- Serpent S411TE - Gary Lanzer - WCIC - Edmonton - 26-29.10.2012 -
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WCIC Series Race #1 Oct 26-29
I arrived in not so bright or sunny Edmonton for the first WCIC series race, they received a lot more snow then we did, but the roads where pretty good no less.
Getting to the track and looking at the layout showed that this could be a interesting track to try and get hooked up on, as the Emonton club had only just received their CRC carpet the week before and had some rather unique wrinkles and a couple tears in the carpet that seemed to fall on certain parts of the transitions thru the corners. The club tried to steam, iron and stretch these ripples out as best as possible, but never could get it perfectly flat, although this just meant we all would have to put up with the same bumps.
I had a couple pre-setup cars (Martins CDN Nats and Davids ETS) as I would be running the 17.5 blinky class as well as mod, which to date, would be my first mod race in about 8 years, and I never really ran the class back then either. I had put in a 6.5 NOVAK Ballistic motor for the event and took it to out club track to do some shakedown runs prior to venturing off to Edmonton. The problem here is a 6.5 and our track don't really mix well. It was more of a point and shoot and brake type of track, so no real info here other than I didn't break anything....On to Edmonton.
CRC carpet always seems to come up for traction pretty quick and the combination of JACO Blue tires and SXT traction compound made for pretty consistant traction so only some fine tuning on the setups and good luck should make for a good weekend of racing. There was one part of the track that was a high risk, high reward section, and I was able to take it successfully more times than not. Both cars felt pretty good, but felt like they needed a little better drive off the corners, one of those strange, slight oversteer feels every once in a while. To fix this I ended up going to 2k rear diff oil and this really brought both cars around. The entry onto the back straight, if taken tight would allow for a straight shot thru the chicane to the hairpin at the other side, and the oil change really helped the car set for this corner, and in practice it looked and felt really good.
First qualifiers, running 17.5 first, got a great start, and won my heat, placed 4th overall, wow. I knew the car felt good, but the competition in this class is so close, I wasn't expecting 4th. On to mod, again the car felt really good, crank a couple warm up laps amd hang on, boy these things are fast.......remember the high risk, high reward part of the track, well third warm up lap and nailed that chicane just right to peel the front arm off the car, didn't even start the qualifier......note to self, don't do that again, lol.
Much the same for the next two qualifiers, except for mod where I kept the car in one piece, but came to the conclusion, that I can't drive a 6.5 effectively, its one thrill ride down the straight, but I end up driving the infield too slow to get a actual fast lap in, let alone a good complete qualifier. Need a lot more practice with mod on a bigger track than what we have at home. I did force myself to continue on with the 6.5 and did get a little better, but did motor up for the last qualifier, running a 10.5 with dynamic timing and a ball park guess at a fdr. Mananged to qualify 10th overall in mod.
Back to 17.5, my last qualifier had a great run going, running as high as 3rd, (this was with resorts after 2nd qualifiers), only to be knocked around towards the end of the run and getting the car rolled into one of those no man islands requiring a corner marshall to get me back on the track, but still mananged to hang onto 8th overall.
For the finals, lets just say luck was not on my side for either starts. In 17.5, I jump started, slammed on the brakes, then waited, the race started and I got going only to get into the remains of a wreck in the first corner, nailed from the side and then from the back, once the crashing stopped I was pointing the wrong direction and in last. I finally got going and got within a corner of a group of cars only to clip a board and loose more time. Never could get back up into the battle, ran some laps with the leader, ran the fifth fastest lap and ran within a tenth of the leaders, so the car had the speed, just no luck. Overall I was pretty happy with the final as its been a long time since I've managed to get into the A of the 17.5 class, competition is really close, so 7th for me was like a win. Running fast laps close to the leaders is very encouraging and the car is very consistant for me, looking at the results the majority of my top 5 and 10's all fell within .04 seconds of each other, only one other driver ran .03.
Mod was more of the same bad luck at the starts, 3rd to last by the first corner, never really could get fast, I was consistant, but just not fast, cranked a buch of the same lap times and was closing on the position car in front of me, only to have the computer crash. We all met with the RD and decided that at 4.5 minutes no positions had changed so that was good enough for the final results. I only wish that the lap data wasn't lost, as this was more of a test session for me than anything, oh well.
All in all the cars where really solid. I wasn't the only car to break a arm in that part of the track, and you had to really nail it just right to break it. Because of the roughness of the track I ran both cars without torsion bars. Started with 2.50 top decks and ended up running 2.0 super flexi decks. (Wish I would have made one of the modded top decks Ed/Tryhard made) The V2/V1 motor mount really plants the back of the car well. The nylon spool held up flawlessly. The mod car I ended up running a 500k front diff.
Once again, thanks to the groups that support me, Serpent America for the great cars, NOVAK for the awesome speed controls and motors and Trinity for the RevTech batteries and pinions.
Gary Lanzer
Serpent America
Source:
G. Lanzer
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