by gascarnut » Mon Nov 06, 2017 6:02 pm
My general comments regarding the cars:
Mostly, the cars were good. We have seen many different proxies come and go here at PMCC and the level of parity among the cars at all levels in this field was great. there were lots of good dices between cars of equal performance.
In general, the tire preparation was fine, the few cars on rubber tires had an initial advantage when they were clean but lost it later in the heat as they picked up the urethane dust. I noticed quite a few different makes of urethanes, none seemed to have any significant advantage over another. There were a few cars where the tires did not fit the wheels too well, and were not glued on, which was apparent when running those cars, as they tended to fell like the tire was buckling under the wheel in the turns.
Guides on most cars could have been a lot deeper than they were for this track. Many cars lost a lot of time because of this. Most of the "straight-lining" you saw was directly the result of insufficient guide penetration. I know that some of the Canadian tracks have shallow slots, perhaps it's time to try to standardize a depth among the proxy hosts. My track will take a full-depth Slot.it wood guide or a Sloting Plus guide, or even the 8.3mm Scale Auto guide, and it makes a lot of difference. Braid setup and quality varied a lot. I know this was round 9, but some cars still had braid looking almost new whereas others looked like the braid had done a 24 hour enduro before being sent off to the Proxy.
One or two cars had really loud gears, but most were pretty good, despite using a lot of stock Scalex and Pioneer parts.
Some cars had major problems with turns in one direction. Some did not want to turn left, some would not go right. I'm not sure why, I have not looked at the cars in much detail. I did notice a few where the body movement on the chassis is not symmetrical left to right and that could be part of the problem. Some had a lot of tire chatter in one direction and not in the other, mostly due to inadequate rounding of the inside edges of the tires.
The top cars in both classes were really nice, well prepared and tuned, just a pleasure to drive. I found it interesting that only two Mustangs made it into the top 16 cars, mainly because they are giving away so much width to the Camaros and Challenger/Cudas.
There was a great variety of scratchbuilding techniques on show too, from Dan's gift card/Lego creations through Lez's acrylic sheets to full-on brass frames. It's great to see so many people willing to experiment with all these techniques. Lots of 3-D frames too, now.
I hope this helps a bit for the next time.