Late Model Track Record Goes Down!

I'm not sure how to describe last night's racing at BFG.  It was both great and lacking at the same time.  Attendance was good.  We were 21 cars deep in Late Model with multiple heats of trucks, Street Stocks and an overfull heat of Sprint cars.  A quick look at the heat boards looks like there were just over 40 cars in the field which is friggin' awesome for Dirt Oval racing in West Michigan.  

Before, the race, John had a drivers meeting to clear the air and clarify the discussion surrounding some proposed rule changes that have been circling around the Hobbytalk thread over the last week.  It was decided that 13.5 will remain open as will the truck class.  No tire rule will be implemented for the time being so we're on foams and rubbers, depending on driver preference.  So far, rubber tire has been the preference for most drivers, but fast lap times have been run on foam tires equal to those of rubber for the most part.  

Street Stocks are going to a breakout of five seconds right now to allow anyone to run whatever they have without having to buy a different motor.  That wouldn't have been my choice, but I don't run the class and I do see the logic.

Personally, I would have liked to have seen us go to blinky for Late Model because I think that would have led to the best racing in the long run.  The main reason to keep it open was the lack of desire to start worrying about tech for cars, which I completely understand.   I wouldn't want that job.  So for now, just about anything goes in 13.5 LM.  DODC body, ROAR approved 13.5 and that's about it.  I like less rules.  It lets me focus on getting faster and not worry about what everyone else is doing to go fast.

The quality of the racing improved to some degree.  There was less hacking and aggressive driving which was nice to see.  It wasn't bad before, but there were definitely a few racers running a little aggressively.  The drivers meeting beforehand reiterated the need for drivers to give courtesy wherever possible, whether it's moving over for someone in the heats or not running someone over in the mains.  For the most part, it was heeded.  I didn't see any instances of someone running someone else over and very few instances of racers holding others up in the heats. 

My Sprint car wasn't feeling too bad.   It just seemed that I couldn't catch a break in the heat races.  The front bulkhead screws came out in the first heat.  Sheared a screw off inside of the bell crank steering in another.  The mains were a lot of fun.  Somehow, I got out front with Jodi coming and just as he got to me with about 30 seconds remaining, he ended up with contact with lap traffic hitting him.  I thought I was in the clear when I did the exact same thing 20 seconds later.  Jodi ended up winning the race with Butch Beebe coming in second.  Close racing to be sure.  We probably could have split up the Sprints for the heats.  Seven is an awful lot of vehicles.  Then again, guys need to start racing the cars and not the track and get used to racing in big heats.  The mains are always fun.

John decided to run the heat races full so that led to some unavoidable contact in some of the heats.  I was on the losing end of some of that contact, which happens.  My Late Model went from wrecking loose to tight to just about ok by the time we got to the third heat.  I also smoked a speedo after the first heat, which made for an expensive night on the town.  Oh well, it lived a good life.  If anyone is unloading a Tekin speedo cheap, I'm interested.  I had a good run going until the last 10 seconds of the third heat, when the screw holding my bellcrank steering screw sheared off.  Yes, a second frigging bellcrank in a different car!!!!  I overcame the first one by canibalizing an Outlaw 2.0 chasis I had with me as a project car.  Unfortunately, I didn't have extras of that part since they're kind of pricey.

Jodi Flipse set the new track record in 13.5 Late Model at 61 laps on rubber tires.  That doesn't mean I'm switching.  I still think that foam can get it done.  Maybe not with all of the rubber tires running on it, then again, maybe it can.  I'm only a tenth off of the fastest times on rubber and my car is what I would describe as junk.  With a good setup, I think I can hang.

I suppose the death of the Rocket steering is the kick in the ass I needed to assemble the SE3 and get that on the track.  I've been working on it this morning.  I need to get some electronics soldered and get a body painted.  Then I should be good to go.  I'm hoping to have it ready for our next night of racing.

