wellll finally time for my Prague update.
@Dinnye is wayyy too fast at writing up posts so this is a couple days late in comparison (maybe you should workout your legs as much as your fingers 
)
To start with I also treated my tyres with the same softener as Bence he summarised my findings pretty well so I’ll just copy em here. The only thing I can add is that they truly do stink. Even after a week of application my tyres still reek.
Bence's Findings
Whilst he was using tyre warmers, I just ended up heat gunning my hubs to get some core temp into the tyres. (admittedly my fastest two runs I didn’t do any tyre prep so who knows if this was effective or not)
I do wish that I had also swapped on non-treated Linnpowers on to compare the difference but alas I didn’t have time during the race.
Moving onto the board and the race itself.
I finally took some measurements so if anyone was wondering my wheelbase currently sits at 96cm (will shrink by a little when I get centerset hangers) paired with the ~66cm standing platform and around +1.5-2cm axel to standing platform height. I’m just glad to see my feelings about preferring a smaller board are founded, when compared to ride feel of the MLR platform that sorta inspired this build.
So for the fancy new thing to this build the Dualities. I set it up with a 37.5/20degs which I believe is one of the more responsive Duality setups. I went into the race with the plan of running 93/95.5 WFB barrels in the front and 95.5/95.5 WFB barrel chubby combo in the rear (going off @Dinnye 's recommendations) and it got me pretty bloody close to what I wanted. After running the first half of quali on it, I felt as if the front end was a little too soft compared to what I’m used to causing me to accidentally dive the front end into a corner and lose speed.
So, I decided to swap to a 95.5 all-round setup with Barrel/Barrel front and Barrel/Chubby rear, and it felt great. Though the only thing to note was that it did seem a little progressive with a fairly loose middle and a progression through the articulation, maybe @Dinnye can weigh in on how it compares to his setup. Early conclusions are that I may have been running not enough preload, or the additional ride height (whatever that lateral G pushback Moe was referring to).
Overall, loved the additional deck angle (limited to ~28deg by flipped front hanger) I’ve been able to achieve with the new truck setups as well as the smoothness throughout the turn when compared to my MLR trucks previously (not to mention the fact that changing bushings mid-race day is actually an option now). I feel like I’m fighting against the trucks a lot less in this setup, achieving a less nervous middle whilst still being able to dive the board into a corner when I want to.
that last pic gives me soo many esk8con memories with Vasek and @davidpilny it’s amazing
As for the race itself, I unfortunately lost to @davidpilny (again) by 0.33 seconds over nearly 7min of total race time (our smallest margin of the year), losing me the 2024 European Championship as well. The two of us have had the tightest ever slew of races this year on a mixture of different setup too, with neither of us ever finishing over a second off each other (and him always beating me :/)
My greatest gratitude to @davidpilny for this amazing fight and xErace for hosting these battles, I can’t wait for next season to start, plus the opportunity to race the rest of ya’ll here in May with the free flight scheme that they are running.
Back to the board. The Onsra escs ended up performing relatively well over the weekend despite being incompatible with >180kv motors (mine are 205kv) only throwing one error as I went over a bump. Though it did one time decide to cut half my braking power, luckily it was during free practice and a restart solved it. I’m looking at swapping to DXW motors soon-ish at a lower kv to better suit the ESCs since that’s what they were designed for. Probably the 6890 (same as Agent and WTF) in the rear and the 6374 in the front to keep weight down, and hopefully that solves my motor and esc issues. These Onsra ones are detuned versions of the same 16s100a JKescs that the WTF runs, running at 16s90a max instead but with IMO a much better user experience due to their remote when compared to the stock ones. It allows me to see ride stats after the fact as well as the ability to adjust front-rear power bias (albeit janky rn but v2 firmware will solve this) which is a non-negotiable for me, and the reason I haven’t yet changed to the new Exway x MBS 18s controllers.
Onto the deck, the additional layer of CF has definitely helped with stiffness and gotten rid of the wallowing issue that I originally had making the response from the board feel sorta unpredictable in high-speed corners. Though I do plan on adding even more CF to make it even stiffer cause there’s still a decent amount of flex in it, though it would technically also add a couple of millimetres to the ride height which is exactly what I don’t want right now.
At the end of the day I’m just pretty grateful to have these events to race at and such an amazing group of opponents to race against, so thank you, to everyone.
Plus I also did some sightseeing in Prague
Though my sights seem very different to Bence’s
ngl these ribs were very mid so probably wouldn’t recommend anyone to go there haha
also found this sick half pipe on the group ride
I haven’t yet had a chance to look through my 360 footage but when I do I’ll either add it here!