Ricky Boobby - Smart Brake --- your on the right idea, to feel the effect you want think about starting higher with the RPM. Like Bob said, this has a bigger effect in touring than in off road. Issue we had with it in in off road is if you the smart brake is too high you lose control of the nose during a jump (brake kicks in, nose drops, hard to get it back up). that being said, depending on the layout and how you drive, it could work.

If you start with a higher Trigger RPM and Max Strength (like 10,000 and 75%) and low drag brake (5% or 0), you should see a quick deceleration and them a roll as it transitions to regular drag brake. You probably wouldn't use that much on track, but it should show you a difference in the pits. Where if you disable Smart Brake and turn drag brake up high (like 75%), should decelerate pretty quick.

Best way to test on track is to take a few "baby steps" and experiment with the settings. Finding a good Trigger RPM and Max Strength for the corner (or corners) you are looking at and them adjusting from there. From my experience, there is not one setting that will work for everyone, too many variables. I could be wrong, but that's my opinion. But its fun to experiment with and see how it effects the handling and hopefully helps lap times.

My settings for 17.5 blinky in a B4.1 with VTX10 BE are:
Brake strength = 100%. Adjusting down with radio EPA.
Brake PWM freq. = 2500
Brake Curve = linear
Smart brake trigger rpm = disabled
Smart brake curve = linear
Smart brake max strength = 100%
Drag brake = 65%
Throttle punch = 100%
Throttle deadband = narrow
Throttle PWM = 5000
Throttle cruve = linear
No boost or timing
The track is small with what would probably be considered meduim traction.

I also have a VTX10R in a B44.2. I used to have this ESC in the B4 and it acted the same. Otherwise I would have thought something was wrong with the ESC. The brake settings are the same other than I am down to 20% drag brake. I want to put in more but it will not jump good. I ran it with the drag brake much higher and it was nice once I got used to not letting off the throttle too much when in the air. I found this was too hard to do when running multiple classes in the same day.

If I set the drag brake at 10% as you have, and run the car at a slow speed like a brisk walking speed, it seems to roll forever with no brake at all. I have an sc10 with the RTR reedy ESC. The drag brake is set to 10% and I can easily notice it at the low speeds so I don't think it is just my perception.

I might be wrong but I thought to disable the smart brake you had to set the strength to 0% not the RPM.

65% drag brake, jebus.

I may be wrong too without having the ESC in front of me but I am pretty sure you get the word disable when you lower the trigger rpm all the way down.

I have tried one of the settings, and I think it was the dynamic brake strength at 0, the result was that I lost the normal brake. I will try to accomplish this again over the weekend and post the settings.

Yeah, you would think it would be impossible to drive with this.

Yea I'm traveling for work so I can't check until tomorrow afternoon but I am 99% sure I have my dynamic brake strengths (3 different VXT10(R) ESCs) set to 0% and I have plenty of brakes.

I run a bunch of drag brake on my B4.1 as well...like 45% right now I think. We run on a very smooth medium bite clay and it really helps bring my speed down at the end of the high speed straight.

Dynamic Brake will be disengaged when you have it set to 0%, but you can still have regular drag brake.

Now, I have done some testing recently using more aggressive drag brake settings (more than 50%) and will change the EPA on my brakes so that I have control of how much drag brake I get. This way I can change during practice / hot laps before a race and get what I need from radio settings.

As far as the Dynamic goes, it really was designed to have very aggresive high-speed braking, and a softer low speed.

All I could say is to test it out. If you had 20% dynamic and 50% drag, I think you will just get the 50% at high speed, but it might work out.

I am not understanding how EPA on the radio can adjust the drag brake. I understand how it adjusts maximum finger brake. Maybe finger brake is what you are talking about. If you could explain, I would like to know because it would be nice to change drag brake on the radio.

I did test out the dynamic brake and it seems that the dynamic brake strenth is added on top of the drag brake setting. If it worked the way you are thinking, I could set high speed brakes at 5% for very weak brake and low speed at 60%+ for strong low speed brakes. I think this would be a really nice feature to use for offroad, especially 2wd offroad.

you can adjust your drag with your brake trim.

Yes, this makes sense to me. Maybe this is what FLHX meant with the EPA.

Remember that I only run 10% drag brake right now because I was a guy who ran brushed motors with 0 drag brake. That 10% now is just to simulate the feel of the brushed motors as they had a little bit of drag built into them.

I am going to actually work on increasing drag brake and expect to settle somewhere in the 30% range.

One other thing to remember is that Drag Brake is purely preference and there is no wrong amount. If you have 65% and can wheel that car around the track, then obviously it is right for you!

That is the beauty of our Viper products guys. The ability to anyone's needs with just a couple quick clicks of a proguage button!

I'm going to ramp my drag brake up some too for bumps & jumps but I think that once we hit some of the other tracks with bigger jumps, I may have to go down a little bit. Was thinking 30% would be a safe place to start.


Oh and when I get my new motors in, I'll work on a non boosted setup for bumps for you. Fred lurrrrrrrrrrrrves boost. Me, not so much. But that setup we came up with does indeed work.

Well I guess I worded it in correctly. You can use your EPA on your radio to give you the "light brake" feel for the high speed, and rely on the drag brake to slow you on the infield. You would still have to apply the brake fully at the end of the strait (lets say it is 20%), but use the drag brake (lets say 60%) on the infield.

The issue would be if you ran into a situation that you wanted to use more than 20% brake, you would have to pretty much go to Neutral and use drag brake (in the case you had to stop for a marshal on the high speed part of the track)

This is sort of what I have been doing lately but in reverse. I am setting the drag brake to be just under the spin out point on the sweeper after the straight, and then setting the finger brake EPA as high as possible for the low speed turns. This gives me decent finger brakes in case of stopping for emergency.

This brings up another point. I don't think drag brake percent is actually the percentage of full finger brakes. 65% drag brake can stay hooked up on the track but there is no way I could set the EPA on the radio at 65% without spinning out in a high speed turn.