We celebrated our 300th FRC official event with a large, appropriately-decorated cake courtesy Luke T, a few dozen shrimp wantons brought by Alex and a 2-litre bottle of Stanley's potent but excellent home-made cider, along with a lot of laughs and camaraderie and, best of all, four classes of exciting racing on the now almost fourteen year old FRC circuit. Turning up and joining me to be part of it were Steve, O'Brie, Luke, Alex, Keith and Spick (Nicholas E). My two little granddaughters Maddie and Ally were also present for the occasion.
Scheduled classes were Kitbash, American Pony Car, Scalectric BTCC, Slot.It Challenge and Ferrari Challenge IROC and we had full six-car grids for KB and BTCC, five cars for SC and four for APC, all filled with excitement and a fair amount of side-swipe contact!
Unfortunately the track/powerbase started acting up as soon as we switched on the power, so we replaced the powerbase with O'Brie's identically-modified (but never used at FRC) one which solved the problem until the same issue recurred in the third and fourth races. We still were able to work out the final placings in these races, but we were unable to run the IROC races. The problem is not likely to be coming from the powerbase since O'Brie's showed the same symptom where the outside lane started registering as throttle 1 no matter which controller/car was used, whilst the inside lane registered everything correctly. We now need to look at the lane changers and anything else which may be causing this problem. The track is getting old like me!
Thanks for the cider Stan!
Wantons, snacks, cider and cake:
Keith, Alex and O'Brie relaxing and chatting before the racing began:
Granddaughter Maddie helping me cut the cake:
The guys trying out Stan's cider:
We even had a rainbow joining in the celebration:
The results
Kitbash grid: Steve's beautiful Corvette Sting Ray on pole, followed by Keith driving Steve's Sierra Cosworth, O'Brie's Peugeot 205, my BMC Mini Cooper, Spick driving Steve's Nissan Skyline and Luke driving my NSU TT:
Kitbash podium cars:
American Pony Car grid: Steve's Javelin, followed by my Challenger, Keith driving Steve's Mustang and O'Brie's Charger:
Race recorded by Luke:
American Pony Car podium cars:
BTCC grid: Steve's BMW 125i, followed by my MG6, Spick driving O'Brie's Passat, O'Brie's Civic, Peter driving Steve's BMW 330i and Luke's MG6:
BTCC podium cars:
Slot.It Challenge grid: Steve's Nissan R89C, my similar car, O'Brie's Sauber Mercedes and Peter driving Steve's Toyota 88C:
Slot.It Challenge podium cars:
(How this is computed: https://www.frcforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=393)
Congratulations to the winners.
Granddaughters Ally and Maddie having their turn after the official races:
Next event's classes: To be announced.
Don't forget to see the updated overall fastest times and the fastest no-magnet times by driver and class to know what the benchmarks are for your cars. Older stats can be found in the Archive area of the forum.
See you on the circuit...
Gordon
