Re: Group 5 Proxy - Round 6 Calgary

[SR HAWAII]

Congratulations to the top finisher.
Thank you for the great work to Rocky Mountain Racers. :text-thankyouyellow:

Takashi

[F1Fan]

WOW, great to be on the top step again, it has been awhile!

With 3x BMW 320's in the top 4 places it appears that this track/car combination worked well, amazing to see how different venues and tracks suit different cars/tuning....unless you are Camber, then everything suits your car!

After a strong few races for #70, I am surprised to see it in 13th place, for a brief moment I almost felt sad for him, but luckily that feeling went away very quickly :banana-dance:

Good to see a few strong placings by others as well - congratulations to everyone else that is pleased with their result, better luck to the others next time.

Thanks again to Tom and team RMR for the great coverage & hosting, it turned out to be a long day for you guys and your efforts are much appreciated.

Onward to Edmonton and our first race on the new monster track, looking forward to the event - it will be time to turn up the boost to maximum and hope that the pistons and conrods don't end up in a tangled mess!

Chris

[Brumos RSR]

[ken weir]

So Tom...when did Brad move his track into his garage? Was it cold in there? :text-bravo:

[F1Fan]

[SuperSlab]

Big thank you to Tom and team for another well run, expeditious round. Fortunately for my peace of mind I no longer have any illusions or great expectations of my mid-pack Capri: at least it is in good company. And as you said Tom: what a pitched battle in the middle area! Less than 2 laps difference from 4th to 11th: on 121 laps that is a very small gap indeed!

Cheers

Alwyn

[Giddyup]

[AndGoliath]

I am the RMR club member, Shadow, who qualified your cars yesterday. I would like to thank you for opportunity to drive your cars. The rest of this post explains a bit of the process and provide some feedback (mainly decrypting the comments on the images Tom posted).

The track is around 6m by 2.4m (20' by 8' to the Metrically challenged of you). The main track elements affecting my driving of the cars:
+ A long straight with increasing elevation for the last portion followed by a hairpin at the top. I tried to be conservative with my braking as I did not want to send a car flying at the top. I believe I only had one deslot at the hairpin. I noticed at least one car had good braking (the track by default has full brakes) and I tried to delay braking on these, but I was still a little conservative by instinct.
+ From the hairpin there is an elevation drop with a sweeping turn leading into a technical section with a short straight in the middle. In this section I was just trying to get an even no-drift line around the corners to lead into the short straight and the sweeping turn. I think I only had one, maybe two deslots here.
+ From the technical section there is a long sweeping 180 turn (full width of the track) onto the straightaway. Based on the handling in the technical section I would gauge how much throttle for this turn to maximize the speed into the straightaway. Most of my deslots were in this turn due to misjudging the traction limits.

I first tried to find the early limit of the cars in the first 25 or so seconds, get a couple of good laps, and then push a bit in the big corner to try and take advantage of any tire warmup and potentially get faster laps. In the case of the couple of good-brakes cars I tried to push the braking.

I can see from comparing qualification times against the fast laps from the races that I was definitely slower due to concentrating on getting clean laps and saving the cars, but the qualification order was close to the race fast time order.

I only remember a few of the cars individually, but I will try to give an overview of my feedback. We were pressed for time during qualifying so I only wrote basic things about each car. My views on speed are subjective based on feel. They are not based on the times. "Balanced" means not loose and a gentle (non-abrupt) transition to loose when pushed (i.e., a easily identifiable limit). All but one of the cars were consistent with handling on and off power. The exception is mentioned separately at the end.

Well balanced cars with more speed: these ones I was confident to really push and also felt really fast
#7 (F1Fan), #1 (Camber), #50 (Gas4It), #10 (CgyRacer, not quite as fast as others in this group)

Balanced cars with speed: these ones I was confident to push and also felt fast
#5 (RedLynr), #79 (JimmySlots), #18 (SteveEw), #4 (Aloha), #24 (Lance...)

Balanced cars with less speed: these ones I was confident to push, but did not have as much speed
#77 (AJK), #82 (SuperSlab), #60 (ChrisGuyW, not as fast), #33 (BrumosRMR), #54 (Lez), #17 (Dmn17), #51 (SlotRacingHawaii), #9 (53B1)

A little loose cars with speed: I could not push these as much, but could get some speed
#70 (Smokied)

Loose cars: these were hard to push to get speed as I was worried they would come out
#62 (Leadfoot), #52 (CoquitlamKid, faster), #59 (MrCarp)

Very loose cars: I could not push these at all
#19 (Audi1), #8 (GT6)

Special case:
#53 (ArnoldN): this car was very Jekyll and Hyde. In the technical section it was balanced and relatively easy to drive, but it became very loose in the sweeper under even medium throttle. It kept catching me out as I thought I had a handle on the car and suddenly it was gone with no warning. I had the most deslots with this one as I have not experienced anything like it recently with my own cars or the other cars in the proxy. I had to consciously hold back to keep it in on the sweeping turn.

Conclusion:
The big takeaway from this is that handling feel is important for someone like me driving an unfamiliar car with no practice. A loose car can be blisteringly fast on a familiar course with a familiar driver or one used to that type of handling, but it can be difficult for someone else. A so-called balanced car lets the driver feel the limit coming on, drive to an optimum slot angle, and then concentrate on braking points instead of keeping the car under control. For club racing I am able to true my tires and perform basic maintenance for my race cars before each club race to maximize performance, which is obviously much easier to do. Getting a car to remain consistently good over this many races must be very difficult.

Hopefully these comments of the car handling/performance at the half-way point of the proxy are of help to the participants.

Again, I would like to thank everyone for providing these cars for others to drive. I wish everyone good luck with the proxy.

[Aloha]

Tom,
It was nice to see the follow up to comments as many of us got to see the video which was a treat. Great to see added notes from Shadow. You guys get my vote for the best t shirts. Love them. Aloha
Dale

[arroldn]

Tom,
Thanks for the follow up notes. Allan keeps telling me its the tires in this and other proxies. So I've got work to do on my tire/tyre truing process.

[AndGoliath]

[SuperSlab]

Thanks VERY much for the detailed and thoughtful notes David: greatly appreciated!

Alwyn

[Audi1]

Congrats to F1fan, Camber and cgyracer :text-bravo:

Thanks for the extensive notes, David. Can you tell us how the tires were cleaned before qualy and race? I ask because I've noticed that some rubber tire compounds pick up a lot of debris on certain tracks, particularly those that run a lot of urethane tire cars; to the extent of sometimes having a glaze on the surface if they are not well cleaned with a sticky pad prior to running on the track. In my experience, this happens with, say, NSR ultragrips more often than it does with supergrips. Perhaps lesson already learned, but I'm curious about that point.

Thanks for hosting!

Allan

[AndGoliath]

[Kevan]

This one?