How do you test your changes without a track

[oxford]

newbie question alert:

how do you test your car's speed without a track? like when you make changes; you need to see how much faster or slower your car is.

 

[Kinser Racing]

You can't. You either have to find a track or send it in to race.

 

[Guest]

Cool car Oxford!
I remember it from last year.
Nice work

 

[bracketracer]

Oxford, do you have a tuning board? One person on here uses a tuning board with a foam bumper at the end. He has parallel lines drawn across the end to use as a gauge to measure the bounce back. The farther a car bounces back, the faster it must have been going when it reached the end. Better than nothing I guess but you have no way of knowing where you're at. So build one, test it as best you can, and send it in!

 

[oxford]

Oxford, do you have a tuning board? One person on here uses a tuning board with a foam bumper at the end. He has parallel lines drawn across the end to use as a gauge to measure the bounce back. The farther a car bounces back, the faster it must have been going when it reached the end. Better than nothing I guess but you have no way of knowing where you're at. So build one, test it as best you can, and send it in!

thanks. i will try that. need to make one of those

 

[Vitamin K]

Oxford, do you have a tuning board? One person on here uses a tuning board with a foam bumper at the end. He has parallel lines drawn across the end to use as a gauge to measure the bounce back. The farther a car bounces back, the faster it must have been going when it reached the end. Better than nothing I guess but you have no way of knowing where you're at. So build one, test it as best you can, and send it in!

Hmm, I'm very interested in the subject of finding ways to gauge performance without the space for a test track. I would like to see more of this "bounce-back" setup, though it seems to me that to really gauge performance, you need to run the car on a simulation of the rail guide that it will follow on a real track, since so much can depend on how well your car follows/doesn't follow the rail.

 

[bracketracer]

Try the foam bumper with and without a rail then? Honestly, the only way to fine tune a car is on the same type and size of track you'll be racing on but if a new racer can't get under sub3, then rolling into the bumper will tell him if he made any improvement or if he still needs to keep working on it.

 

[GravityX]

newbie question alert:

how do you test your car's speed without a track? like when you make changes; you need to see how much faster or slower your car is.

Send in. Take notes. Make as few changes as possible, you'll never know what caused the change in speed if more than one change is made. There are a few proxy racers here without tracks that run real well. There is a thread here somewhere that gives you a baseline on tips to building a fast car. I believe it is a sticky thread.