Arriving in Xiamen, China at 1am on Wednesday it was a quick few hours sleep at the hotel before making the way to the ever impressive 3 Circles / Sunpadow Facility. Having been here in 2019 I quickly remembered being shocked on just how enormous this place was! RC HEAVEN.
Being quite unique this event offers to run EP TC and IC on the same track (different layouts). Deciding to run both Modified TC and 1/8 GP I knew it was going to be busy.. I may have underestimated just how busy..

Without much experience and knowledge yet with our new Serpent X20 ’24 I decided to concentrate a bit more in practice on finding some setups. Learning a lot along the way with my EP driving style, tyre management and setup we managed to qualify 5th for the main.

I was content with this, knowing we had to find some more pace without overheating the front tyres we continued to work with the car, making some big setup changes in all 3 finals made it a little hard to be confident to push, this plus some mistakes on my part resulted in a 7th place final position.
The Serpent 990 EVO was dialed from the moment we hit the track! Needing to add 100 grams to bring the car up to the events 2450g weight limit made the balance and feel change a lot.
Trying some different body positions and tuning options to make the car more consistent I was able to put it on TQ in round one. Using the rocket round system the time set was not challenged for the remaining rounds of qualy, giving us the overall TQ .

The Amain couldn’t have gone any smoother, for 1/8 GP racing its not very often you can run 45 minutes without any problems. Tyre wear was quite high, planning for a 2 stop strategy changed into being able to manage the front tyre with a slightly slower pace resulting in only needing a single tyre change, our team Justin and Danny did an amazing job in the pits to get the car in and out with no fuss.
Leading from start to finish we were able to take the win 3 laps in front of our nearest competitor!

I would like to thank all the race officials and volunteers along with Sunpadow management for providing a very professionally run and super fun event! I would highly recommend attending in years to come!

Also our Serpent family for working together and enjoying RC!
It wouldn’t be possible for these results without the support of many people and companies.

Jeff Hamon