I don't have much else to report from racing.  I did want to throw out the idea of travelling to some big races this winter.  On January 19th, the Big O at Monee is going to be a good show.  I'm planning  to hit that one. If anyone ever wants to see the world outside of the Shire and race another track, Monee is a good one.    The first weekend in February, Teas is having the Outlaw Nationals.  It's a long ways away, but I hear that it's a great place to race so I'm anxious to see it.  Finally, the first weekend in March, is the big race at Trackside in Milwaukee.  There will be some heavy hitters there to be sure.  That track is very similar to BFG except that it has about another foot and a half of banking and is crazy fast.

Missed It By That Much!!!

You win some, you lose some in dirt oval RC racing.  For me, the excitement in the sport is not as much about making our cars an extra tenth of a second quicker, but about racing and finishing ahead of the next guy that's in front of you.  This week at BFG had some great (and not so great) examples of how even losing a race can be exciting.

The track was fast this week, fast enough for Steve Bahr to set the Late Model record and fast enough for me to break into the 3.9 second range in both Sprint and Late Model.  Attendance was good, but not great.  I'm guessing somewhere in the 30 entry range.  There were a bunch of regulars missing which could have pushed us from four to five or six heats of Late Models.  The Truck and Street Stock classes were also well represented.  Two heats of Truck and a full heat (really full heat) of Street Stocks.  Those Street Stockers look like a hoot if you could get the speeds down to where guys could drive them in traffic.  If everyone local came out, we would be pushing 60-70 entries.  That would be kinda fun.

It was also very refreshing to see Rich turn some laps on the oval in his Custom Works Rocket.  If he keeps coming, he will be up in the front of the pack racing for TQ in no time.  For anyone that knows  Rich, they know he's a really meticulous set up man and a pretty darn good driver.  I hope he keeps it up, he's fun to race with.

Some of the offroad guys are starting to show up now and doing pretty well I might add.   Charlie was right up there in his Team C conversion for Late Model and Rich was pretty dialed for his first night back turning left on the dirt.

My Night:

I had a pretty good night in Sprint.  I am committed to foam tires as I think they hook up way better and more consistently then rubber.  Steve Bahr on the other hand, tried foams, went back to rubber, then set the track record.   I was finally able to turn some 3.9 second laps, which as refreshing even though I felt like I still had a pretty good push coming out of the turn.  It's probably the most stable and happy the car has been since we started racing indoors.

Late Model was the usual for me.  The car was too erratic, pretty loose and hopping coming out of the corners.  I ran Silvers all the way around and I don't think they helped much.  I finally bailed on running blinky as I was tired of getting pulled down the straights and I picked up a ton of power and at least a couple tenths on the track.  I'm not sure if 13.5 open is the way to go, but as long as it's legal, I'm going to run it if it makes me faster.

Somehow I got shuffled into the B main even though I qualified fourth overall.  The B was pretty fun even if the computer failed to catch a lap of mine.  Jodi Flipse had a bit of a rough start (must have gotten tangled up somewhere, not really sure) but I could see him coming for the last 60 seconds of the race.  I kept losing a little ground focussing on the car behind me instead of the track in front of me, and when we got down to the last lap, I was in the lead coming out of turn four, but Jodi put the hammer down and caught me at the line.  It was a total photo finish and even though I lost, it was what racing is all about.  Racing a clock is just that, racing a clock.  A lot less exciting.

After getting the lucky bump to the A, I was doing ok out there until I got spun about 30 seconds into the race.  It was unintentional and all, but it does deflate you a bit.  I kept digging because you never know lately and sure enough, there was some action out in front of me.  The two, three, and four cars all tangled somehow with only Chris Holiday within striking range of me (Bahr had checked out by then) after that.  Chris was hunting me down and I could see his car coming up on me out of the corner of my eye.  He would close, close, close, then blow a corner and I would get a little breathing room.  Then I would bobble and he would be right back there.  I'm pretty sure he had a faster car than I did and probably would have figured out a way to get by me if the race would have went five minutes.

