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News  Racing
XB8E wins at Hungarian Championships, Round 1 |
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| Report by Andras Eszenyi |
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The first round of Hungarian Championships took place last weekend. After many struggles with moving places and changing workplaces, I nearly missed out on the first race. I finished my car just before the practice day, thanks to Fekete Róbert, Héjjas Miklós, and my new Hungarian sponsor, Bajusz Zsolt, at xray-shop.hu. I switched from Serpent to XRAY in hope of getting more support, being faster, and having a chance for an international license.
With every new car, I'm always concerned about loose bolts, electronics going wild, or any errors that occur from my or the manufacturer's mistake. The break-in is heavy on diffs and gears, not to mention that this track is astro, putting huge forces on the chassis. As expected, 5 batteries later (less than an hour of running), I had to rebuild the differentials with new oil as they burned to the ground. Except for the pivot ball loosening up and some wrongly planned wires (my mistake), the car ran with ZERO problems. Whaaat?
This is my first time driving a ball' car. After years of c-hub, I arrived at the race with low expectations for results but high focus to get in flow along the car. I know this beast drives on power, acts as an RX racecar, so racing it on astro can be challenging if I go in the wrong direction with setups. I knew from reading the other builds that people tend to lower the rollcenter too much to have less traction roll, so the first step, as always, was to see the structure, then work the car in the optimal range where I can safely race and see my place on the grid. For my surprise, this was pretty fast. I was lucky to have a teammate, Bajusz Zsolt, with a near-optimal base setup. Our driving styles are different, and both electric and nitro require different approaches. I made the rear end a bit more erratic, gaining some speed, and worked on ESC programming for the rest of the day to get out the highest performance and not overheat the electronics. On my HobbyWing G3, I was running under 45 Celsius with boost and turbo. In conclusion, it's a huge upgrade from the previous G2S, where we were on the limit sometimes.
So what about the race? The top 3 were close to each other, but with my mature, calm approach, I won the mental game pretty fast. The two young guns were quicker than me, in my opinion, even- though my best time was faster on qualy. Why? Because their car was set to the limit, and on this track, you pay a huge price for making mistakes. We can reach up to 80km/h, a car on the limit can blow up anytime around the track with a sudden change in conditions and random rocks all over the place.
I won the first two finals with the same setups, so finally I had the chance to test the fully broken-in car in pretty nice conditions. For the last final, I made some changes and beat my previous year's track record by almost 1.000 seconds! I think this was my best ever offroad experience, where I felt like I'm one with the car. I was literally on my human limits, and I felt like I was pushing out the last bit of the car. I know my competition is near me, but being faster than them by almost a second helped me realize how greatly built and optimized the XRAY XB8'24 is. I'm not giving out my secrets, but anyone can message me on facebook, and we can talk about reaching optimal performance with this company.
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| Electric results: |
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1. Eszenyi Andras - XRAY XB8E
2. Fekete Zsombor
3. Kinhirt Botond
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| Report by Zsolt Bajusz |
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| With a lot of bad luck.In the first qualy my transmitter didn't work. In the second qualy I had a flame out.But in the third qualy I won and so I could start from the third place in the finals.The finals went well and I managed to overtake the leader and take the first place.I was leading the final with almost one lap when my electric switch came apart and my car got loose.Luckily I could come back into the race but I lost 3 minutes and so I could only come back to the second place.So I finished in the second place with a big bad luck. Next time we will come back with more power! But my Xray/FX/SRT/Nosram/Nitrulox combo was fantastic all weekend. Thanks to my mechanic Bubu for his help and also congrats to win! |
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| Nitro results: |
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1. Cseko Gergely
2. Zsolt Bajusz Junior - XRAY XB8
3. Varro David
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