First round of this year’s Cheap Car today.
Did hardly anything to the car. Decided to use up the tyres we had, partly because I bought a new (well, 233km old) dirt bike during the week.
We found that spacing the back of the front control arm down helped turn-in and improved front braking traction on the rally car, so tried the same on the Cheap Car. Basically the same idea as an anti-lift set up on a WRX but in this case it is more about killing off the inbuilt anti-dive geometry. Anti-anti-dive, I guess! ?
And that was about it for prep/mods.
Track was wet at the start of the day, I went and cruised around and set a very slow time that was third fastest!!?
As the track dried out, other teams leap-frogged us and we dropped to 12th or so. Then Petey put in a 63.9 second lap that pulled us up to 10th.
They have tweaked the rules regarding driver times this year - still a 15 minute maximum, but they have cracked down on the “first and last stints combined must add up to less than 30 minutes” thing. Now there’s more than one viable strategy.
We stuck to the old strategy of taking a 20 minute first stint, but now have to shorten the second last stint to ensure we have enough driver changes. Other teams did different things, but it did mean that there was a point where we were leading the race ... on paper. In reality, we had to do another pit stop and were more like 6th, but it looked good!
Anyhow, the different strategies meant that it was hard to keep track of where we really were, but there was no question that the car was better.
Turned out that we were 4th, which was nice. The car in 5th (#35) was on the same lap, everyone else was at least a full lap ahead or behind, so really it was just a matter of staying out of trouble.
Paulie restarted after lunch, and made the smart decision to not get caught up with any battles with car 35 - they had their fastest driver in it for the restart, but we were reasonably confident that our team was faster overall.
So we lost 4th place on the restart, but were in a safe, comfortable 5th and stayed there, although the different strategies made it difficult to know for sure.
Discovered one of the front tyres was rooted mid-afternoon. Wore out the inside edge, to the point that there were steel belts hanging out.
Petey, Paulie and ring-in helper Fro managed to swap it faster than the 90 second minimum for the pit stop.
In my last stint, I caught #35. Had a great battle, with only a slight touch when he ran wide when I was on the outside on the exit of Turn 3 - not a dick move, just a racing incident. No damage either. I snuck past a lap or so later.
In the end, it didn’t matter - they somehow took two laps off of us in the afternoon(!!!?!) so my pass didn’t change the outcome even when they copped a one lap penalty for going over-drive time.
We finished 5th on the track, but the car that apparently snuck into 4th had done some crazy things with their pit strategy and were never really ahead - they copped 13 laps worth of penalties in total.
So, that’s how we finished 4th.
Our best ever finish, in a car that is far easier to drive. I am keen to do another track day and experiment more with the anti-anti-dive because I think there more improvement to be had.