All in all, a great race day as I had no expectations again of being competitive in Late Model.  Next time out, I'm running the same compounds I ran on my sprint as I felt those tires had all kinds of traction out there.

Which brings me to my next point:

I'm all for having small heat races when you've got lots of cars because qualifying is all about getting your best four minutes of racing in to see how fast your car actually is.  We also run 3 qualifiers and resort after the second to give everyone an opportunity to get that best run in.  It doesn't always work out, but it's about as fair as you get in racing.   My only complaint locally would be to run the mains the same way every week so we knew at the beginning of the night how it was going to play out.  My vote would be for at least six in the main with a bump from the B making number 6 for 13.5, more for slower classes like Street Stock.

By the way, for the record, racing is inherently unfair.  The fast guys are fast for a lot of reasons.  Having good equipment in Dirt Oval is a lot less important than in some other RC disciplines, but it doesn't hurt to have good stuff to work on.  One of the reasons the fast guys are fast is because they put the time in at the track.  It is said that it takes 10,000 hours to master any skill which has been documented on gifted people from Michael Jordan to Mozart.  http://www.squidoo.com/10000-hour-rule

Some of us older guys might not have 10,000 hours left in us, but that doesn't mean that putting time in is any less important.  Steve Bahr has been in the hobby for a long time and is out every week, two to three nights a week practicing.  Is that cheating?  Maybe :)  What it really is, is putting the time in to dial in your car and work on your driving technique.  Combine that with having some talent and you're likely to be running up front.   There's a reason that the Chuck Lonnergans of the world can show up anywhere and be competitive in just about anything.  Ask him sometime how long he's been in the hobby and that should tell you it ain't luck.

Steering back from my tangent to racing, qualifying is qualifying.  Racing is racing.  The mains should have stacked heats with bump ups.  For me, that's where the fun is at.  Once you are into the mains, it's no longer about running 60 laps or whatever the most laps you've ever run is, it's about finishing ahead of the guy in  front of you.  When you run out of people to pass, you win.   That's how it works.  It forces you to drive in lines that you might not have chosen and it also forces you to be patient when someone is in front of you.  I spent a good portion of the B behind Rich, who was holding his line very steady.  I wasn't fast enough to blow by him on the outside and I wasn't about to run him over because it's his right to hold his position and my job to pass him if I can.  Now if he were multiple laps down, drivers etiquette says that he should move up and out of the way to let the front cars by, but even then, it's his option.

There is no doubt that it can get a little ugly with a lot of cars on the track at the same time.  There's always someone that's out to lunch.  And unfortunately, that means that you are going to end up in someone else's mess to take you out of the race.  If you've ever watched any form of motor sports, it happens all the time.  Very rarely do you see someone make a huge deal about it.  It seems like every time they interviewed the King, Richard Petty, he would refer to it as "one of them racin' deals".  There's a lot of fun out there in the chaos if you let it happen.

Getting wrecked also doesn't give you the right to go out and wreck other cars just because your run is in the tank.  I don't know how many times I've seen drivers get wrecked, get marshalled, and immediately launch right back wildly into traffic causing another wreck.  It's not how it's done.  I take my queues from watching the fast guys.  Guys like Randy Erb and Butch Beebe have put their 10,000 hours in so they know how to make the best of a bad deal. They get spun, they get their car turned in the right direction, wait for their opportunity, then get back under way.  Low and behold, a minute later, they are right back where they were in line because they were patient.  Don't believe me, watch Randy Erb sometime when he gets wrecked.  He rarely loses his patience and I don't remember seeing him turn his bad run into someone else's.  Good drivers also realize that you can't grab the throttle when your tires are covered in crap from being out in the marbles.

Set Up Tips (From Custom Works Seminar)

Sifting through my notes, here's another one that I didn't really understand very well.  

