Wow! What an amazing Memorial Day weekend at the Reedy Race.

It was great seeing old faces and meeting new friends. There were lots of smiling faces in an enjoyable atmosphere filled with positive vibes. Thank you to Scotty, TamiyaUSA, Team Associated/Reedy, and Tamiya Track Locals for your tireless efforts organizing such a memorable event in honor of Mike Reedy.

I've done a quite a few laps on the Tamiya track and can get around semi decently with my Tamiya cars. For this year's race I wanted to try something different (like REALLY different) and picked up an Awesomatix A800X about a month earlier. With all of the amazing online resources that the Awesomatix community shared on Petitrc and RCTech, I was able to guesstimate a setup that kind of works ??. Thank you to the Awesomatix worldwide team for sharing your knowledge base and being available to answer questions.

Additionally, I want to thank Steve at RI Wurks for the huge power. The V16 and 8400 batteries worked flawlessly with absolutely no fade. I started gearing at 4.2 with 54* of endbell timing and left it there the entire week as it seemed to be the sweet spot for my particular motor. Temps were around the 158* range after a main. There was so much more head room left to mess around with timing and gearing. Again, thank you for the plug and play power.

I was asked a lot about another piece of the puzzle. Tires. Massive thanks to Robert, Mark, and Edgar for developing an awesome tire prep regimen with Ulti Traction Oil. For the seeding practice rounds, where the top three fastest consecutive laps determined qualifying order, I used FX2 soaping wet. I babied the car around the track until the car came in and then went for it. For me, I feel that FX2 is half a tenth to maybe a tenth faster up front, but traction dropped off more and earlier than with Ulti sauce. For qualifiers and mains, I cleaned the tires with motorspray and a towel, then used a mix of five parts Ulti 01A with one part Ulti G5 (I was informing other racers it was 05A at the track, but when I saw the can in the garage it was G5, sorry for the miscommunication) applied dripping wet for thirty to sixty minutes. Two to three heats before going to tech inspection, I applied buggy grip on top of the Ulti sauce, again dripping wet. Warm up laps were an adventure, but when the tires were ready it was like a light switch. Again, thank you guys for the tire preparation and testing to come up with this voodoo.