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I went to Salt Lake City and ran on my first wooden commercial track.... Magnets don't work so o was able to get some weight on the Slot.it LMP I was running. So when we got home I decided to drop the magnets on one of my Grp C Slot.it's, my Porsche 956 KH. After adding some weight on the sides, front, and rear. And silicone tires....it runs great, so I dropped magnet on another Slot.it, my Jaguar XJR12 ...this one I did the same, but it ran worse... So I weighed them both, the Porsche was 78 grams, the Jag 85 grams, but it's all over the track...I don't understand why,..... I need advice....

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Did you put silicones on the Jag? If the nose isn't bouncing I wouldn't add weight up front. I would keep it centered just forward of the motor.

Jay,
In my experience a stock slot.it group C runs very well non mag on Carrera track (I believe that is your track). What brand of silicone tires are you using? Not all silicone tires are equal, and sometimes require different tuning techniques.

As for other non mag tuning... Make sure your front wheels are set (using the grub screw locations in the chassis) to be touching the track. If they are above the track it may cause bad handling. Another suggestion is to use the body and motor pod screws to tune for handling. This is probably the most useful way to get better handling, though you can usually find what works in general, ever car is different.

when it comes to weight tuning a car it comes down to getting the balance of the car right
and that can be different from car to car so a bit of trail and error
does help having your own track at home to test on

my club runs a slot-it grpc class and we don't run added weight at all
and when tuned well they don't need it
we experimented with them in the past and find that running stock except for softer braids and adding either slot-it N22 or F22 tires
as rubber works better on NZ surfaces
the main thing to get right is that the chassis is perfectly flat, axles are level and square and I can tell you that they are not
when you don't have the magnets holding the car down you have to get all those imperfections sorted the best you can and that is the challenge
but when you get it all right it most certainly feels great

Our local slot car guru gave me some advice: Imagine a triangle with the guide post at one vertex and each rear wheel at the other two. Any weight you add should be inside this triangle. Good advice that has always worked for me, when I follow it.

I'd try cutting small bits of lead the same size as the magnet pockets in the pod and squeeze it in those 1st. Add or subtract to flavour.

The basic rule of thumb is if your car is tippy, add weight down low, if it is tail happy add weight up high. I have a lot of narrow, more top heavy classics so my weight typically goes low. I have gotten rid of all of my group C cars but remember the Slot.its to be very good but more tail happy if anything. I typically did not add any weight to them. Short sidewinder cars such as all of the Slot.it open top roadsters and the Ford GT40 will do wheelies that lift the guide out of the slot under hard acceleration especially if you are running at voltages approaching 12v. or above. They will likely need some weight added up front. I don't care for overly torquey, long can, anglewinders like those made by Slot.it, Racer and NSR so don't buy them. I'll leave it to others to tell you about them.

Mixing urethane and silicone tires, especially non mag, usually doesn't work well. The urethane tires leave "marbles" as they wear. The silicone tires will then pick up those marbles and lose grip because they become "dirty." Silicone tires like a clean track. If you can, try some of the PGs on the slot.it cars, should make a bit of difference for you.

In our club we run without magnets, most of us use urethane tires, however some guys prefer NSR rubber in their softer compound, Slot It also makes rubber in a softer grippier compound, they are either N22s, or F22s. Paul Gage has two types of urethane tires, PGs which is the regular urethane, and XPG which is softer. A couple of our tracks are in a garage and in the cold months the XPGs work well but in the warm months they sometimes have too much grip so we'll switch to PGs. We don't generally run silicone tires because as we rotate between tracks they might not be used for two or three weeks at a time and the dust makes the silicones almost useless, like the guy above said silicones need a very clean track which is almost impossible in a garage setting.