Like most years up here, the first outdoor TC race of the year is at Kuusankoski in the second half of May. This year it was one week ago, or May 18th to be exact, which is a bit earlier than most years.

Like most years my preparation was excellent, in that I rebuilt my TRF419XR from carpet to tarmac setup just a few days before the race. I did have time to do about 5 runs on the track on the Friday before raceday though. Again, standard procedure... :D

My car was really good at this race last year though, and I did some testing at the track last summer, so since the car was the same, and I built it with the same setup from last year, I was confident my car would work well. Which also proved to be the case.

I therefore could concentrate on testing bodies, which I had looked forward to test on tarmac. Completely new bodies outdoors for me that I tested were the ZooRacing Preopard and DBX, as well as the Mon-Tech Racer 2.

The Racer 2 did not have a good balance on my car, and it was much more of a fight not to make mistakes with this body even though single laptimes were ok. The Preopard worked really well, but the DBX (surprise, surprise) was definitely my favourite. Great over a 5 minute run and made it all feel fairly easy. Really enjoyed testing and seeing the differences, and it will be great to test more bodies later this summer.

You’ll find my full TRF419XR setup below, which is basically the same as one year ago except the body and gearing. I also had the ESC setup a bit differently.

Like last year, I was again somewhat competitive which is always nice, even if surprising, especially when racing mod. A fourth place was there for the taking if I had avoided making mistakes and some bad luck in the finals. I was happy with my 3rd, 4th, 4th places in qualifying though, and overall happy with my pace. I throughly enjoyed the race and racing.

So great to be able to run on tarmac again – 10 times more fun than carpet!