd Regional.

Due to the rain over the last few weeks it was touch and go whether the meeting would take place. But a lot of hard work from the Stotfold crew meant that it was drained enough to run the meeting, albeit missing a few features that were too waterlogged.

Practice round – My KYOSHO LAZER FS2SP  felt good on Schumacher Green mini spikes although a little edgy on the very greasy track.

Q1 - Changed to Schumacher Silvers and the LAZER felt much easier to push, I made a couple of small errors but it was a pretty good start and won the first round from Jon Spencer
Q2 - Kept the setup the same but had some errors and ended up 2nd behind Jon who just missed my first round time.
Q3 - Decided keep everything the same again as I could not fault the car for balance. I tq'd this round and beat my previous fastest time
Q4 - Changed to Ballistic Buggy greens after feeling I was lacking drive and also seeing other cars working well on them. The balance felt very good like this and the KYOSHO would rotate better but give much more grip to get the power down. I set the fastest time in this run and was over 0.5 seconds quicker on my fastest lap.

The finals went well and apart from a mistake early in the first leg where I lost the lead for a while I managed to win all 3 finals.

We also had 3 other KYOSHO LAZERS in the A final, Stephen Brown, Tony Evdoka, and Matt Perry. All with TEAM ORION fitted.

Team Orion is proud to announce the addition of multi-time French National Champion Julien Formentin to the racing team of Team Orion France!

Julien is going to use the successful Team Orion Vortex R10 Pro speed controller together with the Vortex VST Pro Race Brushless motors. The power will be delivered by the World Championship winning Carbon Pro 90C batteries.

FDL and Team Orion wish Julien a great continuation of the 2012 season - he is actually in the lead of the 4WD off-road class and second in 2WD off-road!

Kevin Lee, 4wd Mid South Regional Report, Westmill track 29/12/2012
We started the day wet and damp and it stayed that way apart from the odd spell when it got very wet!!!
For Practice I kept my Setup from Stotfold National apart from running Green compound Spikes, the car felt really good so no need to change for first qualifier
I managed to TQ the first 3 rounds, In Round 4 I made some mistakes and Elliott Boots who had been improving all day with some set up changes took the round.
After qualifying it was decided to call it a day, This was a shame as I think there would have been some good finals and the rain started to ease up, but at the end a very good showing again for the Kyosho team!

The full results from qualifying can be found here.
http://hrcc.no-ip.com/MSR-4WDR1/heatrndsum.htm

As no finals was run the results stood from qualifying positions.

1^st Kevin Lee, Kyosho Lazer

2^nd Elliott Boots, Kyosho Lazer

3^rd Karl Jackson, Kyosho Lazer

Special mention to Shaun Howe finishing 5^th, really a great result for him and another kyosho in the top ten.

Report from Tony Evdoka, BRCA Regional at TORCH - 22^nd of April 2012

My satisfactions were different to normal results of a racing weekend.
I don’t know where to start actually.
In my opinion, Kevin Lee was in a league of his own all day although I did get close to him in round 2 (LOL)
I think Kevin will admit that in round 2 he drove extremely hard to stay ahead and ended up beating me by just  0.72 over the 5 minute qualifier.
Kevin also posted the only 23s lap of the day (in trying so hard to keep ahead- LOL) in that run and that lap is now the new lap record on that track layout. If I am not mistaken, no other 23s lap has been ever been achieved on that layout and jump combination at TORCH
The times posted by Kevin and me were the fastest times of the day closely followed by Stephen Brown with his KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "Vega".
I am still unsure if I got more satisfaction in beating Stephen at that stage or being real close to Kevin :)
Rain then came and we were in the unknown as most of our testing and developments of the KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "DB1" have been in dry conditions.
This is where I was personally shocked at what developed and everyone knows I always quote 'the stop watch doesn't lie'
There have been many people asking whether the new Kyosho based DB1 car would ever work in wet conditions!
Well with all 3 KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "DB1" cars at this meeting we were about to find out.
The rain actually couldn't of come at a better time as it was just between rounds and no one had any advantage or disadvantage.
A very bold statement but all three of the DB1 cars where simply so much faster than anyone else.  Stephen with his KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "Vega" was also quick but unfortunately no lap times posted so can't really comment factually.
Kev, me and Dave were the only ones capable of doing 25s laps with Kevin doing the fastest lap of that wet round.  A 25.206 was posted by Kev in the wet.
To put into prospective my statements.  Everyone else (near 90 drivers) was doing 27s /28s plus lap times apart from just one single lap put in by Glenn Westwood which was 26.936 (just 1 sub 27s)
The KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "DB1" cars were 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd in round and the only cars that did 12 lap pace.
I still look at these times in disbelief how quick our cars were in wet conditions. I have always said the clock never lies and it doesn’t matter how I state the facts.

