Here is a cracking report from Iain Mellish after a great result at the latest Silverstone indoor round.

This years Silverstone Winter Series has seen a somewhat stuttering start for the Kyosho contingent, with the new EOS carpet having us scratching our skulls in trying to unlock the secrets of the RB6.6, and how we could utilise them for our varying driving styles.

The conundrum so far (and always I suppose) has been in trying to get the front and rear of the car working together. I’ve often felt like I am trying to drive two separate cars, a front end and a rear end instead of them working as one – Playing with roll centres, shock positions and caster angles etc have worked to a certain degree but getting a balanced setup that works from venue to venue has proved frustratingly difficult.

It has been difficult ending one meeting thinking I have a good starting point for the next event only to turn up and then realise the balance of the car again needed some work. Last weekend I went to Midland Raceway to get some track time on their EOS carpet and test our latest favoured setup…but in the end came away again feeling like I was going round in circles trying to fix the same problems that on another track had been resolved.

Saying this, I did come away with some inspiration for a new direction thanks to having a go with John Langleys car in-between rounds at Midland Raceway. John had gone for a setup which amongst other things included mounting the rear shocks on the rear of the shock tower. Driving his car compared to mine was like night and day, it was so stable through rhythm sections and landings that it really gave the feel I could drive it at a quick pace without having to bust a gut to get decent lap times.

Knowing how well Johns car handled, we decided to try something different for Silverstone. We took a page out of his book and switched the shocks to the rear of the tower, reverted back to 2 hole pistons all round, and left on the 25 degree caster plate that I had ended up trying in the final at Midland Raceway. That’s where we found ourselves at the start of play yesterday morning…

First practice is always over in the blink of an eye when learning the layout and trying to get a feel for your car, and although not perfect I was reasonably happy with how the it felt. I did wonder whether I’d have enough steering with the shocks mounted aft but in reality I had all I wanted, and more. However, I was turning in way to early for a lot of the corners so for second practice we went back to the 30 degree caster plate and also stood the rear shocks up another hole in order to stiffen it slightly to try and limit the excess ‘roll’ through certain sections of track.

The changes worked really well. The added caster gave me a bigger range of steering around neutral which meant I could push the car much harder into a corner and gained that bit of on power steering that it gives. Standing the rear shocks also helped in aiding the car to stay flatter so that’s how we went into round one.

We put in a solid race, littered with a few errors but still claiming 5th in round. Basically happy with the car we concentrated again on reducing the amount that the rear end was rolling. It wasn’t having an adverse effect in making the car difficult to drive but we knew we could go faster if we could remedy it, so we pondered on whether to go up on the rear oil weight or to raise the rear camber links by 1mm on both the hub and the shock tower positions. In the end we decided that going up on shock oil (only 50cst) would not only keep the rear end flatter but also help in landing off some of the jumps and drop offs around the track.

With that alteration round two found us easily on the pace with the leaders and once I got through into the lead everything was looking positive. Another mistake on my behalf cost us dearly though but we were still quick enough for another 5th in round.

Something strange happened between rounds two and three…..something I cant remember happening for a very long time….something so drastic I don’t think will happen again…I didn’t change a thing on the car. Crazy, I know, but I was so annoyed at myself for the error I made in round two I wanted another stab at driving that oh so elusive clean race.

We had got quicker in every round so far, and round three was no exception. I got a bit of luck at the start with the leaders crashing in front of me and although at no point did I need marshalling I was still making small errors where I would be turning into track markings too early, or having little moments landing off jumps or passing back markers. Coming out with a 3rd in round was good but there was still a lot of time in the car.

I had felt a little nervous driving the car; like I was trying so hard not to make a mistake that I was doing so! I was finding corner entry steering to be a very fine judgment, definitely too fine to get right on every corner for five minutes at the pace we wanted to go, so we made a little change for round four.

I wanted to lean on the front end harder and feel more confident in attacking corners, and having remembering Lee Romang saying he had taken out the 1mm Ackerman spacer to calm the front end down I thought that would help us too, so we went down from 1mm to 0.5mm for the final round.

It never ceases to amaze how such tiny adjustments to an RC car can make such a difference to the handling of it. Just this one change, taking away a little bit of initial steering with a 0.5mm spacer, cured all my nervousness. It was exactly what was needed, I could drive so much smoother than before and never felt like making an error…this was easily our best run of the day, giving us a 2nd in round and an FTD time that was only 1.5 seconds off Tom Yardys. It was a big relief to finally drive a clean race, and with it a much improved qualifying position of 3rd overall.

It was an enjoyable final to race in with some good, close, and clean, racing. I managed to get up to second place, which where at this point I should probably have just settled for 2nd, but in a rush of blood in trying to catch Tom I made an error coming onto the straight and in doing so let Richard Barton through to take 2nd.

It was great to feel we had made progress with the car and get a result for the team, and to go away with 3rd was much more than what we expected at the start of the day! Roll on round four!

Source:

K. Marsden