The beauty of the locker, never having to rebuild diffs again.

Of course this only works on high grip carpet. If you race on asphalt like me spools are impossible. In fact I was thinking of starting a 1/12TH asphalt thread, but I doubt there are enough of us to make it useful.

Im real nervous to try a spool on mod but i keep hearing that's the way to go

It's not as big of a change as you think.

While they are an incredible technical innovation, in terms of outright pace gains, I firmly believe spools are one of the worst things to occur to 1/12 racing in recent years. I love the reduction in maintenance but hate virtually everything else about them (reduced setup window, predictability, etc.) Unfortunately, you have to run one in order to even be remotely close to competitive.

The Seattle Area just said: enough is enough with spools and open mod. We circled back to a 6.5, blinky, stripes, functional diff for a mod class and raced the hell outta it on a 75x40 black track. And guess what? We grew the class! It's better in traffic. It's not hard on a battery. It's only .1-.2th slower then open mod. It's twice as efficient on tires. No one is re-kitting cars. And Regular Joe can race it! It's really fun, but we don't want to let that secret out.....

what happens when you go to a race like the IIC and you are way off the pace because everyone is running a spool? just saying

There are very few places where grip is consistently high enough that any practice you do is 1:1 applicable to larger events like IIC, Snowbirds, etc. As such, you might as well have fun with your local racing, make choices that keep people racing, and know that the guys going to large events will be able to figure it out (whether beforehand or at the event.)

Alternately, they just put a spool in their car when they get to Vegas.

Don't get me wrong, I love a 3.5/spool/open tire mod car on a good consistent track. It's even better when the track owner/organizers leave a layout down prior to the event kicking off. I know what to do for the most part to drop a car on a foreign track.

The gripe about spools in mod is two things: tires are hyper accurate 1-runs and being able to pass accurately in traffic. Those two things alone add up to tire cost and some frustration. I'll admit, when we sat down to the round table to discuss reformatting 12mod, I was a bit resistant. After we all sorted a few variables, we all looked at each other and said: now this fun. Here is a true story from day 1 testing our new format: leading the main, I yelled out to Trav Schreven who was marshaling, you gotta get up here and try this. He hadn't driven 12mod in a year, but on the 3rd lap, he was running the same pace. Trav was blown away how good it was. That day, we went from 3 guys trying something to next week, we had 5. By the Roar Regional, we had 10 cars signed up and racing. Korey won by 5 seconds, I was 2nd, Stuart was third....all within 1.5 laps. I think I used a total of 3 sets of specs. Navigated traffic beautifully with an 8 car field on a 7 second track. Used 1 body all weekend. Just saying.

Brian

Im confused...why would someone think to spec a 'mod' class? Something i never understood. I look at mod class as 'run what you can handle' if u cant handle it you'll literally pay for it and itll force u to drive what u know how to drive