First run of the Club 500

Last weekend my Club 500 got it's first outing. Due to work pressure I couldn't stay for the race in the afternoon, but at least I could give it a test run and see how it went on the water.

The result, it goes really well. The boat is up on the plane almost immediately and top speed is impressive. I reckon the centre of gravity is pretty well sorted as there's no hint of diving in the turns. There are some problems with radio reception at the extreme edges of the lake but this could be the slightly bent aerial on my transmitter. Some adjustment of the receiver aeriel helped a bit but I definitely need to more work on this. Perhaps if I feed it through the spoiler to get more height, this will help.

Steering is good but the boat tail-slides across the water and since our lake isn't very big, the M-pattern course is going to be a real challenge. As you can see from the video, I need a lot of practise !

The skill seems to be to slow down on the chicane and only use top speed on the straights - exactly as you'd expect. Another plan might be to drop the top speed on the ESC and accept I'll be slow on the back straight but stuff everyone on the difficult bits. As it was, I was glad to be the only racer on the water.