The York 24 hour race took place over the weekend of 31st Jan - 1st Feb 2009. Starting at 2pm on the saturday and ending a full 24 hours later at 2pm on Sunday. The name 'EBOR' comes from the ye-olde roman name for York - Eboracum, in case you wondered.

Racing got underway at approximately 2:10 - a little later than planned but not too bad. The drivers and associated marshals got into their positions and on the buzzer there was instant chaos as team Xfactory were on their roof after mere inches. With only the other drivers from the same team able/willing to marshall their own teams cars, of course a glut of marshalls instantly invaded the track to sort the madness.

The next aspect of this was shown mere minutes into the race when an unnamed driver ran to marshall a car from another team - making that teams genuine marshall turn around thinking it was 'sorted' - only for it to turn out to be a cunning ploy as he reached the car and turned around leaving it stranded. It was Tom Cockerill by the way.

7 Teams in all entered the event, some 'privateer' teams such as York. Morley Models had their shop backed team - whilst Distributors like Mirage backed their team.

The teams were as follows:

The teams had a free choice of car - but it had to follow strict rules and not be heavily modified for quick battery changes as well as follow BRCA guidelines. Some teams clearly went for 2WD cars in the belief there would be less to go wrong whilst others wanted the ultimately faster 4WD chassis'.

The Mirage/HB team	Hot Bodies 'Cyber 10b' - plastic fantastic

The 'A-Team' were quickly into the lead driving the 2WD Associated B4 but were closely followed by the Mirage / HotBodies team with their 4WD Cyber10B. Team Xtreme/oOple lay in third but the Xfactory team pushed past several laps into the 24 hour stint.

Almost bang on half an hour into the 24h race, the Mirage/HotBodies team had a crash which as well as drawing huge jeers and laughter saw them break a shock shaft and spend several minutes franticly restoring the car back to health in the pits as they fell back to 6th place overall.

Team Xtreme/oOple - Nathan rallies the troops!	The A-Team, apparently. (I think I see B.A.) An early problem with the pinion held them back from the lead, but the obvious skill level in the team would no doubt make this set back flacid.

The 'Nov-Trak-Macher-Tech' team driving the Schumacher CAT SX were off to a slow start but by 1 hour in were only three laps down on the A-Team, with 155 laps vs 158 laps respectively. back down in third the Xfactory guys were a further 5 laps down. Xtreme/oOple were in fourth place a further lap behind and the the earlier mishap that cost the Hot Bodies / Mirage team dearly saw them another 5 laps back in 5th overall.

Hour 2 - 22 to go.
Nathan Ralls took over the driving for the 2nd hour for Team Xtreme and gradually clawed his way up the order to take the lead with 22 hours to go. An electrical problem (which turned out to be just a dumped battery) half way into the next hour with Xtreme owner Lewis Dickinson at the wheel saw them drop to 2nd and team 'Nov-Trak-Mach-Tech' take over - slowly racking up the lead as time went on.

Breakages among the teams were few and far between - the track design was certainly far from being what might be called a 'car breaker', so that helped things. None the less, there were still a few incidents. The Xfactory team broke a servo horn during the second hour and the Mirage team had two moments when their KO 2.4ghz system unbound - eventually causing them to revert to 40mhz.

The Mirage/Hpi team were racing the Cyber10b for the first time in the UK. The car shown below is the car the team used - both this and a new built car were destined to go straight to the Nuremberg Toy Fair after this event. The car is to be labled as 'HPi' despite some websites (including this one) declaring it to be a 'Hot Bodies'. The car does feature some Hot Bodies D4 parts / design features but with Hot Bodies being the more race-oriented brand, it was decided to release this under the HPi banner. The intention is for Hot Bodies to become the pure thoroughbred racing brand - with cars like this which is effectively a 'budget' D4 in the HPi camp and the full racing version (D4) given the 'HB' badge. The same should soon happen with the budget / competition Cyclone touring cars.

Cyber10b mid flight	Plastic chassis with horizontally mounted cells

The track layout is similar to that seen at the regional race here in early 2008 - the main differences were the lower jumps and lack of huge corner table top seen on the previous track. This all meant the racing was easy and wouldn't tax drivers too much - with many teams giving their drivers a whole hour at the wheel before changes, this was a good thing.

Some 'dealing' - the pair were later arrested, but it was only for lewd behaviour with some rubber stuff.	2002 European Champion - Chris Doughty was driving for the XFactory team and representing LRP as always. Chris did not want to FIGHT!

Unlike many other race events, the EBOR24 features an additional room next door for the ladies to let their hair down. Events started with a spot of bingo and swiftly turned into a drunken mess.

Race Control - 3:30am. The lack of sleep was evident on this young chaps face, but the racing carried on regardless. fool.	Sadness in the girls hall as some of the Team XFactory fans found out on the 'jumbotron' screen that yet ANOTHER servo horn had gone pOp.

