Lots of prep work went into setting up both the software and actual track area at yesterday's inaugural Time Bracket Racing of the now magless FRC era. Somewhat disappointedly, I was joined by only three other drivers, Steve, O'Brie and Keith. Thanks for the support guys. I know that you are amongst the relatively few that share this passion with me and always appreciate your support.
We had an initial issue with the second laptop I'd planned to use, a Windows PC running the SSDC software which for some reason would not communicate with the powerbase, so we fell back on my old faithful Mac which can run both the Mac operating system (macOS) simultaneously with Windows for the SSDC application. In fact I currently have three macOS and two Windows versions installed on this Mac and they can all run simultaneously. I put aside the Windows laptop and have to give kudos to Apple for making things like this possible and a big thumbs down to Microsoft for their complicated and less-logical, less-capable Windows environment.
Soon after getting things going, the powerbase indicated an electrical track short which took us at least an hour to find and fix. One of the under-track connectors we had added for power continuity had started to fray and had caused the short. I have to thank O'Brie for his logical approach to determining exactly where this had occurred and we were finally able to get things working so that we could make a start to the program.
We started with a 30 minute open practice session where we hustled to try each of the many cars we brought along, then moved on to the official qualifying. After running five 3-minute quali sessions of four drivers each and despite having many more cars available to qualify, we decided to start the racing as time was rushing on. In total, we qualified 20 cars and this resulted in three race grids, the first two for four cars each, the third for two cars. We ended up running just the first two races and because of the early delays, this worked out fine as the sun had already set by the end of the second race.
Unfortunately for one driver, his race time was less than his qualifying time by over the allowed 0.5 sec, demoting him to last place and causing a disqualification from the points in that race. As a testament to how close the racing was, in the second race all four cars finished on the same lap, despite each car coming from a different FRC saloon car class - Clubman, Modified Prod, BTCC and Historic Saloon. These cars would normally never see each other on the same grid.
I'll close by repeating the last introduction paragraph from our previous event's race report:
Despite these issues, slot car racing is always a lot of fun, and we did have that. It would really be nice to see a larger attendance of drivers though. Oh well... maybe next time.
The results
All qualifying times, from fastest to slowest:
The computer-generated grids:
TBR D - Saloon nm
TBR D - Saloon race 1 grid - Steve/Renault Megane, Gordon/Zakspeed Capri, O'Brie/BMW 320i, Keith/BMW 330i:
Computer TBR D - Saloon race 1 results:
TBR D - Saloon race 2 grid - Gordon/NSU TT, Keith/Zakspeed Escort, Steve/BMW 125i, O'Brie/Capri:
Computer TBR D - Saloon race 2 results:
Unfortunately, Keith ("Driver 4" in the SSDC results below) was disqualified by doing a race lap time that was more than 0.5 sec lower than his qualifying time.
(How this is computed: https://www.frcforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=393)
Congratulations to the winners.
Next event's classes: To be determined.
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
