THEQuagraine

953 laps. That’s how much I managed to do as my Euros prep. That’s about 6h of run time. That’s 953 laps more than last year though, so not too bad. The thing about driving 10th scale is it is easy to identify driver error. Somehow in 1:8th, there is so much going on, it’s harder to analyse purely the driving aspect and how it affects your lap time. After getting the car good, and then getting consistent, which probably took 600 laps, I focused on my driving, and what I found was that when I think I am concentrating and driving, I would do a 22.4, then when I really concentrated I would do a 22.0 or so. A few tenths by concentrating. Wheel spin affects the laptime. I arguably had too much power, with a LRP 6.5, but watching the big boys, like Cavalieri and Maifield, they always have tons of power, so I want tons of power too. The thing is that pulling the trigger and spinning the wheels was slower. Calming it down a bit, and just feeding enough power to the wheels on the short straights, and then smashing it on the back straight, resulted in about 0.3s faster lap times. No joke, going slower was faster once again. Going a bit slower into the corners and trying to maintain the speed around them resulted in the best laps every time. It’s a balancing act, and that’s what the best drivers are so good at. If you want to see someone who is great at driving a car within it’s limits and maintaining speed around the track watch Marc Rheinard drive. It almost looks slow at times but the lap time is super good.

The thing is, that to get that result posted above, it took me 900 laps. A talented driver will do that after maybe 40-50 laps? How the hell will I get to that point? It’s not easy, that’s all I know. At the Euros we don’t get 900 laps of practice.

Better build that 2WD now….