XRAY - Model racing cars

I tried out the new Ride 'Short Big Bore' springs at the weekend. Here are my thoughts...

Ordered them from rcmarket. They arrived about 5 days after ordering (using standard shipping), so great service from these guys. Although the $12 shipping charge for small parts seems a bit high.

The springs themselves are 23mm long, so 3mm longer than a normal Xray or Reflex T4 spring. With new Sorex tyres I could get down to a ride height of about 5.6mm, so fine for outdoor racing. If you run bigger tyres or race on carpet you're going to have issues.

The springs are also about 1mm larger internal diameter than the Xray springs, so they do slop around a little bit on the shock collars. Ride do include some small plastic collars to take up this slop, but that would also add even more ride height, so these aren't much use.

The track test was at Bedworth in the UK; a medium grip outdoor tarmac track, with a few bumps to really test the car.

I did a couple of baseline runs on my normal springs (Reflex silvers) to get an idea of the track condition. The grip was good and conditions stable enough for testing.

I then ran the Ride Red springs all round. This made the car very aggressive with loads of turn-in (which I liked) and good mid-corner. The car was also fantastic over the bumps and tarmac joins, the extra spring length/diameter really helping here. But traction on the power was poor; lots of wheelspin and the rear end wanting to come round. Fastest lap was about the same as the Reflex springs, but slower over a run and would be very hard to race in a final as I think you'd be spun round at the first bit of contact.

Second run I went to Grey springs all round (one softer than Red). These still handled the bumps well, but had terrible high-speed understeer. Traction was better than the Reds, although still not as good as the Reflex springs. And some of the turn-in was gone. Fastest lap was 0.2s slower, so not an improvement.

I have a set of Purples (one harder than Red), but I didn't bother trying these as with this trend there would have been zero traction on the power.

So my conclusion... if you race on a high-grip bumpy track, these are probably the springs to use. For anything other than high-grip, they just don't have enough traction.

Dale, what RSD springs have you been running at Bedworth lately?

I tried the Silver's on Saturday and although it felt a little better, my laptimes were down slightly, so I went back to 2.7's all round (Zak's setup)

Skiddins