By the way, I'm happy to report that my R1 did great on carpet this past weekend. I applied what I learned this past summer to getting it set up properly and driving it better and it handled smoothly and without any chassis issues.
However, the evening started off pretty rough. Within the first 5 minutes of practice, I broke the left hub carrier and stripped the left hub, then a minute or two into the next run I stripped the right hub. At the bench, I also noticed that my outside hinge pin was cracked! I think those parts must have been weakened (or even cracked) from last season of bad driving, and I didn't notice the issues when I was going over the car. But, once replaced, all was mostly fine.
I say "mostly" because I still experienced the issue of the car pulling to one side after an impact in the A main. I got side-swiped by another car and flipped a few times, after that the car was pulling to the right significantly. When I looked at it on the bench, the steering rack was definitely at an angle when the servo was pointing "straight" The servo horn didn't skip (I checked it), I have a metal gear BLS551 servo, so the only thing I could think of was the servo steering link skipping a few threads in the ball cups. I'm using Tamiya low friction cups (like many of you), but haven't changed them from last season. So, I swapped those for new ones and I'm hoping I won't have this problem anymore. I also put a servo saver back on just in case.
Anyway, I'll stop rambling here. Point is, the R1 is, as noted, a very capable car... if you don't suck at driving