It was boring at 2am and clearly most of this race report is fictional.

Jimmy receives a pep-talk from team leader Nathan Ralls prior to his 4am stint on the rostrum.	After 1 hour animalistic driving between 4 & 5am Stu Evans left the rostrum thinking he was winning... sadly the team were still 192 laps behind the leader.

The lonely microphone, commentating ceased early on in the race when both amplifiers thermalled.	Chris Long takes a well earned nap after a 1 hour stint with The Sun. Steve Kirk thinks Chris is dreaming about hamster mating.

Team Xtreme twice had problems with shorting out the power wires on the carbon prop shaft - with resulting 'magic smoke' seemingly frying the Tekin brushless controller, but as to prove the robustness of the system it was still going strong despite possibly frying part of the internals (fets).

Not much was going on at 3.37am.

To time an event like this you want to be sure to get it right - but even with two seperate systems timing the meeting things still went terribly wrong. The 'Mirage' team were gradually catching NTMT after a poor start but it would take the rest of the meeting bar any mishaps to catch and pass - so went the gossip in the pits during the early hours.
Unfortunately at some point both systems went 'nuts', one after the other- one plainly wrong and the other simply 'missing' laps from the top three teams. The NTMT team were the worst effected, with 18 laps miscounted.
Thankfully the race controllers were 'on it' and manually inspected every lap to ensure proper counting - but as suddenly as the miscounting had started it disappeared.

"We're just going to have to go back to steady laps" - Graham North of team NTMT, 9:10am / 19hours in, after melting their first motor.

In uncharacteristic style, Jim Dixon TEARS a corner off the Schumacher and wrecks the teams clean record.	The A-Team used the opportunity created by a broken shock tower to also do a complete gearbox change - which they were scheduled to do anyway. Mick Cragg and Steve Lawson worked on the car with the speed of a thousand gazelles.

9:10am and the formerlly ultra reliable TechMechSchumacherthingTeamNovak (by this point, I was getting sick of trying to remember their name) were in tatters. Still officially leading but under severe and mounting pressure from team Mirage, they melted their motor - molten goodness oozing out like one of those McDonalds apple pies. Half an hour later the same thing happened and another 12 minutes off the track saw team Mirage leapfrog ahead to take a commanding lead by some 55 laps with 4 hours to go.

Ben Jemison pulls a 'fake' marshalling attempt - fooling the opposition into leaving their teams car stranded for a little extra time - EBOR 24 Stylee.	Some people slept a little

10:30am The order was as follows:

This is what the EBOR 24 is all about:

Driving for 24 hours - but how?
The teams competing at the EBOR-24 have devised various methods of working out a running 'rota'. The Extreme-RC team have 12 drivers, each allocated 2 x 1 hour slots. Those driving long distances home on the Sunday are excused the 'graveyard shift'. The Schumacher lads are running a similar system, but with an alphabetical driver order.

The X-Factory boys are doing things quite differently. According to the shaggy haired sheep-boy Tom Cockerill they have an order based on who is the hardest on tyres. They were not running timed stints but changing drivers after two sets of Lipo's have been run through the car.

Graham Alsop of the Mirage team had absolutely no idea how they have organised their rota - say no more.

The Nov-Trak-Macher-Tech team car was built by Graham North around the Schumacher CAT SX and everything was painstakingly 'beefed up', threadlocked and generally made to last the rigours of a lifetime of racing in one non-stop session - EBOR 24!

Problems with electrics hampered the team in the latter stages but the car didn't seem to throw up many problems of its own. The car uses Traxxas captured rose joints on the camber links, doubled up shock towers, bracing links from the gearbox to the towers, outdrive savers and a great deal more.

Like many others - the NTMT car was running a 10.5 wind motor for the best blend of speed / runtime.

By mid day the race was into its final stages and NTMT had yet more problems during the last hour which saw the A-Team able to sneak past in the capable hands of Neil Cragg to take second position.

Mirage/HPi were only going to be caught if they had problems, which didn't happen. With the problem over missing laps from earlier in the event there needed to be a brief recess by the officials to give the final positions after adding on the manually counted laps.

Schumacher (NTMT) boys franticly try to get their car back on the track after yet more gremlins.

Blue was a popular colour

We at oOple - namely Jimmy and Stu Evans who made this report - were racing in the Xtreme-RC team. Lewis Dickinson kindly helped us out with the car / spares / Tekin Electrics - and Nathan Ralls helped obtain cells from Trakpower to propell us.

Lewis wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty	Pitstops!

We were of course racing the Predator X11 from Xtreme-RC, which despite the historic predator 'jokes' of old that were heard at the start of the day from others, proved to be ultra reliable and tough as old boots, spending less time being fixed than just about any other car racing. The team weren't made of top drivers but after a brief stint in the lead can be proud of 5th place.

Massive thanks to Lewis for allowing us to race his car and his support throughout the meeting.