A good turnout of ten drivers were present for one of our most popular, challenging and entertaining events - special stage rallying - followed by our Slot.It Challenge and F1 races. It was nice to welcome FRC newcomer Edward B to digital slot car competition and great to see him wet his feet in the rally stages.
Once again the stages proved to be very competitive and unforgiving, as I was reminded of on the second lap of the very first stage when I overdid it heading up towards the Dunlop bridge and crashed the car basically dead-centre of the track and out of easy reach of the marshals. Distracted by this, I added more time to my run when I stopped the car at the end of the fourth lap, thinking the stage was over, then took off again to do the final lap. These mistakes cost me about 30 seconds so its a lesson well learnt. Coming back to the competition, the overall rally times were very close and in the case of second, third and fourth places, the time differences between these three were 0.462 and 0.307. That's over three stages of 5 laps, 15 laps in total!
Slot.It Challenge was a bit crazy, with several automatic lane changes happening throughout the 50 lap race. I personally also found areas where my car would slow then get back up to speed, however this may have been a chip issue in my case. Not surprisingly, the Bhola cars set the pace. F1 however was quite an eye-opener, as Team Bhola arrived with two brand-new cars - a Ferrari and a Mercedes - set up with the same type of body and chassis as my McLaren, but with a different power-plant and boy did they perform! Both cars qualified under 5 seconds, with Luke B setting an all-time fastest ever F1 time. Needless to say, the competition were racing for third place from the start.
During the evening, we took the usual breaks for chatting and refreshments and before we knew it, time had run away from us, preventing a second round of the races. Nonetheless, everyone had a good time and I'm sure all left pondering the changes needed to get their cars to the front or keep them there!
The results
The rally competitors:
Slot.It Challenge starting grid - Luke B's Nissan R90CK on pole, followed by my Nissan R89C, Ramesh's R89C, Ramesh's Toyota 88C driven by Luke, O'Brie's Mazda 787 and Steve's Toyota 88C driven by Richard R:
Formula 1 starting grid - Luke B puts Team Bhola's beautiful, brand-new Ferrari on pole with a blistering all-time lap record on its debut, Ramesh's similarly-prepared also brand new Mercedes, my McLaren, Steve's McLaren, Richard R driving Steve's Dallara, and O'Brie's McLaren:
Before closing up, we ran some laps in our scratch-built cars. Here Steve's flared-out Escort Mk I leads Ramesh's and Luke B's Mk II and Mk I Escorts. My dark blue Triumph TR4A is mostly hidden behind the shrubbery at the back:
(How this is computed: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=393)
Congratulations to the winners.
Next event's classes: Class grouping C: Modified Production (MP), Restricted GT (RGT), Restricted LMP (RLMP).
Don't forget to see the updated overall fastest times and the fastest times by driver and class for 2019 to know what the benchmarks are for your cars, the updated class average qualifying times and the updated fastest times for 2019. Older stats can be found in the Archive area of the forum.
See you on the circuit...
Gordon
great stuff!!
