𝗫𝗕𝟮𝗖'𝟮𝟲 𝗧𝗘𝗖𝗛 𝗥𝗘𝗣𝗢𝗥𝗧 - 𝗘𝗢𝗦 𝗗𝗮𝘂𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲

The EOS event in Daun last week saw us get back to racing on different handout tires. Prior to the event I had a few days of testing in Hudy Arena as well as at the track at Elceram arena and made some positive improvements on my setups. Nevertheless, when coming to Daun, the conditions proved to be a bit different than at home and some adjustments had to be made.

As the carpet in Daun was laid on top of the soft tennis carpet underneath, this resulted in the traction level to be very high at the beggining of the event. Car handling here has always been a bit different to what we are used to from different events.

After practice round one, I knew my car was too soft coming from home. The temperature in the hall was for sure higher than when testing at home, and with the high grip, this resulted in the car diving and collapsing too much. I decided to change the shock oil going from 400-300cSt to 450-350cSt as the first change. The track layout was also much slower and more tight compare to home, so I had to make changes to the electronics setup. On my Elceram G2 ESC, I quickly and easily changed the PWM drive frequency from 7k to 8kHz, lowered the turbo and also loosened the slipper a bit, to calm the car down on the very high grip.

My changes for sure helped to calm the car down, but after practice round two I still did some changes to help reduce the grip of the car for the last practice round. One very easy solution was going wider on the wheel hexes, where I changed my 1-5 slot hexes to 2-6 slots, one slot wider front and rear, to reduce the overall traction of the car. This once again helped me get more comfortable with the car and I seeded comfortable into the B heat for qualifying.

Going into qualifying, I knew a 5min pace is going to be crucial over the best lap, so I once again thought about reducing some power on this tight track. I ended up reducing the ramp-up of the turbo, which makes the turbo increase slower and more “calm”. I also wanted to free up the rear end of the car, so I ended up going 1° higher on the C&D blocks and changed the rear shock length accordingly to match and keep the same droop. Q1 did not go as I would have loved to, but I got back into rythm for Q2 and Q3, where I got myself P11 and P12 finishes to qualify overall 16th.

As the lower finals had only 2 sets of tires for the whole race, whereas the A-mains were allowed to get one extra set, we would be racing on more worn tires with the traction dropping immensely. For the used tires, I knew I had to adapt the setup to not be too loose around the track. One very easy change to get more traction on the rear suspension is removing screws from the rear chassis brace to increase flex. As the finals went on, I first removed one screw from the chassis brace, and for the 4th run on the tire I removed the very last screw on the rear part of the side guard. These changes helped me stay competitive in the final runs, where I fought with the guys for top3 positions in every run after starting 5th. In the end I took P4 in the B and overall P15.
In the end the car worked very well and I was super happy with the overall handling. I suggest to try these settings yourself when having a similar race event and conditions.