Seinäjoki 9.2.2002
In this racereport I'm going to explain the setup changes I made to
the car during the FinTrack race in Seinäjoki.
I had just done seven battery packs of testing prior to the race and
with new control tires, Take Off CS series and 12 motor rule I didn’t know
what to expect. The track was a very flowing high speed track and I think
it was the best carpet track that I’ve raced on.
In free practice the car didn’t feel good, very unstable and poor rear
end grip so I switched from the soft milled to the stiff graphite original
SP upper deck and also made the rear shocks longer to 60.0 mm.
In the first qualifying round the car felt better but it still was a
little bit difficult in turn-in, it reacted too fast and had too much steering,
which made it difficult to drive consistent lines and also lacked
rear end grip in the fast S-bend in the middle of the track.
To improve grip in the S-bend I changed to the old type flexible rear
arms Part# ZS-008 and to take away mid corner steering I put on a stiffer
1.5 mm front roll bar.
The changes were in the right direction, especially the ZS-008 type
arms did work really well, so it seems like the softer arms is the way
to go, at least in low to medium grip conditions. The only problem was
the agressive turn-in. In the second round I drove without mistakes and
was 18th overall.
For the third qualifying round I wanted to experiment a little and changed
the front tires from cs-22 to the harder cs-27 with the same inserts, to
take away steering as the grip came up.
This change really did the car a lot easier to drive and the laptimes
did also improve but I pushed too hard in the first corner and crashed
and broke the rear suspension.
In the finals I only did some small adjustments because the car felt
really good. Best laptime was 10.5 which was 0.3-0.4 slower than the fastest
drivers.
I’m really happy with the result and with new parts for the front end
arriving that hopefully will allow me to exploit the grip of the softer
cs-22 front tires, things are looking positive.
my setup
results
(track layout)
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