2012 Dirt Nitro Challenge Day 3 Coverage – Buggy Qualifying

24 February, 2012

In store for us today are 3 rounds of buggy qualifying. A much larger crowd for the buggy classes makes up for 25 heats and a long day in the sun.

The track is starting to show its wounds from the behemoth truggies punishing it all day yesterday. The whoops/rhythm section is evolving as bumpers take chunk after chunk out of it. Finding a good line to jump through it is becoming harder and harder. Look for a lot of crashing and “donkey flips” from the buggies today. Traction is excellent and a solid groove is becoming prevalent. Most racers are still running soft compound tires but in the peak heat of the day, there may be some trying to run a medium compound rubber.

The 5^th scale trucks will be fired up today to start practicing on their respective track. There are quite a few of the Losi 5^th scale trucks around the pits and I can’t wait to see these bang some doors around the very realistic 5^th scale short course track.

Stay tuned to our daily coverage!

Here is a detailed look into the track layout for the 2012 Dirt Nitro Challenge:

Extremely long back straight. Very uncharacteristic for a Joey Christensen layout
High speed sweeper into a 4-5’ dropoff
Ski jump on the inside line, flat on the outside. Fast line is inside but you need to setup for the next corner and counter-steer your car in the air.
The dreaded whoops/rhythm section. Fast: Single-double-triple-out. Safe: Single-double-single-double, Typical: single-double-donkey flip-marshal-out
Slow rolling tabletop to high-speed triple. Big air to an immediate left hand corner
Ski jump into rumble strip
Tabletop to double and full throttle onto the straight

Pro-Lines new V2 2.0 light weight buggy wheel.

Compound Wars.

Spreading through the pits like a plague was a simple yet hard-hitting question, what compound do I use? For the most part everyone had their tire patterns figured out; Pro-Line drivers were running Blockades, AKA drivers on Impacts. It was the rounded carcass tires that seemed to supply the best results simply because it passes over the ruts far easier then a flatter carcass tire. Just over six-hours was the length for each round of qualifying which meant weather conditions and track temps would play a big role in what compound to use. If you wanted to stay competitive, you’d have a set of Soft/M2 and Super Soft/M3 tires mounted up ready to go before your round and flip that imaginary coin as to which set you’d end up running. During the first round, drivers were running Soft/M2 tires in order to help compensate for the higher track temps. As the day went on a temps dropped, forcing driver’s to switch over to SuperSoft/M3 tires in order to get the desired traction.