Preseason Final Tuneups

 So far things are going off as planned. Yesterday I went through the last four cars and lubed/oiled and setup the chassis. Tomorrow comes the tire truing, and with any luck, track laying. It's cold outside, so I'm staying in and it's giving me a great opportunity to do this. 

The Ferrari and the M6B had already been lubed/oiled, so I flared the brushes and set the chassis to my standard "on the loose side of snug", with plans for fine tuning when the track is together. Before that can happen, I need to do some living room cleanup and organization so I can get the track layout down. I'm planning on going with this:

There are a couple of reasons I like this layout: first, the big loop is actually a bit of a brain teaser, as the entry and exit to the loop line up, so your eyes tend to keep going down the straight and not turn into the loop. I know you'd think "no it doesn't", but trust me, it does. The other straight goes under the loop, which I think adds to the mind-bendedness of the loop entry. Also, I like that I get a little bit more challenge out of the layout. I'll be able to go quite fast through the blue curves, but I'll need to be careful going through the brown ones. I'll be on the inside lane the entire way, which is also challenging. This is also a track I wanted to revisit after trying it the first time. There are a handful of layouts I want to go back to. This is just the first one that popped up. I think I might be able to add a straight or two.

The Ferrari is gonna be a hauler, no doubt about it. I expect good things from this car.

Timing of events are coming out well. I figure I've got about an hour's worth of tires to true and I'll be ready to set up the track. I'll of course be cleaning all the track pieces and making sure everything is up and running before race days begin. 

My plan after the track is setup is to begin a 'test and tune' session, where each car will get a handful of laps to get a look and have any adjustments made. This will be as much pre-race setup as I want to be doing to the entire field. After that it'll be dealt with on a more individual basis. So each car will get some untimed laps to work out on for a bit before the racing starts. I'll be taking a look at tires especially, and will go to replacements if needed.

oh....nothing. I'm just going to put this here....

A couple of quick observations:

1. I'm thinking that having only 20 cars receive points after the race might not be enough. I might extend that to 40 cars, so the rest of the field has a chance to sort themselves out a bit. Plus, having 15 cars missing out on points is a lot better than what I have planned now.

As of tonight's count, I have 55 eligible cars for these races. A full 35 cars will be eliminated and receive no points for the race, since a car needs to finish in the top 20 to score points. I can tell you that the cars run so close on my track that there are going to be a load of upsets. When more than half the field will be going off with 0 points, that's gonna hurt. We'll see how it works. If it's a disaster, I can change it on the fly and can back-credit points. The 20-car plan might sort out after a few races and actually work. If not, then I'll do that. Although the more I think about it, the more I like 40 as the cutoff point.

2. It's practically anybody's race. The track layout design is one that doesn't offer much in the way of long, fast straights, which levels the playing field for a lot of the cars. 

3. As I'm doing preseason testing, if I find the Revoslot cars are going to run off pace, I might consider the class addition. We'll see about that. They'll still race as they would normally, just their scoring would be slightly different. While still getting points for whatever place they come in, they'll also have their own separate group. So they'll have their own championship inside of a championship. Nice thing is I can make the decision to do it after the race has been run. That way I can see if it'll actually be needed or if the Revoslot cars will be directly competitive with the plastic chassis cars. 

4. Gonna be a long setup, but now that the holidays are out of the way, I don't have much blocking me. I might actually have a little more room these days, as I moved the drums to a practice room and pushed the TV back, as well as rebuild the Lego build area. 

5. I haven't done any photography lately of cars as I have been mostly setup for video and working on a project for a friend. I'll get that up and running when the time is right as well, and likely run video as well as pics. Still, I want to race, so I might not do any video so that I can focus on the racing for the time being. I miss it and want to do it. The camera will naturally come out, but I might not get wall-to-wall coverage of the first one. I am a one-man operation after all.

None of these cars has raced in anger yet.

This is going to be pretty monumental around these parts. I don't expect anything less than epic racing. One thing I did over the past 10 years is amass a pretty epic collection of racing cars. There are so many potential contenders that I really don't know how deep into it I should go. The more I think about it, the more I think that well over 3/4 of the field has a shot of winning this thing. That's really saying something. Considering how close previous races had been with the field before, I fully expect there to be more of that, with likely some pretty close calls coming forward. 

But when I look down the list of cars, it's just going to be crazy good. The tight track will slightly favor the shorter cars, putting all the 908 and Elva and such in a really nice position. I'd expect good racing from the 917/10s, the Lolas, the 512Ms....I could go on. It's insane to think about. I can't put a top 3 together, or even pick a winner. So I'll be focused on making sure each car is running well prior to the race, and they can sort out the rest of the details.