The TITC inside line with Salton Dong

Anyone who follows electric racing, either onroad or offroad, will know Salton Dong or if they haven’t yet met him in person they’ll recognise him from pit photos from the biggest races around the world.  Involved with Hobbywing from its very early days, he is the face of motor and ESC manufacturer.  As supporters of our TITC coverage for the last two years, we thought for this year we’d do a daily catch-up with Salton to see what kind of things he deals with in supporting team drivers and Hobbywing customers at races.  A huge fan of the TITC, one of the reason for that is Open Brushless which Salton’s says challenges his skill set in getting the best performance from the electronics, unlike modified which he says is far more straight forward in terms of set-up.  That said this year it was Modified that presented a very interesting issue that needed his input to solve – we’ll come back to that shortly!  On the challenge of Open Brushless, a class Hobbywing are the defending champions of, he explains that the power setting needs to be very accurate and coming to this year’s TITC with their new Bandit G4R motor they had to find new settings.  With help from team drivers, it took only 1-day to get the best setting that they could then share to customers, and they have a lot of those here with Salton pointing out that more than 70% are using their products.  As they say the proof is in the pudding and improvements mean the cars are even faster than last with Salton highlighting that they have recorded a top speed of 104kph here this year.

While everyone likes variety and a change now & then, the new track layout for the 21st edition of the TITC appears to have presented an extra element of strain that has become the straw that broke the camel’s back.  This year’s anti-clockwise track layout means the cars reach maximum speed on the main straight undergoing very heavy braking for what Salton described as performing a U-turn to continue the lap and this has been causing Mod driver spur gear failures.  He said the problem actually came to light with their star team driver Bruno Coelho who did seven runs and broke seven spur gears after only 1 or 2 laps each time.  At first they thought there was a problem with the spur gear material but on further investigation and walking around the track he realised that the defending TITC was not the only one having the issue, but a driver who likes everything on the limit it was effecting Bruno more than most.  Xray’s Alexander Hagberg also found himself having a similar issue.

Salton, who enjoys a very good working relationship with the long time Hobbywing team driver, said the main solution they came up with was switching Bruno’s prototype Infinity from 64 to 48 pitch gearing, adding that Michal Orlowski is also running that here.  Putting the failures down to high traction, high speed, plus heavy braking, and very quickly at that, Salton said this has never been seen before at TITC, the other direction on the track having always featured a sweeper meaning more gradual slowing of the cars.  While they don’t know the exact reason for the failures, he said it’s most likely a combination of elements but in response they had a temporary firmware update created remotely and within an hour ready to run on the car.  Reducing the initial brake response to try and reduce the speed more gradually, unfortunately rain yesterday (Wednesday) meant they couldn’t test the combined solutions ahead of today’s official Day 1 pf action so they arranged to travel across the city of Bangkok to the Huge RC indoor asphalt track that hosted last year’s Nitro Touring Car World Championship.  There they tested the new firmware together with the 48 pitch gearing and small strengthening that Bruno’s mechanic Francesco Martini added to the chassis.  On the high traction straight at Huge the test proved successful and as a result Bruno went the full distance in both of todays controlled practices and open qualifier.  We suspect Salton will be hoping for a less challenging day at the office tomorrow but we’ll checking in with him to find out.