17/02/2026
That’s a wrap on TITC 2026! 🎥
Another edition, possibly the craziest yet of TITC has come to a close. For me and many others it was roughly 12 days of intense testing, development and racing.
I brought some big updates with us this year that I’ve been working on the past 6-8 months at RC MAKER. A culmination of several races of testing with various elements all coming together for this race. This year I raced, so I could get my own feeling for the car and understand what the car is excelling or lacking in. Whilst it made me busy, it was absolutely the best idea, as it allowed me to help push us forward in a good way with the setup.
Changing track conditions are always the talk of TITC, and once again it was just that. One day you can have a great feeling and speed, and the next it can all be gone for no reason at all. It happens to the best, and probably the hardest thing about this race (coupled with the heat, competition and length). No team is immune, it’s basically all about who gets the car best in the window to handle all conditions, or who learns what needs to be changed to suit the conditions at any particular time.
Being the youngest and one of the smaller teams makes that part a bit tricky for us, but we all worked together really well by going in very different directions through practise to find a setup that was in the window in all conditions.
I believe it was Monday, when I had some pretty extreme ideas of raising the roll centre very high, coupled with very long upper links (mounted to the bulkhead) and very stiff oil. This might sound contradictory (making the car roll with long links and then preventing it with the high roll centre) however it worked very well! The long links took away the crazy initial traction, while the high roll centre still have the car agility and support in the corner.
Antoine and Jeff gravitated towards this and it became the basis of what we used through qualifying and finals with minor tweaks. In Q5 we went up in diff oil, which gave the car better forward traction while making it rounder in the corners… and turned out to be a great change. Whilst I unfortunately got crashed out by another driver rejoining the track, Antoine and Jeff both had very strong runs, with Antoine posting a 5 minute time only 5 seconds off Michal Orlowski. This is the closest we have ever been and whilst it was “only” a Top 20 run on paper, it felt like a big win for us with the major updates! Antoine finished up 23rd, me in 34th and Jeff in 38th. Sounds underwhelming, I know. But considering the level of competition, im really satisfied with this with very limited track time with the updates!
Open Brushless brought many surprises that became some of the biggest highlights for the event. Shinya put in a blistering first few qualifiers with the updated chassis, that landed him 5th on the grid for the A Main, and our Aussie boy Lincoln kept his tyres for later in Qualifying and drove superbly to land in 7th on the grid with his SP1! First TITC for Shinya and 2nd TITC for Lincoln, what an amazing result for them. Whilst Shinya had some tough luck in finals, he still posted the fastest lap of all 3 A Finals with a stonking 14.687! Lincoln drove 3 epic finals, and despite an epic A2 start which ended in tears, came home for 6th overall!! Couldn’t be prouder of this kid and the work he’s put in over the last year to get to this point. Shout out to Logan Rintoul - RC Driver on 39th overall in his first ever international race!
Non Boost, we once again snuck some A Mains with Shunsuke Mori in 8th and Luke Watson in 9th with their SP1’s. After all was said and done, Shunsuke finished up in 5th while Luke got 10th overall, an absolutely awesome result by both of these guys, working relentlessly to perfect every detail in this hotly contested class!
I’m honestly very proud of these results, as they show such an improvement from our first year last year. For such a young team, I feel we are getting much closer to the top every time out, and the chassis updates are bringing an even higher level of performance and durability.
As for INOV8 RC, it was my first international event with our new brand in the market. I’m honestly blown away by the support from both our customers and pro drivers. Over 50% of the Modified and Open Brushless A Mains were using our body accessories which is phenomenal. The 2 time TITC champ Michal Orlowski has a lot of praise for our body mount system and body stiffeners, and since switching to them 2 years ago, has never taken them off. Most recently he switched from the Duo Stiffner to the Tetra, like many others this year, to handle the brutal on track conditions. I’m very proud of how far we’ve come in such a short time, and want to send a huge thankyou to our customers and drivers for all of this support!
Lastly a small word on my racing. I have missed racing quite a bit over the last year, and felt I would be more beneficial to the team being on track than off. I think this was absolutely the right decision, as being able to feel the car rather than just watch really helped me to understand better what direction to take which helped us all! Whilst I was a bit rusty through practise, once the race started I was feeling comfortable again and really enjoying driving the updated car. I stayed on 4 wheels in all qualifiers and finals, just had a bit of bad luck in some of the runs with other cars, and one random seized bearing 🙈 Overall I finished in 34th, which I’ll absolutely take after my time off. I’m looking forward to putting more time in on track this year and seeing what I can do again next year at this awesome race. Besides the results, I just have a lot of pleasure driving a car I have designed and am developing with my team. No matter the result on track, I feel like I’ve already won 🥹
Thanks to the whole team for their giant effort this past 2 weeks. In 5 weeks time, we head to China for the IFMAR World Championships where we will once again put everything to the test against the best in the world. We are ready for the challenge and looking forward to learning more and more!
Thanks everyone for all your support 💪🏼
Ryan
