BNK Kampenhout 2013 – Wet & Dry Base Setup

The BNK (Belgian/Dutch National Championship) went to Arendonk, Belgium in the last weekend of July. This was my first event with the DEX210 and I had a lot of success with the car, both in wet conditions (training and qualifications) and dry conditions (finals). The electronics layout in the car is a little different from usual, and I would like to share this (together with the setup) with you.

So what’s different about the layout? Well, I’m running a HobbyKing X-Car ESC, which is kind of large… so large in fact, it doesn’t fit in the sidepods. The standard bodyshell doesn’t allow enough room to run it on top of the battery plate.

However, the ESC does fit nicely in the car if a Shorty LiPo pack is placed way back, and the ESC is put between the servo and battery pack. It looks like this:

I didn’t have time to lengthen the wires on the capacitor, so this resides on the battery plate for now. Speaking of the battery plate, this is a piece of 3mm thick lexan with a screw put through it at the front to stop the battery ramming into the ESC. You might also be able to re-use the standard battery plate for this, but that doesn’t give the flat surface to put the capacitor on. Anyway, the battery plate looks like this in detail:

The changes continue at the gearbox: I made the gearing such that the motor sits nearly against the gear casing, by using a 78T spur gear and 23T pinion. A 21T or 22T pinion might still fit, but it is very close to the gear casing. Also, I used a ‘Cream’ 24g battery stopper at the rear.

This layout gives the car a weight balance quite far to the rear for a mid-motor car. I had the car weighed on four scales – unfortunately I didn’t write down the exact numbers, but I recall it had at least 65% of the weight on the rear. With this layout even more weight lies very close to the centerline of the chassis than usual.

The layout is very tight, and an ESC fan barely fits beneath the bodyshell: a low profile one (7-7.5mm) exactly fitted on there! I cut a slot at the lowest point of the front window to aid cooling and add clearance.

Despite the tight layout though, a battery stopped also still fits at the front of the chassis, if it might ever be needed to add weight there:

So all in all, how did this setup run?

Well, to be fair I haven’t run my own car in a different layout, but the car felt awesome: The car had absolutely no trouble getting forward grip, even on wet astroturf and slightly worn tires! It had enough steering too, it was exactly what I couldn’t find with my last car! Some drivers who tried it said it was spot on, others were looking for slightly more aggression and steering. I would like to note here I was running a shorter front link than usual, Schumacher LP Staggers, not LP Cut Staggers, and no weight up front… So plenty of steering could be added to the car without moving away from this layout.

So here are the setup sheets for wet & dry conditions:

PDF File

PDF File

I hope the information helps you out to make your car ever better and quicker – Have fun :-)