[Graham]

Thanks Graham, yes busy but enjoyable day at gt3 yesterday, but onwards and upwards to the proxy!

I haven't decided on the tracks yet tbh, we ran the last proxy on 3 rivers as catalunya was out of service. So there's an argument for sticking with the same track for a clean comparison, or switching to catalunya to see if the track change mixes the results up for returning competitors. From an aesthetic perspective class A and D would suite 3 rivers whilst C and D would suit catalunya, class A cars may find Catalunya a bit of a struggle. Decisions, decisions! Is it possible to do a poll on this forum??

As you say probably no easy answer to this, most of the hosts don't have the dilemma of choice, but I would say that apart from two or three cars in Class A most of the cars did not run in the Le Mans so I would not be worried so much about direct correlation between the two events. Of course it may come down to available Marshals on the day as to which is the easiest to cover.

[PaulCooper]

Hi All
Sorry for the lateness of this report but I have been somewhat busy travelling around this April.

Again a big thank you to all the entrants and the honour of hosting a round, we ( Steve Hills of TRUSPEED ) both enjoyed the day and got a lot of pleasure from driving the cars to their max.

First thing of order is the packaging is excellent well done to Graham sorting that out. This made it so I could take the whole box up into the loft in one go. ?
As with my schedule and getting Steve Hills to come over to do the driving (as he has not entered and is an experienced racer, he also has raced on the track before.) it only gave us a one day over the weekend, but With less cars than before it also makes life easier.

My first issue was with my PC ( an old Dell only use is the RC timing ) going on the blink, so instead of my initial idea of running a timed 20 laps and then the fastest laps as a secondary measure in case of dead heats, I had to change that to only using the DS timer, so 20laps and the fastest three laps added together as the primary time, any draws would be the fastest lap.
With 20 laps any off did not matter so Steve was able to push the cars as fast as possible in the 20 laps.
 
The whole exercise took us from 10am until 4pm so all the cars got a good test run before the timed sessions. 

All the cars did receive individual feedback on the sheets so I will not repeat myself again but if you want more then please contact me direct and I will gladly reply. Please note  these are Primary Steve’s comments as he readied the cars as well as driving them. 

There are a few findings in general which are worth noting .

The Policar track is very grippy , so those who choose not to glue there tyres to the wheels were at an disadvantage as the rubber slips off very slight but enough to effect the times. I found that the difference  of a car not being glued to one that was , was in the .5 to a whole second advantage to the glued tyre.
The other point of the Policar track is the space between the rails is bigger so after the unboxing ( the braids on several of the cars had curled Despite the paper fitted between the car and foam) we spaced each car so the braids were in max contact some braids were slightly to long and had to be clipped to ensure a good contact. 
A couple of cars had rubbing issues, pretty much like the guide issue on the hill if you have set your car to the 1.5 or 1 clearance that in most case is only for the motor clearance and in some the front is nearly hoovering the track, so when they have to go up an incline it bites into the track and ever so slightly rubs the track. ( this was and is the case with the Ninco Megane of Steve’s hence on this road it didn’t quite reach its full potential) 

Tyre clearance was another issue , on some of the cars the clearance was ok on the setup plate but put on the track and dependant on chassis roll in the corners the car was loosing pace by the rubber body contact. ( the Gold Lamborghini was guilty of this flaw ) .
A few had a lot of axle movement and to tight gear meshing which had an effect too.

As can be seen by the sheets some of the racing was very close and with some of the points mentioned the positions could have changed. 

Obviously selection of the car, motor and chassis set up was always going to be a difference maker as to which would be the quickest but some of the above would make a difference.

A lot of the cars were dam quick and set up well others ( mine included ) were held back from their potential by these niggles. 

I did not have time for any video but I have took some still photos of several cars on the track .


Ps 
Steve did use the Apex Controller and as he is the inventor it was appropriate and he really knows how to use it to get the best out of your cars.

[tatter06]

We're having some issues getting the Team RNLI Ferrari to run, is anything in this pic obviously wrong?

