Elliot Boots, Races reports !

 

Friday 6th January Taplow Meeting

Elliott ran the 2 wheel drive RB5 with the vega conversion for the first time. We had to change the setup on the car from the original. We had to make some changes to shock oils and springs. We got the car feeling quite good. We were playing around with the camber links on the rear and was able to qualify a second behind Lee Martin, about 4 seconds off the TQ time, which was quite encouraging on a quite difficult tight track. In the main A Final we had a couple of bobbles with some back markers which left us with a result of 5th.

 

Saturday 7th January Westmill Saturday Series
Elliott ran the 2 wheel drive RB5 on the out side astro track at this meeting. We decided to try changing the camber link setup on the car. We shortened the rear camber link to its shortest setting on the hub and tower which made a massive improvement to the car. Elliott was complaining of lack of steering but once we had made this change it helped a lot. We left the shocks setup as per the evening before and they seemed to work quite well. We didn't really get time to try any piston change in the shocks but this is something we will be trying this weekend. Generally Elliott felt the car was really nice to drive on this high grip surface over the rear motor mounted version. He finds it much easier and he can drive the car a lot harder. Its a lot more forgiving. Elliott TQ'd the meeting and won the Main Final.

 

Sunday 8th January Slough Winter Series

Elliott ran with the MP9. The track was fairly dry, very bumpy. We decided to leave the car with the setup we had from Italy for the first round of qualifying. He found that the rear of the car was a little too soft so we decided to move the rear shocks to the outer hole on the wishbone which is something we normally run at this track. This made a big improvement to the handling of the car as it stiffened it up slightly which made it more stable through the jump sections of the track. We also raised the car up around 2mm all round as the track was a little sticky with mud. Elliott TQ'd 2 of the 3 rounds of qualifying. We were running our new novarossi for the first time which performed really well. In the Main A Final Elliott had a good race with John Hazlewood. Unfortunately at the start of the race Elliott found that the rear shocks of the car had gone a little hard, which caused a big crash on the back jump. This put him down to 8th in the first few laps. This wasn't too much of a problem as he made a lot of time up very quickly and was chasing John for first place in which he passed John towards the end of the race to take the win. Generally the car, as normal, performed faultlessly and was extremely good with very little setup change from the normal dirt setup we run.

 

Changes made on the day:
Moved rear shocks to outer hole on wishbone
Raised car up 2mm all round
Refreshed rear shock oil

 




Saturday 14th January - 2 Wheel Drive Area 51 Meeting

We arrived at this location near Banbury, which was a big indoor track multi surface carpet wood etc. We were running the RB5 2 Wheel Drive Vega conversion with the mid motor. We had a round of practice which was really the first time Elliott had raced the car on a competitive track and meeting. We had a setup to start with from Tony Evdoka. After practice we decided that due to the low traction of the track and it was quite cold, we decided to move the rear camber link to the lower position which should help with our grip level. Elliott had complained a lot about lack of steering so we decided to cut the front tyres by putting small grooves into the staggered ribs. This helped a little but we then decided after another round that we would reduce the weight of oil in the front shocks. This helped a lot more and gave him the steering that he wanted. Generally the car worked very well but still lacked rear traction so we tried another option where we gave the car more kickup at the rear to get it to rotate better, which we did by changing the insert under the rear front plate. This was a big improvement for our car and was able to get it qualified in the A Final. We had a 3 legged A Final where we ended up 8th overall which we were very pleased with considering it was the first outing with the car.

 




Sunday 15th January - 4 Wheel Drive Area 51 Meeting


We arrived Sunday morning to this warehouse with no heating and -4 degrees outside (it felt like -10 degrees inside!). When we went out for practice the car was quite hard to drive with the setup we had on it as we had very little rear traction grip. We decided to reduce the shock oils all round and also change the front springs which helped a little. We were still lacking the rear grip on power. Elliott's car was very loose. We then changed the rear blocks which changed the kickup and also the toe, which now had 3.5 degrees. This helped quite a lot. We were using the big bore shocks but the rest of the team was on the small bore shocks. We tried them for one round but there was no difference in the way the car was handling. It was still more difficult to drive and was having a difficult qualification. At this point we were 13th overall with 2 of our rounds left to go so we really needed to find some pace in the car as we felt that if we did get to the Main A Final we may struggle with the pace of the top guys. We decided to go back with the standard big bore shocks and a new set of tyres. This was slightly better in the second half of that race when the tyres wore a bit it gave us a bit more traction but it wasn't a particularly good run. We felt like we were off of the pace by quite a lot. For the last run of the day we decided to lower the car slightly and we changed the rear camber link to a longer setting and we also fitted the new shock position on the wishbone with the new extended plate. This helped the car a lot by keeping it more level through the fast corners and we had quite a reasonable run. It looked like the place was warming up a little bit which we felt gave us a little bit more grip. Elliott had a great run. Pushed really hard and put it 10th in the A Final. Again we had a 3 legged A Final and had 2 good finals. The first we finished 5th and the second we finished 4th. The car was feeling a lot better. Kev Lee said that we should put the small bore shocks back on as the rear of the car still wasn't particularly good so we thought for the last A Final we will put these shocks on and the car really came alive and looked a lot faster and was able to come from 10th to win the main Final. We do now think that the small bore shocks are an essential part or another option to be used on certain tracks. I can say that when we went to the Electric Worlds in Finland last year with our previous car we had a choice of big bore or small bore shocks and the small bore shocks worked a lot better than the big ones. I think it should be an option that you can offer.

 



 

 

Overall we had a great weekend and learnt a lot about the cars. We look forward to the next meeting.