If you watch the video of the SP race my car wake up call was behind at the bottom of the hill every race but never lost a race. It looked like I was gaining speed in the flat while others slowed down. Just something to look at and think about.
ZZ Racing said:If you watch the video of the SP race my car wake up call was behind at the bottom of the hill every race but never lost a race. It looked like I was gaining speed in the flat while others slowed down. Just something to look at and think about.
GravityX said:Excellent! I'll take a look. Do you recall the heats they were in by chance?
ZZ Racing said:If you watch the video of the SP race my car wake up call was behind at the bottom of the hill every race but never lost a race. It looked like I was gaining speed in the flat while others slowed down. Just something to look at and think about.
g.o.racing said:bracket,
the timer thing you are working on should prove to be use full i'm an old time motor cycle drag racer and the 300 foot timer was what we tuned our set up with. out side the box I think we must be to catch these guys.
derby freak said:there is so much here that comes into play with having the fastest car and everything has to click.
Agreed! I'm searching for the "perfect storm", I just don't know where to look so I think I need to leave no stone unturned. I think the fast builders have either a good plan or an intrinsic feel for what makes a car fast. I have neither right now, so I gotta figure it out, you know what I mean? I started with the basic setup from the "build a sub3" post and tweaked it a little bit but that only got me to 3.0002 and a sub3 badge after the time adjustment at the Nationals. I think there's more I can gain from optimising my mechanical setup and likely a larger amount I could gain from better wheel/axle prep but I have to start with one or the other and the mechanical setup seems easier to test to me!
Besides, if you do have a car that comes off the line slow compared to other cars but gains speed going through the flat and you win the race. What do you do to the car to make it pick up speed at the start.
One of the posts here about mixing graphite lube on the DFW and oil lube on the rears got me to thinking about a way to see if it would have less breakaway torque at the start. It would be hard to build two identical cars to race head to head so I thought this would be something a timer at one foot would show, among other things.
what If you do something to the car to make it pick up speed at the start and then you loose speed on the flat and then your end result is slower.
But with the incrementals maybe I would know if I hurt myself at the start or in the middle or in the back half of the run so I could try to fix it. If I only go by the finish line timer I would know it was faster or slower but I wouldn't know where I gained or lost.
The only thing that matters to me is the end result. IMO there are too many variables to worry about anything other than the end result.
I might not find anything useful, I might end up confused and lost in the woods, or I might catch up a little bit, either way I learn something and I had fun building the timers!
One should concentrate on and perfect the basic fundamentals of building a car
Agreed! That's why there's about twenty undrilled car bodies on the bench right now.
And do the very best job you can on wheel and axle prep and then luck on that day will give you the result you get.
Wheel prep is still Black Magic to me right now. I'm using the DD4H DVD and products and keeping it as a constant while I test the mechanicals. Once I get a solid mechanical setup I can try messing with wheel/axle prep.
Don't try to think into it too much or you will drive yourself crazy.
Might be too late for that advice..........
The people that are the fastest have perfected the prep process and the basic fundamentals of building a car. I mean ask John, I know of times that he was so busy that he didn't even get a chance to re prep his car from last race put them on the track and still run very fast. I can't do that, so that tells me that have have not yet perfected the prep process. I mean, a racer that used to race here called Donelson Gravity didn't even have a track, used a piece of glass from an entertainment center to tune his cars and kicked some butt on the track. Just my merkin dollars worth.
tmeyer said:How about adding front and rear fenders?
DD4H sells rough cut fenders for a very reasonable price. The price listed on his web site is for a pair of fenders. All you have to do is sand them to your final desired shape and glue them onto the body. I used them on our Street Stock entry from the Nationals. The car's name is Mean Streak if you want to look at the fenders in the video.