Race Report

Authors: - Bob Carter

The western heat was held on another nice late summer day. Both cars running in both races. Zebedee had its gearbox removed for this one in the hope of getting a win in F24+; this would give us a chance in the championship. To give ourselves the best possible chance, we selected the batteries for Zebedee’s F24+ and tried to slipstream R-pods (the car we had to beat) to give ourselves the best chance of getting the win.

 F24+ race

We started well and Zebedee got nicely onto Rpods’ tail. Unfortunately the greenpower timekeeping system crashed and the race was stopped for a few minutes (with Rpods and Zebedee going a lap further than anyone else….) and restarted after a few minutes. As before, Zebedee tailed Rpods closely but the writing was on the wall when Zebedee had to pit a lap earlier. However, an excellent pitstop gained Zebedee a full minute (perhaps the Rpod team were a bit rattled by our tactics? Who knows) and we started to think about possibly managing the car to a win, but the battery volts were dropping fast and we had to back off in order to keep going to the end; so we lost it in the last couple of laps to the R-pod, again. Brian, having a steady race, was in much better shape than Zebedee at the end and could probably have beaten it, finishing on the same lap. A 2-3 finish is pretty good, but not good enough to keep us in the championship.

Zebedee’s performance was particularly frustrating. The car was supposedly in its proper configuration, yet it was actually slower than Brian, and used more juice to go less far and slower than at the same track last year.

F24 heat

No pressure in this race with both cars already qualified for the final, it was just a ‘workout’ for the teams. Lucky really – we were dreadful! We managed to put used F24+ batteries into Zebedee at the first battery change – with no gears we were incredibly lucky to make it back to the pits. Zebedee started late anyway as we had decided its poor performance MUST be because the motor was old and failing (it did have over a millimetre of end float on the shaft) so we fitted a new motor.

The new motor was exactly the same as the old one.

And Zebedee continued to use more power to go the same speed as Brian to the end of the race.

The race was won by Rotary Racer, who went 23 miles further than Brian (they are the team in form this year)

 So, a nice day out, but our racing performance was alarmingly poor. The battery mixup was just the icing on the cake… Brian trundled round to a reasonable 11^th place out of 49. The ancient CB radio walkie- talkies I brought along worked well for control to pits communications. Zebedee’s loss of form was unexplained and needed to be found and fixed before the final in 2 weeks…..

Technical View Point

Authors: - Bob Carter