Back into the routine

Today was a busy day !
Racing at West Kent
Charlie's birthday
My Dad's birthday

I overslept this morning and was woken up by my phone telling me Charlie was calling me at about 10 past seven... I was supposed to pick him up at 7, so apologies Charlie, my bad mate !

I got ready and stuck the kettle on while I loaded my gear into the car, then came in and filled up a flask with coffee ready to go.
I was at Charlie's house for about 7:30 and we headed off to the track. Along the way we saw Vince and drove along with him for the rest of the journey.

When we arrived the playground was frosted over so very slippery ! Not the best thing for carrying a shedload of equipment about but we managed in the end :)

We set up in our usual place and got everything plugged in and ready to race for about 8:30 so at least we weren't rushing any more...
I had decided to use some new tyres for this meeting so I put them on the car and went out to practice for a bit, which is something I don't usually do as I tend not to make setup changes unless there's a problem with the car. Not today though ! As soon as i gave it some throttle it shot off at and angle and slid around the track.... note to self: New tyres need to be scrubbed in first !

It was the usual fare in the first heat, couldn't drive for toss but made it round. Got 20 laps in the first heat and Steve (who wasn't driving today as he wanted a day off) was watching. I asked him what he thought afterwards as I was having trouble with it steering too quickly. The car felt good, and had the right amount of steering, but it was changing direction too quickly for me. I'm used to a nice, easy to drive, slightly understeering car that's predictable.
Steve has an immense amount of knowledge and talent for both driving and setup. He's still the only person I know that can set a car up without gauges !
His suggestion was to soften the front end by laying the shocks down by one or two holes and see how it felt. The theory behind car setup can be found here. It's pretty much all about weight transfer in an rc car, and his idea was that laying the shocks down would make the car pitch a bit more coming into the corners and soften the response of the steering a little.
It certainly worked as it got me an extra 2 laps !

I was geared at 82/19 for the first two heats, so went up to 82/20 for the 3rd qualyfier with the intention of keeping the power down for a bit longer around the track... It worked well as I had the fastest lap in my heat (12.29 from a 12.68 previously), but didn't quite squeeze the 23 laps I wanted. When all the results were in I found that I was in 4th place on the grid for the B final, which is not bad for me at all.

The final went well except for a few mistakes and crashes (some of which were my fault and some which weren't). 1st place finished with 22 laps in 301 seconds, I was in 3rd on 22/309 or something, so as you can imagine it was very close all the way round :D