Collection of Driving Ideas/Theories from RCTech Posts

Throttle control is very important, but try and watch the way the real fast drivers steer as well. How you steer is VERY important to cornerspeed.

Most of us started out steering by just turning the wheel fully in the direction of the turn, and going as fast as we can through the turn that way. The real fast drivers are moving the wheel slower, and using less steering. What you're trying to do is transfer the weight onto the outside wheels gradually to get the most cornerspeed. If you just come up to the corner and crank the wheel over, you'll break traction and never really generate the grip you need to get around fast. Try starting to turn the wheel earlier, but slower, to ease the weight of the car onto the outside wheels... you'll find you need less steering and the car will tend to rail around the corner.

Trigger control is very important too, anything you do to transfer weight smoothly will get you better lap times.

also if you have to crank the steering and the car is pushing, you are scrubbing off a lot of speed in the corner, you want to take the corner at a speed that your car will turn with mininal steering input and keep that speed through the turn

Less steering speed = faster corner speed, less steering throw also improves corner speed, but if there are some low speed corners, it could be difficult to corner with. So now I'm running less steering throw, and -ve expone

High Corner Speeds with a touring car- As you progress in your ability it seems that you can set up your car to have more steering traction. If I let someone faster than me drive my car, they say it doesn't have enough steering, if somenone slower drives it they say it's got too much steering. It has as much as I can tolerate. You can tolerate more steering traction as you learn to use more throttle entering and during the middle of the turn. If your car has as much steering traction as the faster guys and then you let off throttle too much you tend to loose the back end. If you turn the steering wheel too fast you can stall the car on a hign grip track. You learn to use more throttle and smooth movement of the Radios steering wheel with practice. You can cheat a little on the radio by using the speed function to slow down your maximum steering rate. This keeps the car hooked up. It is better to learn to do this by moving your wheel more slowly. You can prevent stalls when you are learning by giving the car some forward throttle with the throttle trim. I find that each corner needs a little different throttle for corner entry so its probably better to do with out this as well. The faster drivers don't pass through neutral much if at all on our track, so even if they do have forward throttle trim they are not using it

Best Line For Stock Class. If you watch a formula 1 or a Cart Race and get an arial view, the best line is usually clearly marked with a blackened area of the track. It seems that every inch of pavement is used to make a corner. The cars start wide hit the apex and exit wide. In stock touring RC car's class there is just not enough motor to do that. If you travel a few extra inches your lap times will probably be worse. At the region 9 on-road regionals in Houston, I watched the line of the better drivers. You could almost take a straight edge and connect each corner radius with a straight line to find the fastest path. There were two exceptions. There was one corner (about 150 degrees, (where 180 degrees is a hairpin turn) very sharp) onto a chicane. If you took this corner about 10-12 inches wide of the straight path then you could use full throttle through the chicane and just steer through it. Coming off this chicane onto the straight there was a 90 degree corner. Your car was about 2/3 full speed here so it was a little faster to turn out about half to 2/3 the track width onto the straight. All the other corners were a connect the dots situation.

Cornering procedure-So how do you make the stock touring car take this path. Well you divide the track into straight sections and curved sections. Coming into the corner you have to slow to the right speed. You just reduce throttle (rarely off throttle) Then you drive it around the marker at constant speed. The faster guys are about an inch from the markers. Our layout had some markers made out of a curved material with a gentle radius. These were driven the same way. You stay on the radius till you intersect the next straight line section. You can see a distinct change in the motion of the car on the corners. Constant speed is the key. The car is being kept right at the limit of traction for that radius of corner at constant speed.

So How do you make your car do this. A couple of suggestions. you can't have all of your steering travel turned off with the radio to control oversteer. Fix the setup and make the car able to take a tight radius turn. Then if you need a gentle radius you can just turn the wheel less. Don't get greedy with speed entering the turn. You have to enter at just the speed that you can maintain for the entire turn.

12th scale pan cars are very good training... funny thing pan cars. The less you steer in high speed corners, the more steering it gets. So i do my training there ;-)
True! Same thing for 1/10th. Fast and very reactive. Makes better drivers, imho. I know I benefit from it. Small actions beget large reactions.
Toy Car Racing.. Or Is It?: Collection of Driving Ideas/Theories from RCTech Posts

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Collection of Driving Ideas/Theories from RCTech Posts

Throttle control is very important, but try and watch the way the real fast drivers steer as well. How you steer is VERY important to cornerspeed.

