With my 418 on it’s way it will bring the end to a fairly successful campaign with the different iterations of the 417. The car has proved to be a solid performer at both event and club level, and I will be sad to see my 417 raceberry go onto greener pastures. That said, the 417 has never endeared itself to me in the same way that the 416 did, so “as they say” – out with the old and in with the new!

With the 418 about to drop and already doing well in the hands of the team drivers, I decided to try and set my car up like the 418 – and the result was pretty damn good! The setup is based on both Marc’s BIRC winning setup and also my AOC Yatabe setup, which itself  was based on his 418 setup from the Czech Republic ETS.

So here it is, the main changes from the normal 417 setup are listed below

• Longer front wheelbase – this increases front bite and makes the car more stable on power
• Narrow rear end – this improves direction change and provides more on power steering at the expense of stability
• Short rear link (outside hole on bulkhead) – probably the biggest change, this improves rear side-bite on corner entry then provides more steering on power
• Higher front roll centre – increases corner speed and initial steering
• Camber links raised – smoothes car out and increases corner speed

At the BIRC race Marc also ran the 1.3mm front roll bar, which is something I tried prior to changing many of the other settings and found it made the car very easy to drive but took away corner speed – now that I have made more changes I would like to try it again because the car had huge corner speed but was now maybe a little too aggressive.