- Serpent S411 - Ed Clark - Darling Downs Chargers - Highfields - 02.09.2012 -

And so, onto today... Local club meeting, on a parking lot track with 17.5 blinky, kinda removed from full bore mod running, but hey, it's all fun

Anyway, started out with the setup from above, with the exception of switching to Xceed 400 oil. I had a play around on the bench with different shock setups, and settled on the feeling of the 3hole/400wt oil. It's softer than what I was running before, so should be better over bumps. I also gave a little side to side test between 4hole/450wt, and 6hole/1500wt (as suggested by Johnny). Have to say the 6hole felt good, but the oil was heavy, so maybe 1200 or 1000 would be more comparable to the others I tested out.

The club was using a new venue for the first time, on pretty recently laid tennis courts. I've never seen a venue that has such smooth surface, pretty awesome for a temporary track. Smooth, no bumps, and good grip from the get go too. Overall, very impressed with it.

Anyway, I had a few things I wanted to try out, including bodyshells, battery position, as well as a few geometry tweaks.

First run, car was pretty good, a little too reactive on the front end, and laying the front shocks down into hole 2 helped there. Next up, I tried 4mm on the inner rear link to try and stop some of the sliding, but this ended up taking away too much of the mid-corner rotation, so I went back to 3mm.

Next run, I wanted to test out the battery in the rear most position, by flipping the plastic holders round. From previous experience with other cars, this should give more rotation. What was interesting that this way, it gained middle, and also lost a bit of entry and exit, which is exactly what I was after, so mark another thing to the list of staying on the car

Last thing to test was bodyshells.... I'd been running the LTC-R all day, but I have in the stable a HB Subaru TypeC that'd I had painted up as an option. Now the last time I tested that shell out, I didn't like it at all, felt numb on entry and exit, but with a load of mid-corner. Admitadly, it had been on a different car (A700) and a massively differenet track with much higher grip level.
This time round, I have to say I actually quite liked the feel of it, slightly less initial and exit than the LTC, but with a good level of mid-corner. However, checking the laptimes, it seemed like it was about a tenth to 0.2 slower than the LTC, so for the final run of the day I went back to the LTC to check. Low and behold, I did exactly the same laptimes, so my guess is the tyres have started to go off, rather than anything to do with shell. At the very least, gives me another option, and have a shell for club racing

All in all though, good day. Ended up 3laps up on second place, with good consistency across most of the runs too, so can't really complain

Cheers
Ed

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