The video, Poor Man's F1R and Tire Gluing

A short video on the last couple posts...

Traction rolling and you...

I have not only had quite a bit of traction rolling myself as I have been learning rubber tires on my F104 cars, but I have also been in contact with guys who have been traction rolling as well.  Much of this stems from the narrow width of the cars.  There have been many different cures- heavier side spring, lighter side spring, no side spring, (in the case of the link cars), less camber, less caster, different Tbar, and so on.

So anyway, I was at the track tonight, and the bite came up at the end of the night. My #1 thing to start with is glueing the sidewalls of the tires, tires are 80-90% of the handling, right?

This is my tire after I re glued the sidewall.  I had glued it previously, but that was a few weeks and many, many runs ago.  As the bite came up, my car started lifting wheels and flipping.  At first, I tried to reduce camber, take a bit of caster out, thinking it was a small problem.  Really, the glue had been wearing off from all the runs I had made.  Now, after re-gluing the tires, the traction roll went away and the car actually could push and/or slide, instead of flipping.

More sucky pictures..any who, because I was fooling with the suspension instead of gluing the tires up, I got my setup away from what was working before.  With the reduced sidewall grip, I could now add back that camber and  caster without the car doing triple axles in the sweeper.

The rear tire can almost be as important as the front.  If the car drifts sideways at all, that rear can grab as well and put the car over.

So in closing, when you are getting too much lateral grip, remember, start with a nice fat bead of CA glue on the sidewall, right up to the carcass of the tire.  Keep an eye on it's condition, too.  It will start to wear after a decent amount of runs.

Poor man's F1R part II

Sorry about the semi sucky photos, but I took them with my video camera. Anyway, this is the little plate I made for my Exotek F104 conversion.  It does allow the car to be a bit more flexible.  Maybe not as much as the F1r, and it probably does not have as much rear bias, but that may be ok for carpet racing anyway.

More of an overhead view here.  I made it possible to use up to 4 posts for the top deck.  Here i am only using the rearmost two of the four. 

You can get a little better idea of the layout, there is quite a bit of open area with a short 3800 battery. 

I tried the battery moved forward a bit as well, but I found it was actually very good all the way back. 

Mostly I made this part because I don't have the cash flow for the F1R yet, but it does seem to make more traction...