jackhammer74
I would suggest that you not run Proline tires. My experience with them is that they overheat on all but the coolest track surfaces (S2 and S3) or have no grip on any surface (H13.) There are many good tires out there that are the same price and will work a lot better than Proline. I usually run Pit Shimizu tires, but also use Take-Off. Many guys swear by Sorex. I don't think you can go wrong with any of the three. Make sure you pick the tire that is appropriate for the track temps that you see. In my area, we usually run 30's or 36's since we see track temps up to 140 degrees F and usually have a lot of grip. To keep it easy, run an insert that has minimal air gap like the HPI molded ones. Green is a great choice. If you want to make the tires act a little softer, go with a softer insert. I usually run HPI green when grip is high and move to a Yokomo medium insert when I need the same tire hardness, but want to get a little more grip.
One of the key settings on any car is droop. It is essential to getting the right amount of steering. If you car is pushing, start by removing the front andd rear swaybars and adding some droop. I would suggest that you run 3mm of droop up front and 5mm in the rear to start with. The car should have a lot of steering with those settings. The easiest way (imo) to measure droop is to take your ride height guage and measure the ride height of the car with tires on. Say you're running 5mm ride height, for example. Then, use a hobby knife of something thin like that and gently lift the front of the chassis from the very center of the front bumper and pay attention to when the tire begins to lift off the workbench. Once you determine the point that the tire begins to lift, measure the "ride height" again. For example, say it's 8mm. Subtract the raised height from normal resting height and you have the droop. In this case, it would be 3mm. Repeat this process on the rear, then duplicate the setting on the opposite side of the car. I use a standard Integy droop guage to make sure both sides are the same by measuring the distance between the lowest part of the suspension arm and adjusting both sides to be the same, but you can use a ruler or something like that.
Swaybars are used to control droop and reduce chassis roll. The stiffness of the bar determines how much the two sides of the suspension are joined together. IMO, the sway bars on the TA04 do very little, especially in the rear. You can feel the effect if you go from no bar to the blue bar, but it's pretty subtle. You only want to play around with swaybars if you already have enough or too much steering. Start with the rear and if you still need to tame down the chassis roll, move to the front.
You can also get more steering by adding camber. On my TA04, I usually run 2.5 degrees of camber up front and 2 degrees in the rear and I run the camber links in the stock position. Check where the wear pattern is on the tire and adjust the camber so it is toward the middle. I run a lot of camber due to the technical tracks that I race on and I also like to run a really hard tire and use the excess camber to put some heat in the tires! I lilke the backend of my car to be a little loose so I can break the backend loose when I need to carry a lot of speed into a turn and hold someone off from passing me. You definitely do steer with both ends of the car, so you might try stiffening up the rear a bit to get the backend to slide a little. If you use good quality tires and use the correct compound for your track conditions, the backend will come around in a very controlled manner.
Hopefully that give you some things to think about!
