Quarantine 2020 - 16 Days In

This is a weird timeline.

But it has given me an opportunity to spend time in the attic working on my track. The table had been doing double duty as an indoor training facility for my new Axial SCX10 II Chevy Blazer crawler. But now that the weather is nicer the table is being turned back into slot car racing central.

I wanted to keep it simple, yet long. A few mild switchbacks to keep things interesting, and then it's all-out speed from there.

Nothing like a fresh racetrack to get one going again. While I enjoy the RC truck outdoors, if I were somehow needing to stay indoors for an extended period of time, I think it would be a good time to have a 20' slot car table.
So I got out the vacuum, did the green grass, wiped down each track piece with a lint-free towel, and started building. One of the first things that popped into my head was to make an exaggerated version of the original suggested layout of the original box kit I got. It was the Carrera Le Mans Contest. It presented an over-8 layout, with one loop slightly longer to accomodate the power track.

This was the suggested layout for Le Mans Contest. I ordered more track pieces as quickly as I could.

So once I got the elongated version of the layout up, I still had a whole bunch of unused track pieces, including some really sweet 2/30 and 3/30 curves. So I made a couple of mild switchbacks and inserted them into the layout; one at the end of the long straight and one just before the start of the overpass. I don't usually do layouts with overpasses, but got the itch to do this one.

After building the initial layout, I opted not to change anything about this part of it. All extensions and changes occur at the other end of the layout.

At first I thought a track like this would favor the longer cars, but it looks like each car is doing great so far on it. I haven't done any official timing yet. I still want to give each car a once-over first. But I'll be doing a race on this track for sure.

Looking down the end to Turn 1. Those nice easy curves do very little to keep the car stable before hitting the brakes off the straightaway. 

I'm loving the 2/30 - 3/30 track combination. Even if I only use them in the form of esses, they still do so much to the overall track. The flow improves dramatically, even when they're relegated to a secondary role. They make straights much more interesting, as well as elongating existing ones. And while you can fly through them, they'll still kick you off if you're not careful. You just crash at a faster speed, that's all.

The Porsche is sitting on a 2/30, turned right, connected to a left 3/30, then a left 1/60. So coming off the straight, the car starts to climb right, then left and starts to unweight, then a hard left. It's super easy to throw the backside out on that 1/60. 

I like speed. I like long tracks with fast flow and challenging spots. Making multi-radius curves really pushes the driver to drive the track. You can tell when you let off too early, or didn't handle the turn effectively, or maybe spun out in it. When you have a track of only 1/60 turns, what happens is that you get into a subconscious thing where you know exactly where your thumb needs to be to make it through a 1/60 curve at the best speed. Once you find that, it's just a matter of always hitting that mark for the best time.
But when you have turns made of different radii, suddenly that one turn becomes a multi-faceted monster, capable of either taking the wind out of you or taking your car off the track. That's rad. In that pic above, I've been working on the best way through that section. The curves going in are so smooth that the 1/60 curve comes up very abruptly. Approaching it wrong guarantees a wipe out. Leaving it wrong takes all the power out of the car for the overpass.

So I'm going to run with this track for a bit. I still have extras, and I might use a couple of track pieces still. Not sure about that yet. I think with a few additions/adjustments we could have a good track that doesn't have so many potential drift elements [both 180° endcaps]. I have a couple straights and those little curves I might use. We'll see.