Racing all day and all night at the 24 Hours of Charleroi
report by: David Caradec

The 24 hours of Charleroi was held in Charleroi, Belgium on March 20-21st. Squad MiD44-Tekin was running a very customized AE B4 powered by the Tekin RS Pro and 10.5 Redline Sensored Motor with a 13mm Torque rotor installed.

Technical inspection & practice:
The warehouse where the race was held was to open the Saturday morning at 10AM. When we arrived at 10AM; all teams were already installed, and were testing their cars during practice. We learned later that the warehouse opened at 8AM and was also opened on the Friday evening. Arghhhhhh... So we spent a lot of time to prepare and to finish the car (cut off the body shell, place stickers, calibrate our two transmitters with the ESC...)

We could only test the car 10 minutes before the end of practice, to see how was the hydraulic setup, and how was the setup of the RS Pro in sensored mode. On the first lap, the car appeared to be too soft, under-dampened. It was rolling a lot. The motor was amazing with a lot of torque with the 13mm rotor and your setup (maybe too much for this very grippy track). After 5 laps, the car stopped... before restarting to enter to the pits. Then, the motor started to smoke, and a wire came loose on the ESC. It seems that it acted as a fuse... Ooooopps...

So, we decided to change the motor by the one we had in spare. We kept the standard rotor and decided to make a less aggressive setup on the RS Pro and remove the "BL Reverse" setup on the ESC, which we suspected to be the cause of the failure of our first motor. So we used the "Dual" mode instead of the "Sensored" mode, and tested again the ESC: it worked!!! The ESC wasn't damaged, yeahhhhh ;)

The practice time was over, so we couldn't test the car any more...

Qualifying:
We only had one run of qualifying, 30 minutes long. Qualifying permitted each team to choose their place on the pit lane, on the podium and during marshaling. Our problem was that only one of us had tried the car until then, and we didn't knew how long the battery would last before needing a pit stop. So we decided that each of us would run a part of qualifying round, in order to check our feeling of the car and modify setups accordingly. We finished 5, not bad with 3 drivers swaps. We made the whole 30 minutes with the same battery, but decided to play it safe and make 25 minutes runs during the main race.

Race:
The race started on Saturday at 2PM behind the pace car... The first 30 minutes, the "Squad MiD44 - Tekin" was first, then we failed in the 2nd position and we always stayed at that rank. Our car was very fast, and we made the best lap during the race, even faster than the 4wd Durango!!! During the night, when the lights of the warehouse were off, we encountered lots of problems.

What we broke:
- A diff thrust bolt (we change all the rear part of the car),
- A rear shock tower,
- A front arm,
- A rear arm,
- Two front shock towers,
- One rear ball end,
- One top plate,
- Slipper came apart alone (strange?)...

We used 17 pairs of rear tires (Schumacher Minispike Yellow) and 2 pairs of front tires (Schumacher Staggered Yellow) and 4 sets of 5000 mAh LiPo batteries.

Our car was very fast on the track, our 10.5T motor was one of the best, even faster than Durango's 9.5T motor. The torque was also very impressive... The motor ran during 24 hours at 55-65C (131-149F) during the entire 24 hours and the ESC was kept cool with our special aluminum clamp. All the squad was very happy with the Tekin products.

Thanks a lot Randy and Team Tekin!!!

- David for The Squad MiD44