Laguna Seeca prepped for more slotcar shenanigans!!
With the Xmas season well behind us and a few racers looking like they needed some good exercise, it came just in time in the form of the Slotcar Legends Racing January 2010 Summer season kick off. There is always an unknown about the start of the season. Sometimes those with children are still on holidays and for other reasons numbers can be depleted!! But not in this case. A full fifteen people turned up for commencement of the series and it looked like most had done their homework in the break and were looking for some full on action. With Bob kindly hosting the round and Ninco being the track manufacturer of choice it was sure shaping up to be a slotfest with knobs on. Anything with a magnet was good and three minute heats of the technical but quick circuit was going to have its fair share of casualties!!
Track owners choice was the first class called and this was for Classic Trans Am. Needless to say Scalextric would be well represented on this occasion and with Classic being the operative word, there were plenty of Camaros and Mustangs to go round. Norm took out the first heat and looked in good form but Chris drove a heat two blinder with a five year old model and left the rest wondering what to do. Jordan wasn’t to be put off and whilst driving one of his more priceless models he pulled off a heat win.
Not long after, Norm did it again and stamped his mark on the class. Would Chris let him get away with it though??? I kept my car pretty much in the scenery and as a new model with SOOB features, it went straight back into the box and the end of the class. But that’s another story!! It was also about this juncture that Eggy began lamenting the marshall situation once again. Would the Sunshine boys ever overcome this dilemma??
Norm and the fateful Knighthawk Lola!
Eventually and not before time, Classic Trans Am concluded and the computer put us out of our misery. In a race dotted with chrome bits along the track and whole cars taking a somewhat misguided leap of faith into the wild blue yonder at the end of the main straight, it was a blessing in disguise for car and driver when the last heat was run! Chris showed he had the edge and took the win ten seconds in front of Norm.
Race 1 Classic Trans Am 22 laps Position Group B Driver Race time 1. Chris 10’ 06.740†2. Norm 10’ 16.786†3. Paul 10’ 28.414†4. Justin 5. 1. Jordan 6. Eggy 7. 2. Moby 8. Phil 9. Alan 10. 3. Peter S 11. 4. Ian 12. 5. Bob 13. 6. Ken 14. 7. Peter J 15. 8. Rhys
Once again heat one saw Norm up with his ‘stealth’ Fly Lola…. Flat black and under the radar! Bob in what could only have been sheer excitement, jumped the end fence of his own track and took the marshalls by surprise. Not one of them was able to put a hand to the model on its trajectory, and it all ended it tears on the floor a split second later!! What ever happened to ‘home track advantage’???
Keep an eye on the Red Camaro (on yellow)
Eggy and Justin spent a good part of one heat going head to head. John matched every trick Justin could manage and even had his nose in front a few times at various places. But Justin broke the big man and left him wallowing at the mercy of the marshalls. Eggy regained his composure and caught Justin, who, in panic lost the plot and deslotted, whereupon John planted him a beauty fair and square up the rear and out of the marshalls grip, then left on his way to greater things!! In an attempt to regain ground, Justin once again lost control and eventually he was lucky to get a place!!
Norm decided to race his next heat with his Knighthawk Lola and what possessed him to do that we don’t know. The model was a pig from go to woah an eventually was resubstituted for old faithful, but the damage had been done and he spent several more occasions in the tender grip of the marshalls! But life wasn’t all downers for some. No, Jordan took out a heat win against Justin and no one called for a dope test!! Then he did it again!!
LMP saw several quite spectacular events and the best trick seemed to be jumping the fences at turn one. Rhys excelled himself by doing it Olympian fashion and without a pole!! I seem to recall one of those ancient English poets describing the joy of the game of cricket, saying there was nothing finer than the sound of leather on willow!! I suspect the slotcar equivalent must be ‘the sound of plastic on concrete’!! Quite unique!!
LMP motor class B 24 laps 1. Paul 10’ 48.162†2. Chris 10’ 59.777†3. 1. Jordan 11’ 03.220†4. Justin 5. Eggy 6. Phil 7. 2. Peter S 8. 3. Ken 9. Norm 10. 4. Bob 11. 5. Ian 12. Alan 13. 6. Peter J 14. 7. Moby 15. 8. Rhys
The Sunshine boys were very quiet today??
Competitiveness in the Unmarked Supercar class was clandestine and dirty tricks seemed afoot. Heat one saw Chris continually trip over something in his lane at turn three and while this was going on, Justin had strategically placed his fingers on the barrier besides yellow lane bringing that driver to a premature halt!! With no more ado, the race was halted and restarted in the name of fair play.
An altercation broke out a couple of heats later when Eggy joined the long list of people who leapt the barrier on to the floor. This was compounded by an instinctive gesture on behalf of the marshalls. Kenny made the unwise decision of touching the stricken car!! Bad luck Ken!! But all was not bad news. Peter J took out what must be possibly his second or third heat victory in living memory, once again, no swab test was called for??
Rhys's 722 was not so ducking fusty either!!
There was good news for me too, running my Cartrix BMW Z3 I took off into the lead with Peter S and Justin on my tail. I was running it with the OOB 17,000 rpm motor and it was only its cornering capabilities which kept me in front. Every time one of the guys closed the gap, I squeezed open the gas tap a little more and sure enough, off they would roll into the scenery. No amount of taunting and verbal abuse distracted me. Reference to it not being a true supercar, but a hairdresser’s car fell on deaf ears. I played the ‘possum’ card several times in the course of the race to great effect!!
But the predictability of the event was unpredictable!! Peter J fulfilled the old Bob Dylan lyric prophesy in which ‘He who came first would surely come last’!!....... and he did. Another turn up for the bookmakers was newcomer Rhys who managed to pull off a couple of seconds with a well performing Mercedes 722, Good on yer, Rhys! Moby’s favourite trick was to park his car amongst the alligators at turn three almost continuously which caused me to adjust the focus of my left eye to that point!
Justin's Morgan was a threat straight out of the box that day!! The guide seemed fine though!
Game over, and results published. It turns out that the old ‘come on’ had worked for me and I had run four heats with four clear rounds, that’s 96 undeslotted laps, leaving the rest of the pack to fester in their own bad results. Highlight of the event was Chris’s choice of model!! Without a qualifying car, I let him drive a Porsche Drift car!! He had moved the magnet and put the softest tyres to the rear. The next tactic was to drive through the timing lights and at the next tight corner, spin the model round and drive back under the lights again. The problem was that he wasn’t aware that the minimum lap time was set to just under the lap record. Hence every time he span round and went back, the computer didn’t record his lap (or part of!!) Bad luck Chris, good try!!
Norm suffered a cataclysmic fault with his model and was effectively ruled out of the running in spite of a couple of attempts to regain some ground with donor cars and Rhys had a good drive to lift himself off the bottom of the ladder, well done. But performance of the day has to go to Jordan, we can only assume the decided lack of grape juice intake comparatively must have contributed to the huge increase in his on track performance!!?? Mmmmmm… No matter, the computer told the story as it was and no one was going to rain on my parade!
Unmarked Supercars, round 5 24 laps 1. Phil 12’ 15.107†2. Justin 12’ 20.676†3. 1. Peter S 12’ 49.678†4. Eggy 5. Paul 6. 2. Ian 7. Alan 8. Chris 9. 3. Jordan 10. 4. Rhys 11. 5. Bob 12. 6. Peter J 13. Norm 14. 7. Ken 15. 8. Moby.
All is peace and calm with the Sunhine boys, the Westies and the Cliffers sharing a quiet moment