Greek Baja Race, April 5, 2009

14 teams showed up for the race. The weather was nice, cloudy, not hot, not cold, and the race progressed smoothly.

At the 1hr point we broke the spline of the steering servo. Luckily for us, the team next table had just gone through a similar operation, so we used their "old" spline gear from their leftovers and moved on! At the 1hr 30 min point we didn't survive a crash and the pullstart was torn completely out of the car!!!!!! We borrowed one from team Baja-Law and continued! Then the motor started not accepting any throttle above idle, so we quit at around the 2hrs-30min point. Anyway, my stock kit SS 26cc motor is 65 tanks old and still using the original spark plug! (As in : if it works don't fix it!).

I ran the Rear Dom for the first time in a race. What we saw was weird: When you start pushing the throttle, it's almost undrivable. It makes the rear wheel spin out of line, and it's frustrating. However, right after that there's an awesome midrange: Imagine, our car and another exiting the same corner at the same time. Our car would leap two or three car lengths ahead, just like being shot by a slingshot! The top end is similar to the aluminum SS exhaust, but that midrange... oh... awesome!
We desperately need a good suspension setup, now that we have good power and torque! In truth -and you will see the videos in the "videos of the baja" section, later tonight- only one or two cars were behaving as I would have liked. Everyone else was spinning around, doing unwanted donuts and losing precious seconds per lap. But it sure was FUN! I never saw a grumpy face during the race!!!

Other than that, we didn't break a single thing, everything on the car still works flawlessly, and apart from a good cleaning at first quick inspection nothing needs replacing... The only problem right now are the squeaks and and creaks that you hear when you move the car around: Like a 70's Fiat! Funny!!!

On a side note, Team Baja-Law won a respectable and long deserved 3rd place and a Cup! Congrats guys, and thanks for the assistance!

The pics are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/steliosh1/BajaRaceApril052009#

First Video: 6:45 minutes



Second video: 6:23 minutes



The two files at Mediafire (98 and 93mb respectively, at 640x480 res).
http://www.mediafire.com/?ojtnmmmyymw
and
http://www.mediafire.com/?hn4mut2o1g0