[q-man]

Hey. Hints from you to tune cars equal.

I have quite flowing and fast painted scaley track. Many corners have slight camber. I am running races with my cars (magless) and trying to tune them fast, but more importantly equal.

Scaley gt3 cars were fine, but impossible to make them equal with just changing tyres. Scaley nascars were better and quite easy to drive. Still nascars wear over to years, and always newest of cars was most competetive.

Nsr 917 is best this far. Batch of 6 cars are fast, reliable and actually easy to drive. Still cant figure it out how different they can be between each other. Some cars have more torq, some more topend and most of all handling is very different even after tuning.

Over the years I have tested rubber, silicone and urethane tyres with several makes and compounds.

Silicone isnt working for me at all. just sliding and sliding because garage track is never that clean I guess, and track isnt used always even monthly.

Rubber is ok, but tyres wear, and grip/handling seems to suit some cars, but not all. Also rubber gets old fast. With few years tyres get hard and eventually just ruined. Even nsr rubbers felt bit lacking.

I have found urethane being best. Great grip/handling. Urethane seems to lose grip more gradually, which makes cars more predictable. Urethanes dont get old and wear is very little. I am running Paul Gage pgt. Pgt seems to have advantage over xpg on handling. Xpg feels like real cars too soft suspension. Tried to glue them, but pgt doesnt need it, and xpg still didnt perform as good. Xpg was good at slow corners/speeds, but worst on high speeds. Best times are on pgt compound.

I am not beginner, so I know basic tuning, like changing + trueing tyres, adjusting front axle, lubing motor. Few opinions about others would be nice, since in real life I dont know anyone in slot hobby. My racers are casual middle age men, so equal cars/race is bit my pride.

 

[tamar.nelwan]

Hello Q, Nice track.
To parafrase "George": All cars are equal, some cars are more equal than others.

First of all, race cars are not designed to be equal, they're designed to be fast(er) than their competition. As such so will their scaled down versions be.
You mentioned that your 917 is the fastest car, but even when you were to put six 917 on the track, some will be more equal than others.

So if basic tuning fails to maintain an even playing field...why not dig a bit deeper in to the different RMS systems there are for Digital racing.
There are many options to balance different cars.....

But that's something I'll leave to the more experienced "Digital" SF members to post on

With kind regards
Tamar

 

[tatter06]

Great set up.

You mentioned equality is the priority rather than simply they all must go faster, so you could simply swap components around the best/worst cars until you reach an average. Your fastest car will now be slower but the gap between 1st and last should be less.

You could bench test the motors and weed out any over/under performers. put best motor in worst car and vice versa and compare lap times, is it the motor making all the difference?

You could do the same with the tyres/wheels, swap best with worse until you get all of them closer to the average.

There are also some bits of tuning you could do to all of them to even out any performance discrepancies, issues that may only affect some of the cars:

you haven't mentioned flattening the chassis, if handling is an issue it would be worth flattening them all, especially with NSR I have found there can be a lot of variation, from flat out of the box to so badly bent only 3 wheels touch the track. Big difference in handling if you've taken the magnet out.

have you glued the bearings in? You may have some tight out of the factory and others flapping around.

Check and sand (if necessary) all pods and chassis so they fit together with no binding.

Lastly you could play with ballast to even out laptimes, it would require a lot of trial and error but you could use ballast to either make a car handle the corners better or tame a more powerful motor by making it haul more weight around.

Ash

 

[Kevan]

Or you could just change crown/spur gear one tooth at a time to slow down the quicker ones...bigger gear = slower top speed.

 

[gsnopoint]

Hey Q
I found that using the gears I could equal out an IROC set of cars best. The issue is that not all motors are the same. Changing the gear ratios could get you the results you are looking for. Keep in mind that some manufacturers on their stock, out of the box cars this can't be done like scalextric, Fly unless you change the running gear.
About tires, since it is just for fun with some friends, just find some low maintenance tires and have at it.

 

[RichD]

If you run cars without traction magnets you will probably not be able to equalize even cars of the same make and model simply by changing the gear ratios. Most of the time how well a car handles is a bigger factor than how much acceleration it has or what its top speed is. If you want cars that can turn equal lap times you might have to fuss around a lot.
Here is an article on tuning cars for non-magnet racing: Tuning for Non-Magnet Racing Rev 3.pdf . You could start with your slowest car and see if you can make it better. Another thing to try is to have an individual voltage control for each lane. If a car handles poorly just turning down the voltage a little could result in lower lap times, which is the opposite of what you might expect. If a car is actually under powered you can turn up the voltage. Another possibility is to swap motors. There can be significant differences in power between motors of the same make and model, or you can look at other motors that are a little more or less powerful than the ones that you are using.

