Sunday 22nd January 2012

Our weekly report from the weekend where we attended the Herts Nitro Club Winter Championship.

Weather was dry and about 12 degrees.  Track was in good condition.  This was helped by a very windy day and this would be the first time Elliott was able to run with his new sponsor AKA Tyres and his Novarossi Benitto engine at the large and fast Herts track, which is one of his favourites.  He was really looking forward to getting his new package out on the track to see whether or not this would give him any further advantage. 

Round one of qualification we decided to use AKA's City Block Super Soft tyres which he TQ'd by quite a big margin.  In round two we decided to stay on the City Blocks as the track was still a little boggy in places and again Elliott TQ'd the second round.  For the third round as the track was dry and fast we decided to use the small pin tyre which was Grid Iron Super Soft.  Elliott found these a little bit loose but was able to put in some stunning lap times.  Unfortunately when he hit the kicker jump hard it killed the engine where we think a stone may have caught the fly wheel.  There were a lot of stones on the track.  It wasn't a problem as he had already secured TQ for the day and set the fastest laps by at least one or two seconds over everyone else. 

For the Main Final we decided to opt for Super Soft Impact for the 15 minute final as we knew we would only need to make one fuel stop.  As the race started Elliott made a good clean start and immediately pulled away from the pack.  He set some blistering lap times.  We both agreed that this MP9 still ceases to amaze us with the pace it generates.  Elliott feels he can go faster and faster with it as he is really getting to grips with it now.  With the new package of tyres and engine we feel it has moved him to another level.  The Final went with no problems at all.  Nice clean fuel stop and went on to win the race by nearly two laps.  It was amazing to watch the pace from the start as six minutes into the race Elliott had almost lapped up to third with a really fast lap of 33.89 which was 2 seconds faster on the second place man.

A. Final (Buggy)

Race Duration 15m, Started 16:13 Finished 16:29

Thanks

Regards

Chris and Elliott Boots

Friday 6th January Taplow Meeting
Elliott ran the 2 wheel drive RB5 with the vega conversion for the first time. We had to change the setup on the car from the original. We had to make some changes to shock oils and springs. We got the car feeling quite good. We were playing around with the camber links on the rear and was able to qualify a second behind Lee Martin, about 4 seconds off the TQ time, which was quite encouraging on a quite difficult tight track. In the main A Final we had a couple of bobbles with some back markers which left us with a result of 5th.