Carpet Wars 7 Round 1

We went to Carpet Wars this weekend for the first round of the winter championship for 2009.  Back indoors, back on carpet… back to 12th scale :)

I ran the car in practise on Saturday and found a good setup and tyre combination to run with which made the car very consistent and very easy to drive.

I’m running a single cell lipo in the 12th now instead of 4-cell packs of nimh batteries, so I was very interested to see how far off the pace of some of the really quick guys I was going to be.

I found out in round 1 where I was 2 laps down (which is about right for me), but more importantly, I was simply charging it up between races and going out again.  That’s the biggest change other than a softer centre spring as there’s at least 100g difference between running the car on cells vs running it on lipo.

This means that the car is quicker to accelerate, quicker to handle, but as you’ve not got the voltage anymore (4.2 vs 6 fully charged) there’s a compromise there as the Lipo cars are slower.

I qualified 5th on the grid for the A final and had a good run in the final until the penultimate lap where I made a HUGE mistake and got in the leaders way as he was lapping me.  This cost him the win as the 2nd place runner was able to make his way through and take the win.  I was running 3rd at the time as a couple of the other quicker guys had dropped out with problems during the run.

BRCA TC National Round 4 – Snetterton

At this round of the national, there's a live feed available to watch on the net.

http://www.bbkRCLive.com

Tristan is currently 41st after three very consistent runs
20: 303
20: 304
20: 304

and I'm 26th after 3 consistent runs as well
22:313
21:301
21:301

I was hoping to be able to provide a bit more info during the day, but the 3 mobile dongle wasn’t happy with reception, so I couldn’t get going with it.  I’ll try again tomorrow.

BRCA Young Guns 2009 – Eastbourne

 

Last weekend was the 2009 BRCA Junior National championship held at the Eastbourne club

The weekend was fabulous, with us older racers being there in a support class to help out our junior members.

I managed to set a new Pb for my time around the track, but at the end of the day when packing up, I pulled a muscle in my back picking up the generator and have been off work all week :(

I’m hoping it’s better soon (it’s better than it was on monday) as there’s a pretty busy racing schedule coming up.

STCC Round 6 – Snetterton

Last weekend was the 6th (round out of 8) for the STCC series and the track was Snetterton, where we’ll be in a couple of weeks for round 4 of the nationals.

I decided that I’d spend 1/2 of saturday setting the car up on national tyres and the other half for stcc tyres, giving me (hopefully) a head start for the meeting in a couple of weeks time.  This seemed to work well and I was happy with the way the car handled on the track from the 2nd run after making a slight change to the shock angle on the rear of the car.

There was a big bunch of Sidcup racers there this weekend:

Myself
Charlie
Steve (making his racing return)
Chris H, who is now known as “Mr Chips”
Marlon
Jordan
Tristan (accompanied by his girlfriend Michelle)
Alex (accompanied by his girlfriend Natalie)
Phil

After everyone had finished practising, we walked over to a nearby restaurant for a well deserved bite to eat and some drinks. This turned out to be a great laugh, both at ourselves and the prices of the food.  Chris H only eats Chips though, I still can’t get over that !!!

Sunday morning came and we got set up for the meeting only to find that Maaarrrrllloooonnnn was in the top heat along with myself and Chris H.  He wasn’t happy but he did really well during his runs !

I couldn’t seem to get the car hooked up in the same way as I had done on the Saturday, but neither could anyone else from our little travelling race team.  Alex and myself qualified within 4/10ths of a second of each other to be 1st and 2nd on the grid for the B final, a race that was to become one of the talking points of the weekend !

The first final came and after a few silly mistakes by me, I ended up third, with Alex in 2nd.

The second final was where it was at though, Alex leading me away from the chasing pack until about 4 laps to go when he clipped a kerb and “roofed it” (a technical term)  This meant that I got the lead with a few laps left, but Alex was having none of it !  He came right back at me and we went into the last lap no more than a few centimetres apart !  On the very same corner where Alex had let me through, I crashed in the same exact way to let him back into the lead !!!

