Year of the Tiger - Introduction to my New Blog

This is my first blog of sorts and I decided it would be a good place to store my R/C racing adventures as well as some other part of my daily life. I was inspired to create this blog after reading Alexander Hagberg's blog http://hagberg.blogs.se/, a talented young European driver for Team Xray.

I have been racing on and off since 2003. My first 'real' R/C was an Associated TC3 which was a great platform to learn from but began to show its age when brushed motors and NiMH batteries were at their peak. I now drive an Xray T2R regularly at my local track, Nexus Racinghttp://track.nexusracing.com. This carpet season has been my most focused season, in all of the time I have spent racing, as I am working hard and practicing as much as I can to improve my skills and knowledge.

To begin, the carpet season has been quite a learning curve as it is my first experience with rubber tires on carpet. In the past I had dabbled in some foam carpet with the Tc3 but never taking it seriously. The T2R is quite a good platform for the traction-limited conditions as the fibreglass chassis flexes and thus creates more traction than its carbon fibre counterpart. Most run the Sorex 28's http://www.nexusracing.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=&products_id=2940 . They seem to provide more traction compared to the Jaco Blue's used at most U.S. major races although I have yet to test them. I have only used two sets of the Sorexes this season and they seem to hold up fairly well. I have noticed that it is critical to be sure they remain properly glued(especially the fronts) to avoid traction rolling and numb steering.

The base setup I have gathered from the local Xray drivers has never been too far from the mark but the car is still somewhat slow compared to the others. Talking a pro driver, it's important for the car to rotate in order to build corner speed. I will try to "free" up the car as much as possible in practice this weekend and report the result.

Another aspect of setup I learned during last practice was how an abundance of traction can slow a car down. Makes sense as what we are really imposing is friction and too much will slow the machine down. On the other than, took little the the car wastes time sliding around. With that said, I raised the front outer camber link from 1mm to 2mm and found the car to have less steering, less twichiness, and more of a "direct" feel from the steering. Interestingly, my lap times went down easily by 0.1 sec per lap which was amazing. I will experiment with this as well to try to figure out the relationship between steering and laptimes/corner speed.

Here's a picture of my regular track located just outside of Atlanta, Ga. I've been racing with many of the regulars there for a long time and they are some of the best people I know. I'm the guy closest to the camera on the driver's stand. I got to race the Xray XII car in that pic - such a great 12th scale!