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So, time for another long post today, couple of weekends to report back on!

Anyway, last weekend was a sunday of testing at the state titles track... and unfortuantly it didn't go well. There had been a fence put back in place on the outside of the sweeper, and on the second run I got on the dirt, and well, the ensuring meeting between post and car resulted in the rear most suspension block pulling through the back of the chassis plate. It also took the hinge pin with it, and the block itself had a slight bend. Tears, basically

Thankfully, the screw had pulled through pretty cleanly, and there was a bit of meat left that would hold the block in place. The hinge pin was simply replaced, but with no spare 3.0 block, I decided to carry on with it as is, and see how it behaved, and try to get something else out of the 3hour round trip...

With that issues resolved as best as possible, it was time to start running through a list of things to try, mainly to get the car to rotate a bit better, find a bit more high-speed steering, and try and improve it over the bumps.

First on the list was changing from HPI Silver to Ride Blue springs all round. Straight off the bat this was an improvement, car less effected by the bumps, and also getting round the track with an improvement in laptime. I think these are rapidly becoming my new go-to spring...

Next up was bodyshell mounting. Now this is a more general thing, but I always mount my bodies quite far back. Having been chatting with a few others, wanted to try out mounting the body much further forward. Theory going that more steering, especially at high speed, will result. And well, the theory was right Gained a bit more steering all over the park, and seemingly without sacrificing stability. All good...

One thing I did notice during that run was that I noticed my car wasn't coming out of the corners, especially the low-speed hairpins, as some others. It had the feeling of some slip going on out the corner, like it was lacking punch. Given I was still running 1500wt oil in the diff, and it was much hotter, I decided to give 2000wt a go again, and this did work out very nicely. Car was a little more edgey on initial throttle, but more stable into the turns, as well as gaining straight-line traction.

I was still struggling with the car getting thrown around bit by the bumps, so the next coupe of runs I played around with the shocks, running through some different oil combinations, but not really finding anything I was happy with. I think the main issue I've been running the car too heavily damped, and/or with too much pack in the shocks... a change of oil brand is in the works now, to get a bit more similar to what others run at the track, just I can do a better comparison!

Last few runs of the day, I played around with rear roll bar again (still prefer the 1.4mm), as well as trying out the BD7 style mount again. Before, when I tested that out, I didn't like it as it made the rear very loose. However looking again at it at home, seems that the centre shaft mounts were hitting the top deck and causing a bit of odd flex to happen. So, this time round, mounted it up the same, but raised the top deck 0.5mm with shims to make sure the flex stayed the same (couple of pics at the bottom). This worked much better now, giving a bit more rear traction and stability, without the snappy on-power of before. For now, it's staying on the car

Cheers
Ed

Can you explain little more about this V2 motormaunt V1 center piece thing?

Have a look at the pictures in my first post.

Basically, I take the V2 (one-piece) motor mount, and put on the V1 (two-piece) centre bit. This part connects the top deck as well as the bottom deck, where as the V2 centre piece only bolts to the bottom deck.

Now, when mounting it up, I put the screws in the same place as the V2 on the bottom deck (so that's 5 screws, leaving the middle one empty, first pic below), then in the top deck, just mount up the forward most screw, that screws the topdeck into the V1 centre piece.
(As I mentioned in the first post, you do need to raise the top-deck to make sure you get even flex though, hence the adding of the orange 0.5mm shims in the second pic)

This is the same way that the BD7 has it's motor mount setup, and it's something that seems a lot of other cars are moving towards... seems to help with a bit more rear flex, and does seem to help give more rear traction.