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.....