Thanks for the replies both here and on PM.
B-Regal: I agree that the homemade track without a timer is not a very accurate way to assess the car's performance but still better than just running it on a tuning board. And it had seemed to work before. In September, my cars were averaging about 1/3 car length difference on my 30 foot track. And at the Sept. MOTM race they had 4 run averages of 2.9908 and 2.9981. So I figured that 0.0073 difference matches the 1/3 length difference on my track.
Doing some adjustments to the faster car and leaving the other one alone, I was getting a full car length gap on my track so figured the car was improved and would run sub 2.99. Instead, it could only manage a 2.9971. The slower car was not sent in for the Oct race , so this means it could have gotten slower, as Laserman suggested without me knowing. Although I have a 2nd benchmark car that seemed to keep the same gap with the primary 'benchmark' car as it had previously in September.
Sometimes these things are just hard to explain. Maybe something happened to mess the car up in transit. I can see the advantage of entering multiple cars so hopefully at least one of them will perform up to expectations.
I will back after it in November and working to improve my time.
B-Regal: I agree that the homemade track without a timer is not a very accurate way to assess the car's performance but still better than just running it on a tuning board. And it had seemed to work before. In September, my cars were averaging about 1/3 car length difference on my 30 foot track. And at the Sept. MOTM race they had 4 run averages of 2.9908 and 2.9981. So I figured that 0.0073 difference matches the 1/3 length difference on my track.
Doing some adjustments to the faster car and leaving the other one alone, I was getting a full car length gap on my track so figured the car was improved and would run sub 2.99. Instead, it could only manage a 2.9971. The slower car was not sent in for the Oct race , so this means it could have gotten slower, as Laserman suggested without me knowing. Although I have a 2nd benchmark car that seemed to keep the same gap with the primary 'benchmark' car as it had previously in September.
Sometimes these things are just hard to explain. Maybe something happened to mess the car up in transit. I can see the advantage of entering multiple cars so hopefully at least one of them will perform up to expectations.
I will back after it in November and working to improve my time.