We had a turnout of five drivers for our 346th event for Rally Car and Time Attack runs, including Ram, who we were glad to see as usual. We always appreciate his making the effort to do the relatively long drive from south to join us. After the rally stages, he had to rush off for another engagement, so was unable to be a part of the time attack runs.
During car testing and practice, the inside lane of the track once again slowed down dramatically from the back straight right up to the Carousel and sometimes beyond. This typically worsened when more cars were simultaneously running, bringing the cars to almost a crawl. We tried the method of disconnecting the powerbase track section then reconnecting it, however this made no difference. Ram tried using CRC 2-26 on all the rail joints, which helped slightly, however when all the cars were on track, we still got substantial power loss in the same sections. Since we'd be running just a single car at a time for both rally and time attack, this didn't affect the competition, but we definitely need to address this before the next race meet where there'd be six cars on track all at once.
During the Rally stages, Ram dominated, however both Steve and Peter got down to some very quick laps as well, getting very close to Ram's times. I chose to drive my Peugeot 205 instead of my Alpine, but I drove terribly, de-slotting several times in the stages. The big surprise was the performance of Luke's new Porsche which he just recently built, the car performing extremely well. Luke kindly offered it for use in the time attack runs and it got down to very low 8-second times and almost into the 7-second bracket.
In the end, despite just having the five of us present and just four for the time attack runs, it was an enjoyable afternoon of close rallying and time attack stages.
The usual pics from Luke:
Three brand new Revo Slot Mazda RX7s appeared at FRC, alongside three old slot car racers:
All the rally cars that were present:
Steve and Peter cleaning the track:
Showing Ram my Alpine's raised motor:
Ram brought along six rally cars:
The track washrooms with some advertising added to the walls and roof:
Ram and I trying to fixe some low-power areas of the track:
Steve and Peter's rally cars:
Luke's well prepared and fast Porsche:
Me checking the underside of Luke's Porsche:
Boardroom meeting:
Rally results
Official timesheet:
The orange highlights below indicate who did the best time for each lap of each stage, the driver who did the fastest lap for the stage and the driver with the lowest variation in times driving the stage.
Congrats to Ram for setting the fastest rally stage lap time of 7.842 sec. We're now in the 7 sec range!
Time Attack results
Official timesheet:
As with the rally, orange highlights below indicate who did the best time for each lap of each time attack run, the driver who did the fastest lap and the driver with the lowest variation in times.
Congrats to Steve for setting the fastest time attack lap time of 8.051 sec.
Congratulations to the winners!
Total Championship Points for 2025:
Next event's classes: Clubman, Slot.It Challenge and F1.
See you on the circuit...
Gordon
racing my own tuned slot-car 
