JQ at the TITC – The Wrap Up

The 21st edition of the TITC is now done & dusted and having made his debut at the world’s greatest annual Electric Touring Car race, it was great to see Offroad racer Joseph Quagraine leaving the track on Sunday evening on high after the whole experience.  Maybe the high was not from his own racing exploits in Bangkok, but the process of car set-up and the fact he ended up helping out some pretty big names has the man behind Invisible Speed wanting to come back for more.  Having entertained us with his daily column from the race, here is his wrap up piece from the Infinity RC Addict Circuit.  Take it away JQ……..

The race is over, we got dominance by Michal Orlowski, another classic Marc Rheinard last lap pass, and Pekko won his C-final. I also had my second E-final where my hands were only shaking for 1 out of 5 minutes, and I finished 3rd. I managed to enjoy my final laps.

Let’s take a look at a few setup ideas that I found to be very good on this high grip, edgy feeling, and for Touring Cars bumpy track.

There is no one correct way to set a car up, but there are better and worse ways. I believe that for the best base, you need to adjust your roll centers by checking the geometry in some CAD software for example. To put it simply, I generally want the front RC to be slightly lower than the rear RC, and both to be below ground level. There are different ways of achieving this, with different levels of camber gain and geometric stiffness, and that’s where experience comes in. A setup like this results in a car that is stuck to the track, rotates naturally, and at the limit tends to push. Then you need to adjust everything to this base. Depending on the track there are a few decisions you need to make early on.

1. Long upper camber links/arms help to slow everything down, calm down response, give less initial grip, more overall grip. On a flowing layout, inconsistent grip, bumps and hot weather where conserving tyres is important, long upper links is a good option to decide on and stick to.

2. Hard rear diff: A thicker rear diff oil will help maintain rear grip off power, and through a corner, and give better acceleration out of corners. If the car pushes, or is loose out of corners, it is often better to solve those issues in other ways, and keep the thick rear diff oil.

3. A basic principle of car handling, is understanding how load transfer increases or decreases the grip of an end or a corner of a car. More load on a tyre = more grip up to a point, and faster load transfer = more initial grip. The grip changes occur faster, the car is more responsive, you have a higher peak of traction, but losing your car into a slide also happens faster without warning. The suspension of the car is what determines how quickly load transfers. The chassis moving and rolling in corners is delaying load transfer. No suspension would mean instant load transfer. The long links is one way to slow down load transfer, allowing the car to roll more. The most powerful way however, is the shocks. For a condition where we want to slow down load transfer, we want heavy damping, but still enough pack to have good response and control. A way to achieve this is to increase the amount of holes in the pistons of the same size you are running, and use a thicker oil. The heavier slower damping will give your car more consistent grip and easier more controllable handling in an edgy high grip surface.

There you have 3 key setup points that I feel are important to lock down early on, and then you start fine tuning your car with camber, toe, droop, bump steer etc. We can talk more about that later.

I just want to reiterate one point.  The difference between Q4 and A1 for Michal was a 0.5mm bump steer shim, making his outside tyre bump in under compression, increasing entry steering, allowing for less wheel input, resulting in more steering, corner speed, and a 3.3s win margin with a car that for him felt easier to drive.

The previous significant evolution in TC was when Oleg released his Awesomatix.  The next evolution will be a setup developed for a particular driver, giving him exactly what he needs to perform at his best, while maintaining….invisible speed.

View previous ‘JQ at the TITC’ columns here – Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3