Most of us started out steering by just turning the wheel fully in the direction of the turn, and going as fast as we can through the turn that way. The real fast drivers are moving the wheel slower, and using less steering. What you're trying to do is transfer the weight onto the outside wheels gradually to get the most cornerspeed. If you just come up to the corner and crank the wheel over, you'll break traction and never really generate the grip you need to get around fast. Try starting to turn the wheel earlier, but slower, to ease the weight of the car onto the outside wheels... you'll find you need less steering and the car will tend to rail around the corner.

Trigger control is very important too, anything you do to transfer weight smoothly will get you better lap times.

also if you have to crank the steering and the car is pushing, you are scrubbing off a lot of speed in the corner, you want to take the corner at a speed that your car will turn with mininal steering input and keep that speed through the turn

Less steering speed = faster corner speed, less steering throw also improves corner speed, but if there are some low speed corners, it could be difficult to corner with. So now I'm running less steering throw, and -ve expone

High Corner Speeds with a touring car- As you progress in your ability it seems that you can set up your car to have more steering traction. If I let someone faster than me drive my car, they say it doesn't have enough steering, if somenone slower drives it they say it's got too much steering. It has as much as I can tolerate. You can tolerate more steering traction as you learn to use more throttle entering and during the middle of the turn. If your car has as much steering traction as the faster guys and then you let off throttle too much you tend to loose the back end. If you turn the steering wheel too fast you can stall the car on a hign grip track. You learn to use more throttle and smooth movement of the Radios steering wheel with practice. You can cheat a little on the radio by using the speed function to slow down your maximum steering rate. This keeps the car hooked up. It is better to learn to do this by moving your wheel more slowly. You can prevent stalls when you are learning by giving the car some forward throttle with the throttle trim. I find that each corner needs a little different throttle for corner entry so its probably better to do with out this as well. The faster drivers don't pass through neutral much if at all on our track, so even if they do have forward throttle trim they are not using it

Best Line For Stock Class. If you watch a formula 1 or a Cart Race and get an arial view, the best line is usually clearly marked with a blackened area of the track. It seems that every inch of pavement is used to make a corner. The cars start wide hit the apex and exit wide. In stock touring RC car's class there is just not enough motor to do that. If you travel a few extra inches your lap times will probably be worse. At the region 9 on-road regionals in Houston, I watched the line of the better drivers. You could almost take a straight edge and connect each corner radius with a straight line to find the fastest path. There were two exceptions. There was one corner (about 150 degrees, (where 180 degrees is a hairpin turn) very sharp) onto a chicane. If you took this corner about 10-12 inches wide of the straight path then you could use full throttle through the chicane and just steer through it. Coming off this chicane onto the straight there was a 90 degree corner. Your car was about 2/3 full speed here so it was a little faster to turn out about half to 2/3 the track width onto the straight. All the other corners were a connect the dots situation.

Cornering procedure-So how do you make the stock touring car take this path. Well you divide the track into straight sections and curved sections. Coming into the corner you have to slow to the right speed. You just reduce throttle (rarely off throttle) Then you drive it around the marker at constant speed. The faster guys are about an inch from the markers. Our layout had some markers made out of a curved material with a gentle radius. These were driven the same way. You stay on the radius till you intersect the next straight line section. You can see a distinct change in the motion of the car on the corners. Constant speed is the key. The car is being kept right at the limit of traction for that radius of corner at constant speed.

So How do you make your car do this. A couple of suggestions. you can't have all of your steering travel turned off with the radio to control oversteer. Fix the setup and make the car able to take a tight radius turn. Then if you need a gentle radius you can just turn the wheel less. Don't get greedy with speed entering the turn. You have to enter at just the speed that you can maintain for the entire turn.

12th scale pan cars are very good training... funny thing pan cars. The less you steer in high speed corners, the more steering it gets. So i do my training there ;-)
True! Same thing for 1/10th. Fast and very reactive. Makes better drivers, imho. I know I benefit from it. Small actions beget large reactions.