I ended up 2nd with Alex winning that leg of the final.

I was determined to take the win in the 3rd final for a split on the results, but this was not to be.  I overdrove the car and ended up spinning out (coming 7th in that leg) with Alex taking another win for the overall win.

3rd overall for me.  The worst result on paper, but one of the best (if not THE best) races I’ve ever had.  It’s that sort of stuff that makes us spend all this time toiling over the cars, practising and racing as much as we do.  The close race with a good mate, nothing beats it !

There’s now only two points between myself and Alex (taking dropped rounds into consideration) with two rounds left, so it’s right down to the wire !

BRCA National – Round 3 – Cotswolds

This weekend saw the BRCA National series visit the excellent facility at Cotswolds.

Again, it would be myself and Tristan flying the Team Sidcup flag against the best in the country !

We headed up after a bit of a delay on the Friday due to a number of bad things happening to Tristan on the day, not a good start !

Saturday was a beautiful day and I’ve got to say the track is one of the best I’ve been to so far in the country.  Excellent mix of grip, technicality and speed needed for a good run here.

I soldered in my replacement motor (after blowing one up at the STCC) and went out for practise, taking it easy.  Disaster struck and it went up in smoke after about 2 minutes :(

This meant I had no more 6.5 motors to run other than the one from my wet car, so I ended up having to qualify using 5-cell packs and a 7t delta I had in the box.

After the end of the day I was 33rd overall and had a huge task of cycling all the cells that night in order to get some punch into them for the next day’s qualifying and finals.

I needn’t have bothered though as the weather on Sunday morning was WET WET WET.  This meant that we ran the wet cars for qualifying.  A lot of people chose not to run in the wet or had problems running, so I jumped up to 29th overall after qualifying, meaning that I’d made a C final for the year (I was over the moon)

I recorded two 5th place finishes in the first two finals which were both wet, and didn’t run in the 3rd as it was dry and the car was glitching a bit.  It turns out that the car was fine, just a bit of moisture somewhere that was taken care of after I got home with a liberal squirting of wd-40

All in all a good result for the weekend !

An expensive weekend ! :(

Round 5 of the STCC was this weekend at Bashley and as usual, headed to the track on Saturday afternoon.

I had the GM motor in and that blew on the first run of the day, but I think it was almost gone from the National Round at halifax.

I put a speed passion 6.5 in and went out for a few practice runs.  I was happy enough with the car, so I settled on the setup I had for sunday morning’s qualifying.

Qualfying was another expensive session for me, with another motor gone (this time the speed passion)  I was on for a new PB until the motor went up 3ft from the finish line on the last lap.  I had a tekin left, but I’d never used it before, so it took a couple of runs to get used to it as I was EXTRA careful with gearing and timing on it.

It turned out that I needn’t have bothered as it was my initial run that ended up being my best qualfying run and put me 9th on the grid for the A final, with Alex in 7th and Charlie on the number 10 spot.

I had two bad finals, one of them with my shell catching and the second with a driveshaft pin coming loose that left me out of the running for a good placing overall.  Third final came along and I had a good run, ending up in the middle of the pack somewhere.  Oh, but to have that finish earlier in the day !

I’m sending the motors off the investigation to see what went wrong with them as I haven’t ever got close to having a motor blow before, so I must have done something seriously wrong, although the car was extremely quick !

I have some video footage of the racing, so I’ll post them up tomorrow on the usual youtube channel.(www.youtube.com/Aomircko)

Modified Racing (interesting results)

The top 10 finalists at the last BRCA national at Halifax was a split between 5-cell and Lipo 6.5 even with the weight differential

 

Chris Grainger - 5 cell
Andy Moore - LiPo 6.5t
Elliott Harper - LiPo 6.5t
Jonathan Aird - 5 cell
Chris Ashton - 5 cell
Glenn Doman - 5 cell
Olly Jefferies - LiPo 6.5t
Alan Bickerstaff - LiPo 6.5t
Matt White - 5 cell
Colin Price - LiPo 6.5t