With the IFMAR World's representing the end of the 2004 rubber tire races, finally we were onto the indoor carpet racing season. The first race of the year for me was 2004 Norrca Carpet Nationals which went extremely well as my T1-FK was in very good form and I was able to TQ and win the race. I knew that I had to test a few more things though so I had more set-up knowledge going into this years U.S. Indoor Champs race. I was able to test my last few set-up ideas along with break in all of my tires at our Cleveland Warm-Up race at my track, Halo Hobbies. We had a lot of the top contenders there practicing so it was a good judge to see that the car was on pace and would only need to have the set-up adjusted to match the the Champs track.
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Tuesday night we headed down to Cleveland, unloaded the truck and got some much needed sleep. Wednesday morning I set up my pit area in the hotel room and prepared for the first round of practice. I had heard that they were making the track larger this year and I was hoping the track wasn't going to be super high speed as I prefer a more technical track. Well, it was larger and they definatly made it technical though as it had a super balance of highspeed sweepers, hair pins, switch backs and a really tought chicane!! The first two practice packs I spent driving the car around getting used to the track. I didn't make any set-up adjustments as I didn't want to take the time to adjust to a new set-up when I wasn't comfortable with the track.
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Thursday I began to try some set-up changes. I tried the medium position for the rear roll center, while this did make the car easy to drive it wasn't what I was looking for as the car felt much to tight and lazy in the really tight, technical parts of the track. The next run I wanted to try a few things - different camber link position and shock set-up but this wasn't to be as a first lap crash destroyed my rear rim and suspension arm!! Going into the last practice I went back to something I was sure of so I had a good set-up to start qualifying.
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Friday started off great with a TQ in round #1. The car was pretty good but I did think it still needed a bit more corner speed and steering. I tried leaning the rear shocks in 2 holes and changing from dark blue springs to purple for round #2. Round #2 wasn't bad as I only went .01 slower after five minutes compared to round 1!! The car was much different to drive though as it had more understeer into the corner but it definatly had more steering from the center out. Paul Lemieux took TQ in this round so I had to up my pace again to try and be on top for the final.
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Saturday started off like Friday with reclaiming the TQ in round #3. Again, the car was good but still not 100% as I was still encountering an understeer into the corner. I made the adjustments and the car was extremly good in round #4. A last minute mistake in traffic cost me a little time that gave Paul Lemieux a .4 second lead to take TQ. I don't know if I could have taken TQ without the mistake as we would have been seperated by hundreths!! It was such close racing!!!
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Sunday was the finals and I made only a slight adjustment to my car, again trying for more steering. Everyone got away on the start very clean and after two laps Paul made a small mistake in the sweeper allowing me to take over the lead and hold onto it for the remainder of the race. We raced extremely close for about 4 minutes which I have to thank Paul for some really clean driving as I don't think we could have been any closer on the track without a major crash!! I think Paul faded in the last 45 seconds as I was able to pull away about one second to end up with the victory!!
Josh Cyrul
Setup of Josh Cyrul is available for download here at www.teamxray.com