Castor is the angle on the suspension of the car and it helps determine how the suspension reacts under load. Blah, blah, blah.  

Here's the deal:

In general, the higher the degree of castor, the better off power steering the car will have.  The lower the degree of castor, the better the car will turn on power.

You'll notice that when you look at the front of your RC car, the front shock tower is some percentage more than perpendicular.  That's called the kick up.  This is one component of your castor.  On Custom Works short shock cars, that's usually a low number like 20 degrees.  On the long cars, it's either 25 or 35 degrees depending on which generation vehicle you own.

The other component of castor is the castor blocks located near the wheels.  It's the part that the king pin slides through to hold the axle carrier and axle in place.  These come in varying degrees and are specific to right and left parts on your vehicle because they impart either a positive or negative value on the overall castor of the vehicle.  Typically, they add to the overall castor, but sometimes you want to reduce the overall castor so you would reverse the right and left sides to get the negative value.

Ok, that might not have made a ton of sense, but this should.  More castor is valuable in loose dirt/low bite situations because you are typically going to be off the throttle going into the corner.  The increased castor allows the car to turn better when you're off the throttle.  On high bite tracks, you may want a lower overall castor because you are more likely to be turning on power into the corners. 

My notes indicate that these adjustments were more subtle and will not take your car from being a 5 and make it a 10, but it might get you from a 7 to an 8 or 9 in the right circumstances.

Well, that's all for this week.  Good thing I don't pay by the word here.   

Don't know if I'll be racing next week, maybe some practice.   I could sure use it.  

See ya....

Mr. T is the Man!!!

After coming back from Omaha and skipping a week of racing afterwards to catch up on projects that the Department of Homeland Security (aka Mrs. KzooLou) had waiting for me, I finally made it back to BFG to race.   It felt good to let go of all of the other stuff going on in my life and concentrate on 1/10th scale race cars for a change.

I ended up not getting there until around 4pm, which didn't give me a lot of time to test anything out so I rolled out with pretty much the same setups I had used in Omaha.  The Sprint car was working ok for the most part out of the gates and I wasn't really planning on running Late Models, but Bahr and Holiday talked me into it.  I hate being rushed and snapping a pin on the dog bone and breaking a shock tower in practice didn't help.  Luckily, Bahr had a spare of each and I was back in business at least to start.

The Late Model was out to lunch for the most part all night.  Free in, pushing off, it was really a handful all night.  It didn't seem to have nearly as much smoke as the others even after I tried a few different gearing combinations.  I'm running blinky, so that might have been some of it, but some of the guys ahead of me were running blinky too, so I'm not sure what the deal is with the Rocket.

Late models ran four heats deep and I qualified in the B which is about where the speed of the car was at.  There were at least two other cars in the B that were as fast or faster than me and I can say honestly, that it was maybe the most fun four minutes I've had in RC racing for a long time.

At the start of the race, Doug French and I were going toe to toe for the lead, running pretty clean for the most part for about the first minute. My memory is a little foggy on what happened there, but something happened to Doug and he dropped off a little just in time for a surging Mr. T to come right up on me.

I could see him coming.  There wasn't much I could do about it.  My car just didn't have the pull coming out of the corners and his was rotating nicely.  He came right up to my bumper and looked for an opportunity.  I held the line (it was the main or I would have ceded the position) and he waited until he could get his car in underneath me.  I went a little high on one end and he was right there.  We swapped positions back and forth for what seemed like an hour (it was probably something like 45 seconds).  I can't even remember at this point what happened, but George made a mistake and I finally got away from him. 

Mr. T. had a faster car and clearly could have punted me if he chose to do so.  I have a lot of respect for him for not doing that to me.  After the race, he said that he would rather lose clean than win dirty.  Now that's something we all need to keep in mind out there.  If you really want to have fun, then you need to have some respect for the other drivers.  Just because you're faster doesn't mean you have to run the other guy off the road.  A clean pass is a great feeling.

