Published March 4th, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran
Hobby Habit Racing - Round 2
Saturday night saw the running of Round 2 of the new Hobby Habit season. I’d done a bit of work on the rear wing on my new body shell to try and resolve the aero problems I had last meeting. In practice, this worked almost too well, and lead to a slight understeer. A slightly softer set of front springs helped that, but allowed the car to roll enough to scrape the chassis on the ground. An extra spacer all round raised the car about 1mm, which was enough to stop the scraping.
I drove a pretty ordinary first race, but still managed to set a time 13 laps. I had one pretty bad roll over, which broke off the new plastic part I’d glued to one end of the wing. Strangely enough I didn’t notice that this was missing until the end of the second race. It would appear that one end cap improves the efficiency of the wing enough to make the car work well. The other two qualifiers were pretty ordinary, and my qualifying time was a pretty ordinary 14/320s time. This was good enough to qualify 3rd for the B Grade.
During the half time break I made up a slightly smaller end plate for the wing and glued that on the car. Hopefully being a bit smaller it’ll be less likely to be torn off.
In the first race the car ran well for 4 or 5 laps until I had a major accident. After that, the car handled very poorly for the remainder of the lap, but seemed to come good towards the end of the lap. Although it still wasn’t right (understeer turning one way, chronic oversteer the other), I decided to press on, and eventually finished 6th. Upon examination of the car I found that I had a broken front shock absorber (the bottom had pulled off of the shaft). Its a miricle the car handled half as well as it did. I repaired the break, and checked the other front shock as well, an get ready for race 2.
In race 2 the car handled poorly from the start, showing very similar understeer/oversteer problems to race 1. I gave up after 3 laps, and pulled the car in for a look. The wheel on the front left wasn’t drooping as much as it should have, and the right shock (not the one I broke last race) felt a lot stiffer than the left. When I pulled it off the car, and had a look previously, I’d put the botom spring retainer on upside down, meaning I had massive preload on one side of the car, but not the other. The droop was just some small rocks caught between chassis and wishbone.
In race 3 the car started out well (second at the end of the third lap), and I finally seemed set to have a good race. About 3 or 4 laps in the car developed the same handling problem again (grrrrr), so I decided to retire, as there was no hope of even a placing by this time. Again, looking at the car it looks like I’ve rolled one of the rear tyres off the rim. A bit of glue should fix that, and I’m almost due for new tyres anyway.
The car is over two years old now, and its starting to get worn out, but hopefully next fortnight will be better.