John Stranahan

iTrader: (27)

Track Report-

One of the tips the oval guys have is too look at your tire wear. If they are wearing even left and right then you are doing a pretty good job of preloading the left. You can do this with your dial caliper by measuring the O.D. of the tire after a race or if the track has any traction by looking at the rubber bits the tires are leaving on the underside of the body. My fronts are wearing more even now and are leaving a similar amount of rubber bits but the bits are not quite in the same place. The left front leaves them in a pile under the back of the left front fender. The right side tire is now leaving a few more bits on the inside of the passenger door, but a similar amount as the left.


+5 camber left front steering block (arm).
I described this piece in my previous posts. It adds 5 degrees of positive camber to the left front tire so that I can then set the kingpin at a negative 3 degrees like the other side. The result was wonderful. The car felt like it had a low roll center now. Corner entry grip was improved scrub was absent. The car required very little steering throw to accomplish the corner. If you are doing flat oval on asphalt I highly recommend you try this and give me a report back. A manufaturer could easily make this as a tuning piece for this associated front end. The left front is working harder now than ever based on wear and rubber bits on the body.

I tried the battery 1/2 inch forward and all the way back. I prefer all the way back from a handling view point. I did not get lap times. The car just has better forward traction all the way back. This helps a lot on corner exit. My battery lead wires are 1/8 inch in front of the rear tire.

I moved the receiver and transponder to the left edge. This put about 1.5 more ounces on the left side toward the front.

I took another .75 ounces out of the car by removing chassis in front of my body posts which are just in front of the inner a-Arm pivots. I removed chassis under the servo.

The Ackerman change (see above post), though slight, must be OK as the car handled super.

The HPI clear rear wing from 200 mm Nitro allowed me to remove the spoiler. This should streamline things a bit.

Gearing is about 3.14 inch/rev rollout.

Throttle Roll On
Today traction was only low to medium due to some drizzle and rubber dust from a big race. I ran my wide pan car on the oval and practiced rolling on the throttle with LiPo and a 6.5 motor. It is just remarkable how rolling the throttle on just a little slower will make the car jet out of the corner a lot faster. Newcomers to pan need to practice this a lot. The car handled well. Can't wait for a dry day.


John