Performance
With less than two weeks until I had to pack up my truck and head to the World Finals, I plugged in the battery, crossed my fingers, and made a few passes on my backyard track. I knew that my initial setup would be pretty good, but I was surprised when I saw the truck drive for the first time; it was better than I was expecting. The tires dug in well, the rear of the chassis sunk down, and the truck took off with authority. In the turns, the tires and dirt meshed well, and the truck made it around as good as some of my best mod Clods from the past. Jumping was also good but not as good as I had wanted: Off the ramp, the nose was slightly high, but it quickly came down, and the landing was a little bouncier than I was looking for. The good news was that I had a just enough time to print up a new set of cantilevers, so I made them slightly longer and added an extra mounting hole for the link to soften the suspension a bit. Back out on the track, the truck still landed nose first but soaked up the landing much better than before. After roughly a minute of running my Clod, I had to call it a day and put it in a shipping container. I arrived at the RC Monster Jam World Finals a day late and didn’t get the laps on the track that the others had. The track had a simple J-shaped layout, but you only get one lap and the surface was much different from what I was used to running on. Day 1 consisted of me trying to get the track figured out, and on day 2, I figured out that my setup wasn’t that great. The truck worked great at home, but the hard-packed and bumpy dirt was much different from the fluffy Georgia clay that I had set up at my house. These issues ended up hurting me, and I wasn’t able to get the truck out of the first round of bracket racing. On the morning of the last day, I made some changes, which were easy to do thanks to the design of the truck. I stiffened the front and rear sway bar, moved the battery back slightly, and stiffened the suspension by moving the cantilever link back one hole. This time around, the truck felt much better and more at home on the dirt, and I had a much better day.