Axial XR10 Rock Crawler
During the week of June 22-27, I took a short trip up to Cisco Grove California for the 2011 AWCC event (AWCC is the Axial West Coast Championships). This is the premier event for RC Rock Crawling and, well, this not only would be my first rock crawling event, it would ALSO be my first time actually DRIVING an RC Rock Crawler. So, ya, this ought to be interesting.
After a short 7 hour drive, I found myself at Reno Airport picking up my boss Greg; he would be attending this event with me (we were covering it for RC Driver Magazine). We arrived at the campground in the early afternoon and after about a 5 minute unpacking session, we were already crawling the rocks with our scalers. Since this was a pretty major competition we figured we’d better get some stick time in! We spent about 2 hours getting the feel for our rigs…how they felt, getting use to very little throttle (we’re racers…it’s all or nothing!) and finding the best angles for climbing. I must say it was an absolute blast…so much so that, after dinner, we were out and at it again!
Thursday came and, once again, we were out on the rocks with the scalers. We were both quite amazed at how well they worked and what they could climb. The suspension on our SCX10′s was great, and the tires would pull our trucks up some pretty steep inclines. About mid-day we were wrangled in by the Axial guys and told that we should probably get our XR10′s (the actual competition crawlers) up and running since Friday was the first day of the actual event. Bender, one of the Axial crawling gurus, set up a mock course for us to practice on. He drove his truck through the course first to give us an idea of how it was going to be. First off, Greg and I were amazed at how these things stuck to the side of the rocks! Bender’s truck was like a little lizard…it was great. Then we took our turn at it. Uh, ya. A LOT harder than it looks. Most forms of RC require you to drive your car around a course and, even if your car is just ok, you can still just drive it around the course. Crawling requires you to KNOW your car intimately (not that way), and to be one with it. The XR10 will climb and stick to some amazing surfaces! Pretty unreal. It took Greg and I the rest of the afternoon to really feel comfortable with what we were doing. It just seemed un-natural.
Friday was the LCQ, or Last Chance Qualifier, for the weekends Championship. You don’t just show up and drive, you have to qualify for the event. They had a few different courses at this event; a standard 10-gates-in-6-minutes course, a 2 lap ‘speed’ course, a Bonus course (10 gates, then another 10 gates with a 3 minute bonus time) and a combo course that had 10 gates with bonus gates in-between. This was a new format for most of the competitors, so no one really had an advantage (other than experience driving on the rocks).
Greg and I started off on the 2 lap course. Bascially, it was a rock crawling course with some open areas that you could run your truck full throttle for a short time. Well, of course, we liked this one since we are open-course racers! A few mistakes by both of us netted us an average time, but really opened our eyes to the fact that, since you only have a limited time to get through the course, car control and speed were extremely important. On our Thursday-practice day, we really didn’t time ourselves so there was no sense of urgency to get through the course. Things are now VERY different…
We moved to the next course, the Bonus course. This course gave you 10 gates to get through in 6 minutes. If you were successful in doing so, you could continue on to the 2nd set of 10 gates, but with only a 3 minute window. I made it through the first 10 (surprisingly…and to the surprise of those around me!), but the 2nd set was a bit more difficult and I was only able to make it to gate 5. Still good and I received a good score. Greg got a little caught up on one gate and failed to finish the first 10.
On to course 3, the standard+bonus stage. Basically, you have 10 gates in 6 minutes, but there were some bonus gates positioned in-between each gate. If you CHOSE to try to get a bonus gate, good luck…it wasn’t mandatory. Making a bonus gate did net you a better score so some of them might be worth it. Well, I spent a little too much time trying to get through one and failed to finish the course. Bummed me out a bit as I saw myself getting greedy since I was doing well on the first 2 courses. Greg, however, completed the 10 gates with a couple bonus ones!
And finally, course 4. I like to refer to this as the ‘Way To Much Skill Involved To Complete’ course. Greg and I sucked hard on this one…it was way outside of our skill level. We might have been able to do it if we had 20 minutes, or maybe 15, but 6…no way. It required some incredible skill and precise driving to complete…both things Greg and I hadn’t achieved…yet. In fact, I ended up breaking my XR10 because I fell off a rock and down this slope. Poor thing…fresh, new and now broken! Simple repair but enough to end my weekend. So, we blew out on course 4 and, unfortunately, that boosted our scores high enough that we did not qualify for the weekends Championship. I’m alright with that. It was definitely hard and has made me want to get my truck back together and back on the rock.
We did, however, get to compete in the G6 class; basically the Scaler class. What we didn’t know is that 1) it was going to be at night and, 2) we’d be running through the forest. Gates were set up throughout the campground numbering 1 to 150. The goal was to get from gate 1 to gate 150 in the least amount of time with the least amount of marks against you. You would get a mark against you if you hit a gate, missed a gate, touched your truck (you could only do so to repair it) or used the ‘Judges Winch’. You and a buddy were a team…one driver and one judge. When you run through the course, the driver drives and the judge keeps track of any mistakes. If you roll your truck, get it stuck or whatever and you need some help getting free, you could either use your onboard winch (if you had one) or the Judges Winch (a line attached to the judges clipboard that has a hook on it). The goal was to NOT have to use the Judges Winch…for Greg and I, anyway. And, I might mention, all of this was on the honor system. Yah, you can see where this is going…
I was up first as the driver. We failed to do a walkthrough of the course (like apparently others did) and took a bit more time to get through. If we got stuck, we winched ourselves out. If we couldn’t get up or over an obstacle, we winched ourselves (correctly) up and over. We did it right, and scored ZERO penalty points with a 42 minute run. Sounds good, right? Well, there were some people that made it through in 22 minutes, but had a TON of penalty points. So, I thought we were doing ok. Greg had a killer van project there, but we came to find that, because it was TOO scale, it got hung up on alot of obstacles that the other competitors just flew over. His time was a bit longer than mine…somewhere in the hour and 25 minute range. Ya, we weren’t doing so well so far.
Saturday started with an early morning Comp Crawl Competition. We took some time to do a little sightseeing (since we didn’t make the show), but got back in the early afternoon to get our G6 trucks ready for the night run. This was going to be the night run…night as in it started at 10pm. We prepped our trucks and, right about 8pm, did a preliminary walkthrough of the course. Only gates 1-60 had been put up so far, and there were going to be 100 gates. Tonite, Greg got to go first. We changed our strategy a bit and figured we’d push ourselves a bit more on tonite’s drive. Greg made it through pretty fast with only a few errors. On my run, we hoofed it pretty fast and made it through with only a few mistakes. It was kind of fun running through the pitch-black forest with only the vehicle lights and whatever lights you could strap to your transmitter. Very Blair Witch.
Sunday came and, according to the schedule, they would be starting the final G6 stage around 10:30. That was no good as Greg and I had to leave for the airport around 11am. We decided to skip the day’s events, pack our stuff and just take some pictures. Come to find out, they had swapped the schedule and were running the G6 at 8am. No batteries charged and our cars packed away, we kept to our plan and just watched. It was pretty cool, seeing all these people running around frantically chasing little toy cars. After the main G6 event, they also ran a mud bog section, chassis-twister section and pulling event, all adding points to your G6 final score. We got some great pictures (which you can find on my racing site, CompetitionX.
It was killer event. I have a whole new respect for crawling and will definitely do it again. It’s challenging yet incredibly fun all at the same time. I can honestly say it was one of the best RC events I’ve ever been to…and I’ve been to alot.