The IMCC Cup is the first race back after the New Year break and is hosted by the IMCC club in Illawarra NSW, Australia. The racing is split across the weekend with Nitro Saturday and Electric Sunday. With racers from both categories enjoying the flowing and technical layout. The club had done a fantastic job this year grinding down some of the bumps and repainting the track surface.
During Friday practice the track felt quite green with little rubber down on the new surface, this made finding a good balance challenging because the cars always had off power understeer and on throttle oversteer. To overcome this I gave my NT1â™14 more rear droop giving more off power steering into the slow corners as well as using the flexible setting in the top deck to give more on throttle grip. Finally I changed to a lighter shock oil to try and speed up the cars change of direction.
On Saturday during the first qualifier I felt as though I had made a small improvement to the car with the shock oil but was having a hard time tuning the engine in the 35 degree heat. The engine was struggling at the bottom end as though it was rich and blowing plenty of smoke however the temperature was already up at 160â™C and struggling to idle for more than a few seconds. So I was unable to lean the engine for fear of further overheating which was something I had never had before. The tune was changing dramatically from the start to the finish where for the first two minutes of the race I could hardly get second gear from the engine being far too rich, then for the final two minutes the car was almost changing immediately into second gear.
As run time was no issue I tried to think of ways to get more power and help the engine without leaning the motor. Over the second and third qualifier I decide to run deeper gearing and tighten the clutch to let the engine rev more which helped a little bit. The engine still would not idle properly so for the final I had no choice but to set a high idle just to keep the engine running.
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For the final I had qualified second and needed about .2 per lap in order to catch Aaron Lee who was TQ. I decided to change to a Protoform P-56 body for the final and tried to further tune the motor to try and sort out the bottom end. I also changed to a softer Matrix front tyre to gain some aggression.
The final got off to a pretty bad start, the engine stalled during the warmup with about 30 seconds left because the idle was too low. My pitman quickly turned up the idle, fuelled the car and put it on the ground just as the cars had to go onto the track. While waiting for the buzzer I had to rev the car as much as possible without moving the car to avoid stalling the now cold engine. At the start I dropped back a place because of the engine hesitation and was in third behind Rick Bartolozzi. Because of the rushed refuelling I now had fuel in the brakes making stopping the car at the end of the straight difficult. After a few laps I tried a pass on Rick but I just nudged the rear of his car while trying to brake at the end of the straight spinning him around. I waited for him and gave the position back while dropping back to fifth. Before the first fuel stop I was able to cleanly make my way back up to second but Aaron was almost a lap in front by now. Aaron then had a flame out in the pits and from there I was able to control my pace in order to not take any risk in traffic and have a small lead in the end.
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Final result:
1. Tim Lee â“ XRAY NT1â™14
2. Aaron Lee
3. Rick Bartolozzi 4. George Karozis â“ XRAY NT1â™14
5. Alex Koussas
6. Michael Tohmeh
7. Kane Alderton
8. Tim Moylan
9. Scott Macdonald
10. Jeffery Mackie