   

[Kevan]

I'd try two wires straight to the motor first to see if it actually runs.

[tatter06]

Well we tried our best to get it running, body off it could be coaxed into life, albeit a bit tamely, as soon as the body went on there would be no or very little movement, I guess that means some of the wiring was fouling something or another, but we couldn't figure out what. the motor did run with wires straight to the motor but of course that was body off too. Apologies to Team RNLI.

[Makem]

Are those two suppressors on the motor possibly shorting?

Graham, can you get it sent to me and I will get it fixed and return it to weherever next round is?

[tatter06]

Are those two suppressors on the motor possibly shorting?

Graham, can you get it sent to me and I will get it fixed and return it to weherever next round is?

It's very possible, the behaviour was like a short somewhere, but was difficult to track it down to exactly what, it ran best when the wires from guide to chip were raised up and out the way, we unplugged/re-plugged everywhere we could and moved wires/braids about to narrow it down but I can't say we knew exactly what the problem was. There was no smoke or big sparks so I don't think it is terminal.

[Graham]

Are those two suppressors on the motor possibly shorting?

Graham, can you get it sent to me and I will get it fixed and return it to weherever next round is?

I will email your address details and ask the host to post the car back to you on Tuesday.

[tatter06]

Hi all, the SMSRC stage has been run, verified, checked and double checked and the runners and riders are below!

Thank you to all participants for allowing us the pleasure of running your cars, it continues to be fascinating how the same basic rules are interpreted and challenges overcome. Thanks to Graham for continiung to organise excellent proxies, with rules that encourage diversity in and accross the classes but keep producing close results and some epic battles. I think as you can see from the results almost everyone was in a duel with someone else with really close results. 

Myself and John had a great afternoon/evening running the cars, we settled on Catalunya track and Fastest lap for T1 and Average lap for T2, you may notice some large gaps between the 2, partly because we were really pushing for fastest laps so there were a few deslots which take a while to martial, also we had a few cases of missed laps (shallow guides/light cars pulling wheelies accross the start/finish line) but we kept an eye out to make sure no fastest laps were missed and no tiebreakers were needed. Full results via the xls files will be available this week.

There will be video and commentary to folow over the next few days but it always takes longer than I think (I estimated less than 2 hours racing, why was I at the club for 6 hours?!) and I wanted to get the results out tonight.

Class A
Podium
   

Time Sheet
   

Very close class, less than a second covering everyone and 3/10ths covering the top 4 (Average times to follow, I forgot to take a picture but I do have the xls files, luckily no ties so not needed for the result)

Class B
Podium
   
Time Sheet
   
Another close podium, the Cobra of Bangers racing just taking it, some were quicker, some had more grip but the cobra was perfectly balanced.

Class C
Podium
   
Time Sheet
   
Bit awkward my car came first to claim it's first win but as one of the previous hosts mentioned; not entirely surprising as this is the track the car was tuned for (John ran the classes I was involved in), next up a trio of camaros but interestingly all with different chassis/motors/layouts and all still quite close. The pontiac GTO looked at home on the Catalunya track!

Class D
Podium
   
Time Sheet
   
An incredible diverse class but some real gems in there, tip of the hat to the Bangers 911, as far as I could tell an old 80s scalextric body and a generic chassis, but it ran beautifully which is no mean feat. The Road runners Corvette looked fantastic on Catalunya track.

Couple of running repairs on this class
RNLI TR8 - guide wire had come out, no problem popped it back in
Rockers Monte Carlo - front guide post had unstuck from body, didn't have any epoxy so had to superglue, it survived the race but I will check again tomorrow, I think it needs epoxy for a proper fix.

So there we have it, thank you again for everyoe taking the time to build a car to enter, I will be posting a video of every car in each class with a little commentary and a couple of laps with feedback and observations but they will come out over the next week, hopefully giving you some idea of what it was like to race them and how they performed.

Ash

[Brumos RSR]

Congratulations SirCourtneyS, Chris K and Taters on your wins.   Thank you for running the round and I look forward to the next.