 

[q-man]

I run digital and without magnets, so power can easily adjusted between cars. Torque seems to be very different between identical motors. Also urethanes seems to be maybe perfect tyres at least to me. Still cant figure why xpg isnt working for me, and harder pgt is just better handling. Anyone else noticed that?

That gearing change could be interesting. It could even less torq motors, and topspeed isnt never archieved on 3 meter straight anyways. Also flattening chassis.

Point of post is bit asking questions which (manufacturer) cars are as equal as they can be. I thought Nsr is made tight tolerances so they are exact copies, but seems that they arent. I also thought that nsr motors are 21,5k when wrapping says so, but I think it just wrapping. Nsr must be one of best plastic cars and great racer. Still Nsr is best so far of many manufacturers tried.

Could it be that no plastic rtr car can be that exact copy?

 

[q-man]

We run about 40% power. Laptimes are between 7.4s and 7.15s. Still I think margin is quite big. Because of amateur drivers we have to keep power very low. Low power means less deslots and fun race. But with less deslots and low power, handling is big thing and 0.2s differense is huge in 30laps race.

I know... It is getting bit serious It is bit of illusion I trying to make my friends. Everybody wants to feel great driver. On that illusion winner is easily made with best car.

 

[vfr750]

Why not have heats that let each driver race each car then total or average the scores?

Cheers,

John

 

[q-man]

Why not have heats that let each driver race each car then total or average the scores?

Cheers,

John

Actually we are running heats like that. After qualifier rounds one driver drops and so on. At finals there is one long race between 3-4 cars/drivers. Whole bracket depends how many drivers (9-12 mostly). It is needed to have 5-6 cars, because sometimes had happened technical problems like broken wire, fried digital chip etc. Only few hours time and we have to give time chatting, beer and grilling too.

 

[GRUNZ]

As Tamar said, use the RMS to try fine tune the difference between cars. If you are using the APB, you should get RCS64 which will allow you to design throttle profiles that you can assign to the driver of a specific car.
You should give Thurnderslot a go.

 

[RichD]

Without using traction magnets even tiny things like body and motor pod float can have a major impact on how a car handles. I started out a race with a nearly stock Carrera car and it ran OK for a couple of heats, then the handling went to pot. After the race was over I discovered that a single body screw had loosened by a couple of turns.
With respect to the Paul Gage tires, the soft compound will roll under in the corners greatly reducing their footprint.
If you are doing races where you supply the cars those do not necessarily have to be equal. You can do a race with lane rotations where each car stays with its lane and only the drivers rotate. That way any differences should come out in the wash.

 

[Kevan]

Of course the #1 thing you can't tune equal is the drivers and they have the biggest effect on lap time.

 

[q-man]

Without using traction magnets even tiny things like body and motor pod float can have a major impact on how a car handles. I started out a race with a nearly stock Carrera car and it ran OK for a couple of heats, then the handling went to pot. After the race was over I discovered that a single body screw had loosened by a couple of turns.
With respect to the Paul Gage tires, the soft compound will roll under in the corners greatly reducing their footprint.
If you are doing races where you supply the cars those do not necessarily have to be equal. You can do a race with lane rotations where each car stays with its lane and only the drivers rotate. That way any differences should come out in the wash.

So I wasnt only who cant get xpg to work. Pgt is still great.

Digital 2-lane with just one x-over, so just one big lane where every other lap is different.

We are rotating drivers through cars, but final is one long race. With 12 people amount of laps and races = more time. Multirace final would make it much longer event.

 

[q-man]

Of course the #1 thing you can't tune equal is the drivers and they have the biggest effect on lap time.

Yeap. I just want to keep illusion of quite equal drivers. Even our qualification point system is 1st 5p, 2nd 2p an 3rd 1p. That way everyone gets points, and with three second places isnt necesserily qualify to the finals. With this system draw points is quite rare.

If winning would be just luck, people dont get excited about race. If luck is wiped away, few becomes discouraged, and race becomes boring.

It is quite hard to set good race on amateurs. You really dont want deslotting mayhem and everything must go smooth as silk. At the beginning of qual, everyone are just casually driving. At the end of final its getting really serious

 

[RichD]

The HO club that I race with imposes a one lap penalty on a racer that crashes and only allows a certain number of crashes before he is out of the race, that encourages the drivers to concentrate on staying in the slot. For races that are run with track calls most race management software allows you to include a track call penalty delay.