The 3rd race of the Middle Swedish Electric car Cup, the largest indoor series in Sweden, was run in Eskilstuna, the track is permanent and the layout had been up for a while so many drivers had practiced on it before the race. Because of that and the fact that I hadn’t tested my new XRAY X12 car I decided to go there on Friday evening for some installation runs and test different speed controller settings on my Novak Kinetic with 13.5 motor which is the 1:12 class in MSEC. The track is not that big and did not look particular hard to drive but it was quite bumpy which could make it challenging.
The start setup I used was, 2.5° reactive caster with 1mm shim behind the a-arm, with 0.020 front springs, in the damper I used 700cst oil and the gold spring, in the side tubes I used 6000cst oil and the silver springs was used as side springs. The tires I started with were double pink in the front and magenta in the rear.
The car felt really good but I needed more steering in the hairpin like corners so I switched the side springs to sm 0.020 (softer) and that gave the car some more turn in. But my main thing to test was the settings in the speed controller so I played around with the timing on the motor and in the esc. When I looked at my lap times they were dropping but after 3 packs I was .5 seconds from the best lap times which was a bit worrying since I thought the car was excellent and the speed felt ok, I didn’t know what the grip level was so I decided to pack up and wait for race day and see what the competition could do.
After the first practice I noticed that I could more or less keep up with the rest but I was a bit behind so I got some inputs on esc settings from my friend Staffan Karlsson who had been testing a lot at the track, I made some small changes and also since the grip level had come up quite a lot since my last run on Friday I changed tires to yellow in the rear but kept the double pinks in the front.
The second practice went really well and I could now compare the lap times which were in the same tenth as the top four, around 8.1second. This showed 2 things, the grip was better on Saturday and my car was good so I was a bit more relaxed when the qualification started!
Since the grip was picking up more and more I decided to try a different front tire so I went for lilac instead of dbl pinks. At the warm up I felt that I was missing front grip, wrong tire choice…the start went off and I immediately lost some places but after a minute or two I noticed that I was gaining on the cars in front of me again and in the end I was 3rd. It was not completely wrong tire choice but the high-grip line was too narrow so I decided to go back to dbl pink in the front with no other change to the car, I also went up on the gearing from 63mm to 64mm. This was good enough for making the fastest round of the day by half a lap!
The car was excellent and the speed was excellent and my driving was actually really good!
It was really close on lap times though, the top 5 was on the same tenth besides Mackan Göransson also driving an Xray X12 who had the fastest laptime 7.9, more than a tenth quicker than the rest of us but some small mistakes kept him from TQing. Since my car was really good the only things I changed for the last qualification was making new tires so that I could break them in for the finals, I also geared up another 1.5mm.
At the start I immediately got a gap down to the rest of the field and the car was so easy to drive! At the 4 minute mark the speaker said that the best lap was 8.3 which were disappointing since it felt like it was going so well…. I was leading the round the whole time so I was satisfied with not losing my TQ spot. When the heat was over I looked at the timesheet and was surprised, I was still TQ but now a lap better than everyone else and I also had the fastest lap of 7.8sec.
This felt really great! The car was super easy to drive but also super-fast and the speed were really good!
Going in to the finals it was decided that there would be only 8 cars in them, this was a good decision because the racing would be better with less cars on the quite small track.
I felt that only one thing could mess it up in the finals for me and that was myself... and I did in the first final. After the first minute I went on a curb and slammed in the outside barrier, this lost me time so that Max Rosén could get close, unfortunately he tried to make a pass that took us both out so we had to start from the back. We did catch the rest but then it was my turn to take Max out with a too bold try to pass so we each lost a place and I ended up 5th. The good thing though was that Mackan with the other Xray won the final quite comfortably from 3rd starting position.
Going in to the second final I tried to relax and just enjoy the fact that the car was so fun to drive, I got a gap and fell in to a good rhythm and kept making the gap bigger. In the end I didn’t want to mess things up so I backed off a bit and kept my lead to the goal by half a lap from the steadily improving Magnus Hedlund, who always seems to find something extra for the finals. Mackan was less fortunate this time and had a big accident just after a couple of laps which sent him back to last place by 3 laps, he drove really fast but was too far behind to catch up to anyone.
The third final was about the same as the second, I got a good start and found a good rhythm, and again, the car and speed was super! Despite losing some time getting hit when I was lapping a car I made the fastest final of the day and won by more than a half a lap and I never felt any pressure from behind. Mackan was doing really good until the last minute when he got hit lapping a backmarker which dropped him down, but fortunately it was enough for him to still end up on the podium in 3rd place making it 2 Xrays in the top 3!
In the end I noticed that I hadn’t change anything on the car during the day, I just tried different tires and made small adjustments on my esc/motor settings that in the end was close to what Charlie Suangka from Novak had tipped me to do. Since I didn’t need to make any big changes during the day it was relaxing and I could really enjoy driving the car which in the end helped me win the race.
Results:
- Mickael Brandt / XRAY X12 / Novak / Futaba
- Magnus Hedlund
- Mackan Göransson / XRAY X12
- Maxx Rosén
- Staffan Karlsson
- Jonas Eriksson
- Ronnie Piispanen
- Andreas Böök
Cheers
/Mickael
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