Stees won Arizona State Championships in 4WD

0 Oct. 27, 2017, 11:31 a.m.

By Aaron Waldron
LiveRC.com

Race report from XRAY:
www.teamxray.com

This past weekend I attended the Arizona State Championships at Hobby Action raceway. The layout for the track at Hobby Action was pretty awesome and a lot of fun to run both mod 2wd and 4wd on.

There was a huge triple and a quad section that was pretty massive for an indoor track so that was fun to have something different and a nice change of pace for indoors. Friday was open practice all day, so I spent most of the day breaking tires in and making any minor changes as the track progressed and the grip came up. Saturday was three rounds of qualifying and the fastest single time was being used for your qualifying position. In round one of qualifying my 4wd was really good. I felt I had the correct tire on for the track conditions and everything fell into place and I ended setting my fastest time for 4wd of the three qualifiers. The other two qualifiers were filled with some bobbles and mistakes on my part mostly, so I used my round 1 time which was good enough for 2nd on the grid.

In 2wd it was a little different of a story I felt really comfortable with my car and thought it was really good I just kept making small errors throughout all my runs and ended up having to use a second place that I got in round two as my best time. This was only good enough for a 4th place overall in qualifying because the track got quite a bit quicker in round 3 when the grip was up, but I still knew that my car was really good and had the ability to do a lot better. Saturday was followed up by a Single 8-minute a minute main for 4wd and a double 5-minute main for 2wd on Sunday. A1 of 2wd was not my best showing in a race and had some problems with traffic on lap one and then a mechanical problem that let me not complete the race. A2 was a lot better for me, I was able to get through traffic quickly and made my way to 2nd place within the first lap or two and stayed there for the rest of the race.

Unfortunately, with my 10th place from my DNF for A1 and a 2nd for A2 I was one spot short of the podium finishing 4th overall. The single 8-minute 4wd main was a lot of fun for me. My car felt really good and I was definitely confident in it, I felt like wherever I wanted to put the car I could. The race started off good first place and myself broke away almost immediately and had a good battle going for a couple laps. I gained the lead and slowly started to break away from second until I had a problem with lap traffic and had to be marshalled were I fell back down to 2nd.

The battle continued on once again until 1st made a mistake and I was able to take the lead and get a gap going until the end of the race where I finished 1st. Overall it was a really good race and a lot fun, I wish I could have done better in 2wd, but problems happen and I'm ready for the next one. All my cars and equipment performed and worked great all weekend long and I am super happy to be running everything.

Thanks to all my sponsors for the support both on and off the track. XRAY, RCAmerica, Pro-Line, HUDY, Amain, Protek, VP Racing Fuels, and Stick It1 Racing.