David Joor Three-Peats The RC Pro National Electric Title | 2012, 2011, & 2010
This year the RC Pro National Finals started on Halloween in Houston at Mike’s Hobbyshop. The series consists of 4 events in the southern division and with RCP being born and raised in the south it is by far the largest division to compete in. Electric being the largest in the group with a turn out of usually 40+ at each divisional race. I won the finals in 2009 (but not the National because I started too late in the year for max points), 2010 National, and 2011 National, I really wanted to go for the three-peat. However I knew this year would be tough with so many people getting into electric and getting faster. It also turns out that the Mike’s Hobbyshop track has always been my nemesis and this year would be different but not..
Going into the Finals I had prepared by testing several times during the year on a good base setup. The only day of practice went well and Lutz and I were swapping fast laps back and forth throughout the day. For the final practice run he went before me and ran a 29.1 and I ran a 29.0 right after. Ryan is always 0.75 – 1 a second per lap faster than me so this was a good feeling going into qualifying (In A2 I did a 28.2 but Lutz did a 27.8 in A3, still better than 1 second!). Electric was the largest class and there was no resorting until round 4 which was going to make it tough. This event my car was ready and I was confident but slower cars would be the demise of my progress. In electric I only had two wrecks that weren’t in some way caused by passing another car. Lutz found his pace and was able to do consistently faster laps than me but had electrical problems in almost every qualifier. I ended up barely squeezing in overall TQ over Jake Dellinger (Fellow AE / Avid / FTW driver) by TQ’ing 2 rounds and both with 15 lap runs. This was good because I needed the 2 points for TQ because Jake had gone into the finals with only 3 points less than me.
When mains came around, the first main was semi clean with a corner marshall knocking over Jake’s car in an attempt to flip me back over. Feeling as though it was somewhat my fault for the corner incident I waited until he and Brian had gotten near me before we started racing again. Brian would have a bobble early on shortly followed by Jake which gave me a good 5 seconds of breathing room. However Lutz had an amazing start by getting into 4th in the first couple of laps and was on a mission to hunt down the leader given his bad luck in qualifying. At 8 minutes in Lutz had caught and passed me and I made a diligent charge to reel him back in which I did but going over the triple I tapped his car in the air which caused my car to spin out on the landing and with only 2 laps left and lap traffic we finished 1.5 seconds apart. In A2 I had a very solid start and had a nice 5 second gap once again on Dellinger by 5 minutes in but twice I had to single single over the important off-camber double due to 3 lap cars battling for position which would cost me 4 seconds. Jake was no only 3 feet behind me while I had a lap car just 1 foot in front of mine and for a full lap the lap car wasn’t battling anyone for position, the race announcer asking him to move over for us 3 times, and everyone in pit lane and around the track informing him to pull over but he never did until 33 seconds later after he got out of control and I had no where to go but into his car. This allowed Jake and Lutz to get by and I couldn’t find my way back after that finishing 3rd. For A3 I calculated that I need to lead 7 laps so that no one could take most laps led from me. This would give me 2 more additional points to win the National title in case I didn’t beat Dellinger in this main. So I did just that, lead the first 7 laps and on la p 8 my speedo wire finally frayed apart from the pounding it took on the hard triple landing and I had to DNF. However I finished with 1 point more than Dellinger to take the National title once again!
Thank you to my sponsors, Team Associated, Reedy, KO Propo, Tekin, Upgrade, VP, FTW, Dialed, Paint by Smiley, and Avid. David Joor
