Originally Posted by Turbonium
i dont think that anone needs $$ batteries for competitve TCS racing... the Memphis race had enough minis to go down to an F-main, and i know of at least one in the A that was using 3 year old Hurricane 3300s... qual'ed 8th, finished 5th. led for a few laps even, ran in the top 3 most of the race, then caught 1 dot and went back to 4th!
i personally am against the lipo, especially when there is no weight penalty imposed.. just my input.
I'm not sold on LIPOs yet either - but then I haven't tried them yet.
Nathan & I still run 3300's quite often - all are either "hand me downs" from our stock TC racing to Mini, or left over from the Nationals spec battery. Going to 3800's or 42/4300's in a mini gets you a bit more voltage, but at a signficant weight penalty of over 30 plus grams. On shorter tracks, you are better off with the 3300's, as the lighter weight is more important than top end speed. However, if you are on a course with a long straightaway sweeper combo (Aliso viejo is 125' plus the sweeper), and since we are gearing limited, those extra volts put out by the newest 3800/4200's would be a clear advantage and offset the weight penalty.
And I'm not sure that the voltage ratings on the matched packs mean a whole lot to us mini racers - I doubt a silver can in a car ever gets close to pulling the 35 amps that batteries are now matched at. Heck, put a silver can on a T35, run it at 7 volts, and pinch your fingers hard on the shaft to add a load and you still don't max out the t35 motor amp draw. For us, we would have more meaningful numbers testing a pack at an amp draw of maybe 10-15 amps - I bet a good number of NiMH batteries will show very little difference in performance at those lower loads.
And given how much of a full battery pack we really use in a 5 minute race, the average voltage numbers from a matcher (which are average voltage over the entire pack capacity) again don't mean much to us - we're interested in the numbers only for the first third or so of the pack capacity. (Back in the days of 1700's and 2000's, I used to test packs at 20 amps, and rate the batteries by how they did over their first half of discharge only, for my mini racing. The numbers on the batteries and the numbers I found did not necessary match up as far as which battery pack was best.)
By the way, what was the layout like in Memphis this year ? - one year I was there and they had what seemed to be an "endless" straight (125' or more I would guess), but other years they had smaller layouts.