and another one bites the dust....

Perhaps that was the cause. This buggy has been put through the wringer over the last year or so though. It has seen much harder bumps than the clean landings I was hitting yesterday. The hill is 40 feet tall, but at any point the buggy was never more than 8-10 feet up from the slope. It's not like I was jumping off a cliff ;) My guess is a solder joint on a fet gave out and then touched another shorting it. the black smoke was from melting plastics. There was white electric fire smoke too but the plastics smoke was thicker.