The answer is YES, but maybe not for the reason you think…
Buy, build, race; buy, build, race… the buying is fun, the racing is funner, but for me the biggest joy is in the building! I love putting together new cars, getting everything to fit, doing my wheel and tire customizations, adding decals and even painting on those occasions when I do it. Usually they come out great, sometimes I’m a little disappointed, and I do have a small number of failures that went into the scrap heap, but its all part of learning. After all, I’m doing this in a “vacuum:” its not like I have a load of friends or club members willing to come over and hang with me, or let me go to them; not with the “pandemic” in full force! Maybe some of the stuff I’m doing is lame-brained, and maybe some of it is brilliant, but either way I’m doing it on my own, and its all fun.
So, perhaps having gone from 0 Thunderjets to (as of this evening) 120 in the space of almost exactly 1 year can be partially explained just by the joy of putting them together, right? Well, yes, but if you are wondering how much fun it can be racing these cars against one another-or the clock-when they all have the same basic chassis, the answer to this is actually the most funnest part of all!
“Isn’t it all the same after a while?” The very surprising answer is to that question is: not at all!
Well, that answer surprised me, anyway! I have been consistently amazed at the remarkable variations I see in the performance of all these cars; in fact, while it may be overstating things to claim “no two are alike”, it’s not much of an overstatement! Some cars are faster at the top end than others, some accelerate faster, some corner better, some brake better. Part of the thrill is in seeing what I’m going to get when they first hit the track, and the rest is in adjusting, modifying, and trying new tricks to make them better.
I won’t pretend to understand all the dynamics involved here because, when taking the laws of physics into account, there are likely hundreds of variables: tires, axles, weight, wheelbase, overhang, balance, traction magnet strength, motor magnet strength, motor magnet matching, friction, wear, dirt, lubrication, fairy dust! Every little thing plays into it because, like I’ve said when discussing fitting a chassis to a body, when you are working with this scale, millimeters become miles and nanoseconds become minutes.
I’ve already mentioned that there is a huge variance in the power of the magnets that come on these Auto World chassis; I’ve had 6 chassis out of the box that were miserably slow and in 3 of those 6 cases all I had to do was replace the stock magnets that came in them with a different set of stock magnets from another chassis and the difference in the performance was night and day! And then I’ve had a few that were just hopeless slow-pokes (all of them but one, incidentally, the transparent red ones) and nothing I could do would improve them. So right there, we have a wide gap in production tolerances that account for some of these differences. One could argue that this is actually a sign of poor quality control, and I won’t disagree, but it keeps things interesting!
Beyond that, each body has its own characteristics. While I doubt that aerodynamics plays much of a role at this scale, I can’t swear that it doesn’t, but weight definitely does; some of the smaller and more compact bodies, like the Cheetah and the Ford GT-40 are naturally the lightest, and less weight means more speed.
However, does it always mean better overall performance? It doesn’t seem to, at least not in every case; I have some relatively heavy bodies that are fierce performers; my pair of Model Motoring ’67 GTOs and my pair of ’67 Chevy Malibus are amongst the fastest cars in my fleet. One of the biggest and heaviest bodies I have, the Auto World 1970 Mustang Fastback, is an example of how you can’t assume weight = poor performance; of the 2 cars I have with this body, one of them is only fair-to-midland on the track after hours of tuning, while the other is almost always a finalist-and often a winner-in nearly every tournament it runs in.
In fact, I have a couple of cars that are so fast they are almost useless because they can’t be controlled; my yellow Jaguar E-Type spends more time upside down that right side up because its so hyper-fast that even after practicing for hours its still all I can do to complete a lap without flipping over; most cars with poor handling can be cured with a different set of wheels or tires or even axles, and sometimes the issue is the pick-up shoes or the springs, and changing them-or even swapping them from side to side-makes a dramatic improvement. And I have a couple that have vexing handling issues I’ve never been able to solve: I’ve changed the pick-ups, the springs, the wheels, axles, tires and guide pins and still they just won’t corner worth a damn. Most cars run best when they are warmed up; a few seem to do better cold! Sometimes just a tire refresh makes a world of difference, but I’ve had a couple where replacing worn tires with an identical set of brand new ones actually made them worse!
To all of this, you can add driving skill; how well I know each car, how much practice I’ve had with it, how forgiving it is to mistakes and how quickly it bites me in the ass when I put the wrong amount of power down in the wrong place; there’s luck involved, sure, but just like in real life, skill is 75% of winning the race.
So who’s to say what the answers are to all the mysteries? I can solve a lot of the problems and make a lot of improvements, and I’ve learned a lot in a year, but there is still an element of mystery and surprise to the results I see at the finish line. More than anything, its these “what will happen today” questions, and the challenges of making constant little improvements and learning what works and what doesn’t, that keep me coming back to my workshop and my track over and over again.
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