XRAY - Model racing cars

If you really want to accelerate your knowledge, buy the following books, read them and test what you read on the track.

* XXX Main Chassis Setup Guide - Has pretty good explanations of most chassis tuning options, but doesn't really help you to understand how to develop a good chassis base setup for your car and driving style.

http://www.xxxmain.com/bookz.shtml

* Chassis Engineering by Herb Brooks - Really helps you to understand design and dynamics of any auto racing chassis and directly relates to RC car chassis. Provides some good philosophies of how to get the most performance out of any racing chassis through designing a base setup and tuning.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 47-2032942

There is another good book I learned from that is based on Formula 1 chassis design, but I can't remember or find it right now.

The improvements in your driving skills will have to come from more track time and your local racers who can analyze how you drive and provide you with feedback to help drive more consistently and eventually faster.

Hi Steve,

There are a lot of things that go into finding the right setup for a given track. Before describing a bit how we work towards a good setup when we get to a track it is important to talk about preparation.

First of all it is key that you develop your driving skills. If you know how to drive the car consistently it will be easier to notice and how the car is behaving and feel what a change in setup has done to change the car's behaviour on the track. To develop driving skill you need to have a reasonable setup but it doesn't have to be perfect. When you are just starting the easiest solution is to copy someone elses setup. Then, without changing anything, run the car as often as you can on your home track. Focus fully on training your driving ability. Also watch the top drivers drive keeping an eye on not just their car, but also what they do on the transmitter with steering and power.

The second thing you need is setup knowledge. The Hudy setup booklet is a great starting point for this. But there is a lot you can do on the track through testing. When you go testing don't worry too much about your driving (i.e. this is not training!) but focus instead on the effect changes to the setup make. Test each change separately one at a time. Don't worry if your car gets worse with a change. The key thing here is to understand the change it accomplished. If for instance a change resulted in increased understeer you know it might be worth trying this in circumstances where your car is actually oversteering.

The third thing is when you actually focus on the setup. Now it becomes important that changes in the car make things better. This has two aspects to it: driveability and speed. Driveability you can feel for yourself as the car will be easy to drive. Laptimes are important to measure driveability too. If you can drive laptimes consistently the setup is pretty good from a driveability standpoint. But, we want to be consistently fast! So you also need to work to get the laptimes as low as possible. Usually this includes trading some driveability for speed. The trick is to find a good balance between driveability and speed that will allow you to stay consistent but with the lowest laptimes you are capable off.

Developing a setup can be split into two efforts. Finding standard (base) setups and finding the best setup for a given day/track. The base setup is what you will start a day off on a given race day. If you have a good base setup you can focus on small changes to the setup (one at a time) to optimise it for the track you are running on and the circumstances on the day (e.g. temperature). If your base setup is off then you will be in trouble from the start and quite often the top guys will make multiple serious changes in one go (basically switch to a different base setup) to find a better staring point.

Thanks for all the responses.

Tony: I found that the basic setup oversteered and spun out very easily, so the setup I have at the moment is the basic setup with added camber front and rear, softened rear end and decreased downstops. The car is now very smooth and stable to drive, and also very forgiving of driver error, but I know that this kind of setup is not the fastest.

I realise that style is going to vary with the track type, but do the top drivers develop a driving style first and then set the car to suit, or do they set the car first and then adapt their style?

Sorry if these are dumb newbie questions

Steve,

You asked a very good question. Mostly the driving style and setup influence each other. During the first years of driving all of us develop a sort of natural driving style. This driving style is what top drivers try to set their car up for. Having said that this doesn't allways work. When the setup is off the mark top drivers are usually able to adjust their driving to suit the car's handling to get the most out of it. Lesser mortals like myself find this harder so for me it is important to find the right setup for me or suffer being off the pace big time...