Keven Hebert takes 2WD at the Canadian International Championship

Wednesday, Aug 5, 2015 at 12:00am UTC

The Canadian International Championship was held at the Sutton Aviation Raceway with a small club race for 2WD-only on Wednesday night, then practice on Thursday and Friday for all of the classes, followed by one qualifier on Friday for 2WD. The race attracted people from all over the east coast from Canada and the US. Some racers from Seattle also attended. With just shy of 400 entries and about 100 in 2WD Buggy and 110 in 4WD Buggy, it made for some good and tight competition.

They split 2WD and 4WD classes, so from Friday night to mid-day Saturday they ran all 2WD qualifiers so you can focus on 2WD; and then once those were done they did the 4WD qualifying. It was two best qualifiers out of four for all classes. Nine would go into the mains with one bumpup from the B.

The race used a very unique triple A format with a reverse grid in A2 to mix things up - which made it very interesting, to say the least.

Our team at this year's race consisted of Alex Miller, John Wallentia, Damian Lamy and his dad, Eric Deschene, and myself, Keven Hébert. In the 2WD class, I had good speed all weekend but the very difficult track made it hard to put in clean runs; having made some small mistakes in each of my qualifiers, I was only able to qualify sixth on the grid in 2WD and third in 4WD.

All five of us made the A for 2WD, with Eric bumping up from the B, and three us made it to the 4WD main, with Damian second on the grid, myself on third, and John Wallentia eighth.

The 2WD mains went really good for me and my RC10B5M! In A1 I was able to pass two cars on the first lap so I was running fourth in a freight train with the leaders. Eventually, Mikey Brown made a mistake with Damian, so I was able to pull away along with Alex Miller. Eventually I got close enough to put on the pressure and he made a mistake, and I was then able to cruise on for the win.

In A2, with the reverse grid, I started fifth, and after a good start I found myself in second after lap 1 and got in the lead halfway through the race; but I crashed on the double after the sweeper and lost a lot of time there, so I lost a spot to Dave Henry. I caught back up but it was too late to take the win in A2 so I had to settle for second.

In A3, I got away clean at the start and got through a pile-up up front to find myself in second place after two laps, with Alex Miller in the lead. We pulled away and got ourselves a comfortable lead. Halfway through Miller made a mistake, so I had a clean track in front of me and drove to the finish line after 5 minutes to win the overall 2WD title. Alex MIller took second.

Products used:
#90003 RC10B5M Team Kit
#9063 Factory Team B44.3 Kit
#27000 Blackbox 410R ESC
#238 Sonic 540 Mach 2 7.5 Motor
#27100 Reedy RS1206 Servo

Thanks to Keven Hébert for this report.


Pictures