Its great to see that so many had a great time at the Ipanema Sports 2010 GT World Championships.
Reading the few pages that I've missed since my last log-in I can see some "crazy talk" about limiting weight & engine ports.
Here are my feelings about limiting weight:
Right now there are only 2 "players" in RTR GT cars in North America. That's all fine and dandy, but there are several other chassis that could be converted very easy to GT. (If the manufacturers cared to enter our arena)
So with that said, what do we have?
A. We have the Kyosho IGT1 & 2, C-Hub suspension, "Kick-Up" BUGGY type chassis and lite-weight design. Huge followiinig and support network.
B. The Ofna DM1, DM1S (Spec). Pillow Ball ssupension, flat chassis and substancially heaver weight. (I haven't mentioned the GTP1 & GTP2 chassis because it seems that they're not showing up at many races, but they would be welcome too)
The big weight debate is starting. It seems that since Paul was able to run pretty darn quick with a IGT2 chassis with the Force RTR engine I'm hearing talk of forcing weight to be added to the chassis that started it all.
I personally don't think it's fair to ask any racer to add 1 or 2 pounds to an IGT car just because the DM1 car was designed by someone that wasn't thinking about weight reduction in the planning stages and R&D.
I'm 100% positive that every IGT owner/racer will agree with me that we're not going to add any weight to our lite-weight cars, because of 1 heavy-weight design.... right guys?
Here in Florida we all used to race the IGT1 and we all had a lot of fun racing the same car (we had "Spec" rules very close to what Victor in Mexico has too)
Then the DM1S appeared at the track. It seemed fair enough to let the car enjoy the fun we were having.
The only problem was that it came from the factory with a much more powerful RTR engine. So much more powerful, that it was hard to beat using the Kyosho factory GXR engine.
A few of us decided to put Force engines into our IGT cars The end result is the potential to have a fast "Spec" car. I even tried the Force in an IGT and it was a quick combo. (Just like Paul Roberts, our current 2010 Ipanema Sports GT Spec Class World Champion).
The GXR is a 3 port with mild timing, while the Force is a 5 port with a more agressive profile. Stock vs. stock the two are unmatched. This is the reason why I made the spec class rules the way they are.
If the 2 manufactures would have "sat down at the table" like I wanted them to 4 years ago, we wouldn't have any of this on this thread today. But since I get tired of calling the same guy 50 times in a week, I just did it my way. And my way is proven to work.
I don't care if anybody comes on this thread and brags about being in the RC industry for 750 years, they don't know SQUAT about SQUAT, because their 750 years of experence hasn't done nothing to bring our SPORT to the mainstream's attention the way as our GT racing programs have.
Sorry for the "straight-talk" after such a great racing experence we all had at our event, but I can see the Vultures circling our GT classes. They're trying to "get a piece of the action" because they're hungry. They've sucked the life out of their classes and will try to do the same with ours if we don't watch eachother's backs.
Everyone is welcome to race in GT, but our international GT army will not let anyone screw up the great racing classes we have all worked so hard to grow without them.
Lets keep together GT goodfellas!
