[BAracer]

#82

"Lazerbeams4fun"

JohnK has been busy with Christmas approaching. The Porsche 935 is rubbed down and ready for the casting process to happen, as is the Chaparral 2G side project. Jeremy has also been busy designing and printing a light bridge for the timing system on his track. He showed us what he said was the 8th iteration of the design, and it has a feature on it that brought gasps of amazement from everyone for being very simple but so useful that once seen, you wouldn't want to be without it!

"Over to Gazza...................................open the picture then share.............."

"Nah, forget it!"

Graham Shed have us an update on his routed track build. Top tip this week was how to incorporate gentle banking for corners in order to eliminate the risk of negative cambers buy the use of everyday objects that you might find round the house. Ironically, at the same time as that, he was struggling with straights that had cambers in them when he didn't want them. Lots of tips for how to flatten out a straight and keep it flat.

"Gazza....?"

".......Nope"

"Dewann......?"

".........5 minutes"

Greg's Tip of the Week was the answer to whether you can you run a track with both an analogue powerbase and a digital powerbase installed on it at the same time. Spoiler alert...listen to Greg's tip first before you try this at home! Garth's Tip of the Week was a solution to identify both lane colour and direction with a stickers, which once everyone thought about it, was ingenious.

In Club Corner, Our Alan, ably assisted by Greg, gave a presentation of the Classes they race at Nascot Wood Slot Club. Clear explanations on the rules for each class, whether the cars within each class provide for exciting racing, how they develop existing classes or introduce new ones to keep everyone interested and to keep the racing competitive, but most importantly, FUN. Dewann enjoyed the recent Halloween race meeting at Electric Dreams...did he win any races? Nope. Did he win the raffle? Yep!!!

Club Corner highlighted the importance of races being enjoyable events. A question was raised about handicap systems that people have used in order to equalise performance between experienced and novice racers in order to maintain enjoyment in a club. There were systems for drivers whereby your race results are captured over time and, like in golf, you start with a negative lap count at the start of a race and you have to catch up those with lesser handicaps. In digital, there are simple software adjustments that can level up a race card, such as altering the size of your fuel tank or burn rate. There were schemes where cars carried different 'lap handicaps' which led to previously non-competitive cars being brought out or retirement due to having a beneficial handicap rating, which led to greater variety in grids. There was the simple 'crash and burn' which rewarded reliable racers and created risk for the out and out speed merchants. There were the races where you had to match target lap times which again rewarded skill over speed. 

On the scenery front, Greg highlighted a German Carrera based website he often goes to where you can download and print out hundreds of decorated building templates (if you know where to find them...)

"Gazza.........?"

".......Nope.........yes! Can you see this.....?" Finally, Gazza managed to connect up his satellite link and we were treated to sight of his 3D printed control tower and his Miner's Cottage.