Team Durango ready for the Worlds in Pattaya
Sponsors of our live event coverage from Thailand, Durango sent us this report on their preparations for the big event. Even before the 1/8 Team Durango Worlds team went to the World Championship track in Pattaya, Thailand, in October, we knew that the track was hard. It is not only a hard track to drive, it is a hard track on cars. We knew from seeing how other teams’ cars suffered at the warm-up race that the chassis in particular came in for some real punishment. During our tests in October, Ryan Lutz, Hupo Honigl and Gerd Strenge were able to confirm quite how punishing the Pattaya track surface was.
Since he returned from Pattaya three weeks ago, Gerd has been working night and day on a solution to protect the chassis from the super-hard track surface and mega-high jumps. The 7075 hardened aluminium chassis, which comes as standard on the DNX408, withstood the punishment the track gave it really well, but Gerd wanted to give the chassis even more resilience.
From these photos you can what Gerd has done. Using his engineering expertise, Gerd has taken a standard DNX408 chassis and steel to make front and rear skid plates. What is special about Gerd’s work is that he has managed to bend the skid-plate around the front kick-up of the chassis and make the rear skid-plate cover the full width of the rear of the chassis. Gerd milled the underside of the top chassis layer and then, inset skid-plates for the front and rear of the car. This means that the hardened skid-plates sit perfectly flush to the bottom of the chassis. So, when the Pattaya track eats-away at the skid-plates, Gerd can simply replace them for new skid-plates.
Gerd’s ‘skid-plate special’ chassis
We look forward to seeing how well this works when the World Championships start on November 8th. At the moment there are no plans to put this ’skid-plate special’ chassis into production. Of course, if there is enough demand, Team Durango will listen to what our drivers want and we may offer it as an option part in the future.
Source: Durango [team-durango.com]
