2nd Race of the season with the Gambler

This weekends race-meeting took me to the Duisburg Track, which I know for many years now. Starting with some slight rain in the morning but drying out very quickly and becoming extremely dusty.

I stayed with the mid-motor-setup and the 17.5T Speedpassion motor. Shock-oils were 40WT front and 50WT rear with orange Losi-springs all round.

I did not have a single technical issue the whole day. The Gambler was running flawlessly. Despite that I only reached 8th place, having some very bad racing luck.

As the rear end is nearly perfect now, I will do some more tests on the front-end to gain more stability. I'll keep you posted on that.

More updates

Updated my gambler before the upcoming race on sunday.

First of all I filled the diff with 1000WT oil. No more weight, because I don't want to sacrifice too much steering. Then I installed the 1,5° aluminium rear uprights, which should give more straight line traction on a slippery track (which is expected for the weekend)

Most important and most substantial change are new front-arms from the HPI Blitz, as new Gambler front-arms are not available at the moment. Modified shock mounting position slightly.

These arms are 5mm narrower than the stock parts. I got back 2 millimeters with wider hex-mounts from my scratchbox.

I also use orange Losi springs now, which are a little stiffer than the original springs.

Did I mention that the Gambler has the coolest mudflaps by far..? ;-)

Video from the weekend's racing.

 

Video by Pascal Huntjens

First race with the Gambler

Easter-Sunday was the first race-meeting and season-opener of NRW Offroad-Cup 2011 on the very nice and demanding Panik-Raceway in Troisdorf, Germany





My class is the Short-Course stock-class, which is the biggest class with the closest with the hardest and most exiting race-action.

A Speedpassion 17,5T spec motor with a fixed gear ratio had to be used there to make racing even closer.

In this series we only have one qualifier and 5 finals with the best 4 to count. So you have to be fast in every run to be up there.

I didn't had the chance to use the trainings-session on friday and saturday, so I had to work out the setuo in the first runs - based on what I found out at an earlier training-day there.




With a certain ammount of experience it was no problem, finding the right setup quickly.

The track-surface is artificial turf as used on tennis-courts. Additional sand made it quite slippery.

I changed the rear oil to 50WT (2 hole pistons) and stayed with 60WT (2 hole) up front. Tire-combination may look unusual, but worked very well. I used the stock-tires up front and Pro-Line Bow-ties M3 at the rear.

I would have used some harder springs or maybe stabilizer-bars to reduce the chassis-roll a bit, but missing these I used white Traxxas-Slash springs again as the stock-springs are too soft for this kind of track.

Those jumps are quite tricky there.

I had some very close fights with racing-mate Pascal Huntjens from the Netherlands - as in nearly every race in the last two years before.

Pascal and me fighting

I sadly missed the podium because of a broken front-arm in the decisive run, but had a great race anyway. Came home in 4th place, which is not too bad.

The next race will be on a very slippery clay-track in Duisburg on which I always had good results. Looking forward to that one very much. 

More on that race-series can be found here: www.NRW-Offroad-Cup.den be downloaded HERE

New Gambler pic

Trimmed the shape of the 'face' a little bit to give a sleeker look

The dark side of the Force

Pro Line Pro Trac Wheels

Just wanted to show Pro Line's ProTrac Renegade Wheels (2727-03) that I am using on my Gambler. They fit very well under the Gambler-body.

Tires used in these pic are LRP VTEC Short Course Tires.

Further Setup Changes

I changed some settings on the Gambler now and I will explain my thinking behind that.

To enhance front end grip in slow and medium speed corners I changed the inner pivot point of the upper front wishbone to the outer hole (inner hole is stock setting). This gives more camber increase, when the frontend is compressed and therefore gives a more constant steering while cornering.

I also increased front camber to two degrees to stay below 0° camber unter hard cornering (stock setting gives positive camber during hard cornering)

Front toe: As the steering has a lot of Ackerman, I decided to run no toe at all. Normally I run a little toe out to have a more direct turn in. But you have to sacrifice straightaway-speed for that.

With this car I am able to run neutral toe and gain more speed on the straight, which is very important when you only run 17,5T Motors.

Of course with neutral toe you also have a better turning angle on the outer wheel, which should increase steering even more.

Next I now use 2 hole shock-pistons (the ones that came with the car) instead of the stock 3 and 4 hole pistons. They have to be sanded quite a lot to make them fit perfectly. Because the first race of the season is on a high grip artificial turf track I tried 65WT oil front and rear, which is a quite stiff setting. 45-50WT should be a normal setting for this truck.

But I want to try out how the car behaves with a lot of dampening. The goal is to decrease body and chassis movement in the fast chicanes and to get more predictable jumping. The results of this I can only tell after the next testing session (which might take a while this time)

I kept the white Traxxas Slash springs, which seem to give very good results. All in all these changes should make the car even better for upcoming race.