Race report: Mini 4WD UK Autumn Grand Prix 2019
On the 19th of October 2019 we ran our first Mini 4WD UK event in Gloucester UK. We organised our event at a small local church hall, which was just about big enough to set up our challenging 3 lane circuit based on the Japan Cup 2019 Miracle Baron Circuit.
We were expecting 12 racers with about 30 car entries across our three classes, on the day we ended up with 13 racers and an incredible 60 entries.
We had racers join us from all over the country, in one case a racer, Erwin, sent their cars for us to race as they were unable to make it to the event in person. We even had a special guest racer, Kaz, who flew in from Japan to race with us. He is truly a world wide ambassador of Mini 4WD having travelled to multiple countries to be a part of their growing communities.
We ran the day with a similar format to the Japan Cup’s Trial Class, which guaranteed each racer 3 rounds before we head into the semi-finals and finals, with a shoot out to clear up any tie on points.
Box stock
As usual, box stock class was a fun and very competitive class with some of the faster special edition cars, such as the Aero Avante Black Special & Trigale Black Special, struggling with the raised Dragon Back & down slope. This allowed some of the regular kits to be competitive with the special editions making a mixed field in the semi-finals:
Semi final 1
Jerome
Storm Cruiser (Super X)
Kaz
Baron Viento J-Cup 2019 (FM-A)
Semi final 2
Adeline
Manta Ray MKII Black Special (MS)
Jerome
Brocken Gigant (FM-A)
Semi final 3
Aust
Gun Bluster XTO Light Blue Special (FM-A)
George
Shadow Shark (AR)
The semi-finals produced some surprising results after some of the special editions that look good all coursed out on the raised Dragon Back, like those in the qualifiers.
Final
Jerome
Storm Cruiser (Super X)
Jerome
Brocken Gigant (FM-A)
Aust
Gun Bluster XTO Light Blue Special (FM-A)
Aust’s Gun Bluster went into the finals looking like the favourite to win, a good lead from the start with Jerome’s Storm Cruiser in 2nd place.
On the final lap Aust’s Gun Bluster became another casualty of the Raised Dragon Back and coursed out with less than half a lap to go giving Jerome a 1 2 with Storm Cruiser taking the win, and Brocken Gigant coming in second.
Tuned class
Tuned class was very popular with racers as it is a fantastic next step from Box Stock and allows racers to learn the effects of each option part on their machine’s performance.
With most racers entering at least one car in the class we had a very diverse field of chassis, bodies and set ups.
As with Box Stock the raised Dragon Back and down slope was the tricky section for the Tuned class cars, with the cars higher speeds landing them with brakes at the top of the down slope causing them to flip it was a fine balance between too slow and not too fast.
As expected the Torqued motor was preferred by most with it powering all but one car to the semi finals.
Semi final 1
Jerome
Aero Manta Ray (AR)
Erwin
Aero Avante (MA)
Semi final 2
George
Hexegonite (MA)
Jerome
Thundershot MKII (AR)
Semi final 3
Jerome
Fighter Magnum VFX (Super 1)
Mike
Aero Manta Ray (AR)
The cars in semi finals were all pretty stable with only one car coursing out over the three races. Cars running torque tuned motors the balance of speed and stability to make it through, but Mike broke the trend and got through to the finals with a Rev Tuned motor.
Final
Erwin
Aero Avante (MA)
Jerome
Thundershot MKII (AR)
Mike
Aero Manta Ray (AR)
“Virtual” Erwin’s MA chassis went into the final as favourite having been strong all day, so it was a fight for second with Jerome’s Thundershot VS the under-dog of Mike’s Manta Ray. Erwin’s Aero Avante stormed away from the start, with the race for second being settled in the final section on the last lap with Mike’s Manta Ray edging ahead for second in one of the most exciting races of the day.
Open class
For open class is was a different story, the up slope and short recovery section causing most of the trouble challenging racers to hone their setups for the track.
The first round of qualifying saw a lot of cars going with aggressive setups and coursing out on the up slope. With racers taking different approaches for tuning their cars, some gearing down and opting for Light Dash motors, and others sticking to Hyper Dash with aggressive brakes, however the fastest car of the morning was an MA chassis running 3.5:1 gear ratio with a torque tuned motor.
This meant that it was very tight on points for the qualifiers for the semi finals.
Semi finalists
Jerome
Manta Ray (AR)
Joseph
Dump Truck (MS)
Joseph
Brocken Gigant Blue (Super FM)
Jerome
Avante 1 (AR)
Joseph
Avante Blue (Super 2)
Aust
DCR-01 (MA)
Jason
Winning Bird Formula (MS)
Unfortunately, this meant we made a mistake and missed out one of the racers who got through, and had to have extra semi final races between all the qualifiers to rectify this.
Having had the day to get the cars set up, the pace of the semi finals were the fastest of the day. With Joseph taking all 3 spots for the final.
Final
Joseph
Brocken Gigant Blue (Super FM)
Joseph
Avante Blue (Super 2)
Joseph
Dump Truck (MS)
In the open class final it was simply a case of which of Joseph’s cars would take the win, the high speed and advanced set up of the MS Flex based Dump Truck meant it was no contest from his other cars and won the final by a significant margin.
Time-attack
After the main events we had a time-attack, where each racer could choose one of their cars to compete for fastest 3 laps.
With some of the fastest looking cars from tuned class looking like they could actually challenge the open class cars on the time-attack, the record went to Jason’s Winning Bird (MS chassis) with a time of 16.38 seconds.
Special award
We also would like to thank Kaz for travelling 23 hours all the way from Japan to join us in our race, and become a part of our Mini 4WD community. We presented him with a special award of “Furthest Travelled”. Kaz has also been very kind and allowed us to share his photos of the event.
Lessons learned
With this being our first event we went away with a number of lessons learned, both as racers and race organisers. We would like to share some of the lessons learnt as organisers with you.
We were prepared for approximately 30 car entries, having organised heats in advance of the day to help speed things along on the day, unfortunately this preparation went to waste as we had double the number of cars than we expected, causing a delay to starting, and between rounds. This also resulted in those racing multiple cars racing themselves on a number of occasions.
It was also hard to keep track of some of the cars for racers entering multiple machines, especially when cars are very similar.
With this experience in mind, and following conversations with racer at the event and afterwards, there are two things we will be doing to smooth this out in future events:
Implementing software to generate the heat lists automatically from our entry list
Limiting the number of cars per racer, per class to two.
To sum up
Overall we had a fantastic days racing, and seeing everyone getting involved, help each other out with car set ups and cheering all racers on during the races and this truly made organising the event worth it, and with the most asked question of the day being when is the next one.
We are happy to say that we are hoping to organise 4 races in 2020, in multiple locations in the UK. On top of this, we will also be organising a series of more casual “Tuning days” to give UK racers more track time between events to better their machines, and challenge one and other to races.
We will be posting details as soon as these are confirmed.
See you at the next event!