13th-Aug-19, 04:08 PM
Posted 09 April 2019 - 03:17 AM
The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 360 days and counting
Back home after an eventfull 8th edition of the Le Mans 24hrs. So how did it go? Not as good as we were aiming for I am afraid.
I blew the light installation on the 2018 racebody Friday evening just before the start of qualifying, so that had to be redone on Saturday morning 06:00 hrs.
Then we failed post qualifying tech (rear axle too wide) which meant we ended up in Siberia rostrum wise.
We'd also been chasing a weird package drop problem which ruined most of our free practice sessions and persisted till finally solved by Maurizio after 1 hour of running in the race.
After swapping chassis, chips, ID's, firmware and controllers, faulty cartridges on both our prime and spare controller were finally diagnosed as the root problem.
We got a new one from Maurizio and from then on the Ford finally started to live up to its potential, but on set-up and fine tuning we were running a day behind so we had to do that during the race.
We sorted what we could and slowly but steadily started making good progress, climbing up from dead last to 7th overall...
...but dropped back to 9th overall after a string of pitstops trying to solve what looked like a loss of power problem but in the end turned out to be a binding front axle.
The good things were that with the front axle sorted the car ran faster than ever and Lennard posted our fastest lap time of the race with a 14.96...
...on a track that was definitely a good 2 -3 tenths slower than at the start of the race.
And that all the development bits and pieces that were on the car performed as predicted and both chassis and body survived the 24hrs nearly scratch free.
We lost a mirror, one wiper and a sideskirt.
Last but not least, our cooperation as a mixed Anglo/ Dutch team worked really well, by working as a team we managed to solve most of the problems that the event threw at us.
There's still plenty of development room left in the Ford..so we'll most likely run it again in the other DiSCA WEC events planned for this year.
That will hopefully sooth the pain of having to wait for 360 days before we can head up the road to Le Mans... again.
With kind regards
Tamar
![[Image: post-18820-0-17478800-1554772230.jpg]](https://www.slotforum.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2019/post-18820-0-17478800-1554772230.jpg)
Post race pictures, the Ford finishing the race on the Mulsanne Straight.
![[Image: post-18820-0-38903700-1554772284.jpg]](https://www.slotforum.com/forums/uploads/monthly_04_2019/post-18820-0-38903700-1554772284.jpg)
The Road to Le Mans 1/32: 360 days and counting
Back home after an eventfull 8th edition of the Le Mans 24hrs. So how did it go? Not as good as we were aiming for I am afraid.
I blew the light installation on the 2018 racebody Friday evening just before the start of qualifying, so that had to be redone on Saturday morning 06:00 hrs.
Then we failed post qualifying tech (rear axle too wide) which meant we ended up in Siberia rostrum wise.
We'd also been chasing a weird package drop problem which ruined most of our free practice sessions and persisted till finally solved by Maurizio after 1 hour of running in the race.
After swapping chassis, chips, ID's, firmware and controllers, faulty cartridges on both our prime and spare controller were finally diagnosed as the root problem.
We got a new one from Maurizio and from then on the Ford finally started to live up to its potential, but on set-up and fine tuning we were running a day behind so we had to do that during the race.
We sorted what we could and slowly but steadily started making good progress, climbing up from dead last to 7th overall...
...but dropped back to 9th overall after a string of pitstops trying to solve what looked like a loss of power problem but in the end turned out to be a binding front axle.
The good things were that with the front axle sorted the car ran faster than ever and Lennard posted our fastest lap time of the race with a 14.96...
...on a track that was definitely a good 2 -3 tenths slower than at the start of the race.
And that all the development bits and pieces that were on the car performed as predicted and both chassis and body survived the 24hrs nearly scratch free.
We lost a mirror, one wiper and a sideskirt.
Last but not least, our cooperation as a mixed Anglo/ Dutch team worked really well, by working as a team we managed to solve most of the problems that the event threw at us.
There's still plenty of development room left in the Ford..so we'll most likely run it again in the other DiSCA WEC events planned for this year.
That will hopefully sooth the pain of having to wait for 360 days before we can head up the road to Le Mans... again.
With kind regards
Tamar
Post race pictures, the Ford finishing the race on the Mulsanne Straight.
![[+]](https://slotracer.online/community/images/bootbb/collapse_collapsed.png)