Once I bumped to the A, I felt I was the slowest car in the bunch, which turned out to be true for the most part.  During the race, I was probably lapped a few times by the leader (Steve Bahr) and for the most part was not competitive for the first three and a half minutes.  At the 3:30 mark, chaos must have broken loose because guys were wrecking all over the place.  Steve Bahr has his Late Model dialed pretty good.  He was turning plenty of 3.9 second laps during the first heat of the night.

After the race, Geoff asked me how I did and I told him last or second to last, but John came up and paid me out for second place.  Good to be lucky I guess.  I'm going to need a better setup before I run Late Model again.  It might be time for the SE3 to make it's debut.  If I get some time, I'm going to get it put together this week.

Man, the track surface is really pretty nice, if not a little abrasive for some reason.  It seemed to eat my tires last night pretty good so I'm dedicating my setups to foam from here on out.  Mark had his BMS car turning 3.9's  on foams.  I drove it and it felt really good so I'm inclined to say that they will work.  I can't see buying HB's every two weeks to run up front, so I'm hoping that I'm right.

There were four heats of late models, a heat of Sprints, two of trucks, and one of street stock with a LOT of regulars not there.  Guys are coming from Battle Creek, Ionia, Reed City, Holland, and of course Kalamazoo.  Things could get pretty packed in there very soon.  I hope John is working on a plan to finish the pit space around the track.  We were starting to get a little claustrophobic  with the offroad racers practicing at the same time.   Honestly, it's got to be a good problem to have.  With the new banked oval track, things are really taking off there.  I hope it keeps up through the winter.

I can't wait to get back up there.   I'm hoping to get some tire testing in one night this week.  Maybe Wednesday or Thursday, just depends on work.  Somewhere I've got to pick up about two tenths of a second.

A couple of guys were asking me for my notes that I took at the Custom Works chasis seminar.  I'm going to put it all together at some point in a single article that I'll have vetted by someone who actually knows what they're talking about.  For now, here's a few snippets:

Ride Height

In both seminars that I've attended so far, Arnie talks about starting with the ride height equalized on the cars before you start.  We all tend to go for shock collar adjustments because they're easy and they have a noticeable impact on the behavior of the car.  If you go too far, you can have a really negative impact on the attitude of your car.  The example that he gave was that if you had a ton of rake in your car (back higher than front) and you make another adjustment on your vehicle to get it to turn or whatever, you might find that you don't see the desired effect in your car because the rake is keeping the other change from giving a predictable result.

The place to measure chasis height is to take your calipers or other measuring tool and measure to the top of the chasis in the four corners of your chasis.  He kept coming back to the fact that moving to far away from this is a bad idea.  Once you've tried turning your shock collar more than 5 turns in one direction, it's time to do something different like change a spring to get the desired effect.

Trade Offs

Everything you do to the car has an equal and opposite effect in some other way.  In order to add grip in one area of your car, you typically need to give up grip somewhere else.  It makes sense and seems pretty obvious when you think about it.  Good stuff to keep in mind while you're making changes.   

Hub Spacers

If you built your Custom Works car, you know what a pain in the ass it is to thread the pin through the little white spacers and in between the arms and the hubs.  I always figured it was just bad design, something left over from it's origins as a B3 that you had to live with.  As it turns out, it's a pretty good way to tune your car.   Rather than keeping the spacers on each side of the hub carriers, you can load one side or the other to change the geometry of your car.  Example:  If you move the spacers forward (ahead of the hub carrier), it has the effect of lengthening your car. If you move them to the back, you shorten the wheel base of your vehicle.  It also puts more weight of the car behind the wheels.  I don't have it written down, although I think moving the hub carriers forward (spacers in the back) would have the effect of giving the car more forward bite.   I'll try to get this confirmed.

Well, that's all you're getting from me today.  I'll try to do a follow up later in the week.

Until then.....