4 Kyosho cars in the main A final (3 KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "DB1s" and 1 KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "Vega") and all 4 on the front of the grid.
Kevin Lee (DB1), Tony Evdoka (DB1), Stephen Brown (Vega) and David Burton (DB1)

The Finals were also wet although the rain had eased by then.
Kevin and I got a 1^st and 2^nd in legs 1 and 2 securing the win for Kevin and a Podium for myself.
Stephen Brown also drove a great last leg taking the win from myself to secure himself 2^nd at the meeting.

Results were then a KYOSHO  1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd in the Main final. And also a win for Matt Perry in the B final with his KYOSHO Ultima RB5 "Vega" just missing the A by one place.
A great event with a great result for TEAM KYOSHO !! The TORCH crew also need to be commended for their superb efforts in giving everyone a great prepared track and a well run meeting.
Full results can be found here  http://www.torchracing.org.uk/results/BRCA/2WD/mtg3/ressum.htm

Regards Tony Evdoka

Firstly I would like to thank  Mike Cradock personally and all our sponsors
for your help and
support at this prestigious event, which is really on the same level as
an Indoor World Championship, with 95% of the best drivers in the world
in attendance.

Day 1 Practice

We had a reasonably good practice run which consisted of best 3
consecutive laps which gave you a re-seeding for your qualification so it
was really important to get into a good heat as this is an extremely
difficult track to overtake and can be a real problem with back markers
and traffic.  It's quite hard to get a clean run.

Day 2 Qualification

We had 5 rounds of qualification, best 3 to count over the next 2 days.
The first day we had 3 rounds then on the Sunday we had 2 rounds.  As
I suspected our first round was looking really good, Elliott leading
the heat by about 5 seconds but unfortunately came upon some back
markers where he had trouble passing, which cost him a lot of time,
which placed him in the top 20, but would have put him easily in the
top 10.  We had a couple of reasonable rounds and on our 4th round we
were looking for a TQ run but unfortunately we had an incident where we
had to retire the car and the 5th round we had a reasonable run, which
gave us an overall position of 16th, which was okay as we had
automatically qualified for the semi-finals.

Semi Final

We headed into the semi-final.  Our car was set up beautifully,
everything was running perfectly, we had lowered the car by 2mm all
round in the last qualification heat which made the car much easier to
drive and we new the car would be good heading into the semi final with
the objective to get the car home safely and get it into the main A
final.  We had a really good race with some of the top drivers setting
some really good lap times and ended up 2nd behind Jarad Tebo, which is
not a bad job considering the company we were in.

A Main Final

We had qualified 4th for the starting grid of this A Main which was a
fantastic result, our best ever at Neo Buggy in all the years we have
been doing it.  The car was working fantastically with no problems
whatsoever and Elliott had a lot of confidence in doing well.  In the
first part of the race we were running around in 3rd place just behind
Mayfield for a while and as the final progressed unfortunately we had a
few little bobbles which cost us a fair bit of time but we kept on
pushing hard, Elliott driving really well, and we ended up in the 7th
position, which is a great achievement and gives a good indication for
the World Championships this year in Argentina.

Regards

Elliott and Chris Boots

The first round of the BRCA national series took place on the 14^th and 15^th April. This year is the most competitive for years with a lot of drivers returning to 1/10^th from 1/8^th, so it is going to be a challenging year!

For 2wd on Saturday I was running the prototype DB1 conversion of the RB5 from Rudebits, and from first practice it felt straight on the pace. I ended up qualifying 3^rd behind Lee Martin and Simon Moss after getting a 1 and 2 in round scores. The finals went well and finished 2^nd in every final but was unable to get past Moss to take the final leg which left me 3^rd overall.

In 4wd I went second in the first 2 rounds with the FS2. It felt really easy to push, but unfortunately I was beaten by 0.7 seconds on both runs, first by Tom Cockerill and then by Lee Martin. The 3^rd Leg was affected by rain which didn’t help, and in the 4^th I made a couple of errors. It left me lining up 4^th on the grid and my final results were 7^th, 3^rd and then 7^th giving me 5^th overall.
My finals didn’t go as well as I hoped in 4wd but a 3^rd and a 5^th is a solid start to the year and I’m looking forward to the next round at Robin Hood Raceway.

Kev.

Kev