THE Cub Report – Life In The Fast Lane

Hey there rc fans, welcome to THE Cub Report. The rc industry is all ramped up for the holiday season, I hope you are too.

While BSRC isn’t about racing in any way, shape, or form, I do talk about it once in a while. I mean, even bashers should keep track of at least a little bit of what’s going on in the racing community. With that said, last week IFMAR put on the 1/10th scale buggy world championships. This was held in China and new champions were crowned in both 2 and 4wd.

I talked about Ryan Maifield a few weeks back. Back then it was a rant because he had thrown a transmitter and caught the internet on fire, today it will be about him locking down his first two IFMAR world championships. RM has long been known as the fastest guy at pretty much every event he has entered, in China last week he finally put the whole package together and just crushed it. In the past he was a bit like James Stewart, the FMOTP, but he had problems putting all that speed on top of the worlds podium. Now, at least for last week, he had everything perfectly aligned. The competition should be extremely fearful, when the fastest guy on the track puts all the parts together, watch out. Not only is he now the guy with the most raw speed, but now he is packing the most confidence. Furthermore, he seems to be more patient, something rarely seen from him, a guy who is typically a hard charger from tone to tone.

At the IFMAR worlds they first hold 2wd, then after crowing a winner there, they move on and do the 4wd class. Maifield absolutely dominated the mains in 2wd. Ryan not only had speed to spare, but he also drove smart. Behind him, guys were pushing their brains out to try and match pace, but when you push, especially on a rough, chunked out track, bad things happen. This lead to Ryan crushing the field, in fact, he made it look like he was on an entirely different level.

After Maifield dominated 2wd, he set off after 4wd. 4wd really is the premier class at the worlds, and while he had already landed one title, you just knew he was gonna be loaded with the confidence needed to make a run at the 4wd title. While he didn’t crush it in 4wd qualifying, he did qualify well enough to make a run at the win, and that is exactly what he did. At the electric worlds, they run 3 mains to determine a winner. Maifield promptly won the first main, then finished second in the next main. This took everyone to the third main to determine the overall winner.

In the final main, Maifield, Tessmann, and Ronnefalk all had good shots at the title, but A3 was one of the wildest world championships races I have ever seen. Do you want to see the world’s most elite drivers look a bit like you and me? If so, have a look at the Final Main Video. While you and I might get nervous and make all sorts of dumb driving errors during the first qual at our local track, the video shows that it takes A3 at the worlds for some of those guys to finally show a crack in their armor. The one guy that didn’t crack, even after being dealt a full hand of pressure via Tessmann, was Maifield. In the final main Maifield just kept on digging, yet didn’t let any of the pressure get to him. Instead, the pressure got to pretty much everyone else in the field. Well, except for Rivkin, who went on to actually win the final leg of the mains. Maifield kept a level head, didn’t push too hard, and went on to secure his second world championship.

Big props need to go out to Ryan Maifield and his sponsors – Yokomo, JConcepts, and Orion. After watching a lot of the coverage from China, even I am stoked to get some of the old race cars out. The racing in China was totally awesome, it is amazing just how talented all those drivers are, especially the top ten’ish guys, who can drive their cars so hard, yet stay within a line that is only a few inches wide around the track. Sadly the electric worlds are only held once every two years. Too bad that we don’t have a multi race national championship series, but who knows, just when you think nothing will ever change, that is when things typically get crazy.

That’s all I got for ya this week folks. We hope you have a great Thanksgiving and that you don’t spend every penny on a new 70 for the living room, you gotta leave behind some cash for your local hobby shop, just say’n. 🙂

YOUR Cub Reporter