It's probably not a surprise I bought this car. I go on and on about short cars being great and everything, and when I got the NSR 908/3 Escuderia Montjuich and ran it, I immediately knew it was going to need a partner. I thought a 917K could do it, but they're too different. And this car hadn't been released yet, and I didn't bother with pre-ordering or anything. Then when it came time to buying one it was there and in stock.
Since this was my second 908/3 in a very short time, I pretty much followed in the other car's tiresteps regarding the initial tuneup. I wasted no time installing the grub screws and setting the ride height. Did a full lube/oil, checked and set all screws, flared out the braids and sanded the tires. I can't say enough about how good NSR slot cars are. They're very well put together, don't really have any weaknesses, and are pretty forgiving in regards to tune-ability. They don't really need much in the way of tuning to run well as they run great right out of the box.
All of the NSR cars have a break-in period, which seemed to last around 1000 laps or so on my current track. You can feel the newness when you first get them running.
There's definitely going to come a time for a huge showdown between all the short track cars. Between the two 908s, the Alfa and the Chaparrals [yeah, I'd put them in there], it should be a good race.
Something else came in the box, and that's some replacement tires. I didn't want to do a wholesale tire swap, as I thing the Slot.it tires are just fine, but I wanted to try it. I picked up a pair of rear tires from Ortmann, which is a well known company that makes tires you either like or you don't. Since I wasn't sure I needed them or that they would improve things. I did pick up a couple of pairs for a specific purpose:
After years of sitting off to the side, neglected, I finally bit the bullet and bought new tires for the old Carreras. Neither of them is particularly old, mind you. It just seems that way. Anyhow, with all this talk about adding brands to the collection, well, Carrera's a brand, and they should have some representation. And I know is this R18 isn't the greatest car they have, and Carrera doesn't have the tune-ability that the other brands do, but it should be fast enough to make it a spoiler if a Slot.it car crashes. I don't expect it to be anything but a backmarker, and a lowly one at that.
And last, but well, last....the Audi Safety Car. Both this and the R18 above got a fresh set of Ortmann tires, which gets them back on the track and respectable again. The Ortmann compound seems kind of hard compared to the stock Slot.it rubber, but we'll see how things iron out.
I'm going to do a thorough retune of both of these cars to get them in optimal shape, and they'll run in the Sport Class with the Slot.it cars. I think the R18 could be a troublemaker, and can catch a car that's out of shape.
__________
Having 16 working cars is going to be a challenge when it comes to racing. Races will take longer to complete, and cars may or may not get their best treatment before setting a lap time. I hope that doesn't occur, but it's happened before with much less of a field. So it may happen that a race takes multiple days to complete. Either way I now have a goal to compare brands as well as potential performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment