VRAA 2016 - Round 2 - Pebblestone

[old23]

The cars are now with Gascarnut in southern California. The race at Pebblestone Raceway should be run one weekend this month. Stand by.

Old23/Stewart

[old23]

This just in from California:


All,

My apologies for being so absent. I have been rather busy here with work, some minor surgery and with being in Tacoma last weekend for the BRM 24-hour event.

HOWEVER, Round 2 will be held on PMCC this Saturday, November 19. We will start around 2:00pm PST with qualifying and then go into the racing. There will be a live stream on the following channel:

www.twitch.tv/samsonclassics

More later.

Dennis

[old23]

Here is a re-post of Gascarnut/Dennis's Race 2 Report from over on the SCI Forum:


OK, first off was the GP2.5 class.

Craig Correia kindly did the qualifying of this group of cars, which ended up like this:




We ran 14 heats with three drivers, then swapped out for another 14 with a second set of drivers. This gave each car two runs on each lane for a total of 12 minutes of racing. At the end:




Here are the fast times for each car as well:





Here is the link to the video of the racing. Unfortunately, the qualifying video was very disjointed as a result of no audio and me struggling to get that working:

www.twitch.tv/samsonclassics/v/102345590

Congrats to the podium places!


By the time we got around to the GP 1.5 class we had lost a few drivers who had to leave early, but we did manage to get the run completed.


Barney Poynor handled the qualifying for us.

Video: www.twitch.tv/samsonclassics/v/102346508




We ran the first set of lanes, then took a break, so there are two videos for the actual racing:

www.twitch.tv/samsonclassics/v/102349363

www.twitch.tv/samsonclassics/v/102350303

Once the dust had settled, the results were as follows:




Best laps for each car:




Excellent cars, but a dominating performance from #22, being 3 laps clear af the second place car at the end. For those who heard me calling missed laps for car #8, those were added to the results published here. Sometimes the lap counter misses the very slim cars, as the photocells are next to the braid Posted Image instead of in the slot, something I have been meaning to fix for years and have not.

Dennis

[old23]

Round 2 General Comments By Dennis

A few general comments from my point of view:

As I said earlier, this was the best set of VRAA cars to have come through PMCC since the start of the series. The level of preparation and performance is amazing.

There were so many pretty cars, that I am glad I did not have to choose a Concours winner. And the variety of frame construction, from super little bras and wire creations to totally 3D printed car was wonderful.

In general all the cars performed well. Some had tires that could have benefited from a little more grinding and polishing, as they were still slightly concave or out of round. One or two struggled for decent speed on this track and the #7 car in particular had massive amounts of brakes. I did check it out and nothing appeared to be dragging or binding, despite the suspension details being very close to the rear wheels.

Each car had its own character, and I am sure form the comments you will have heard on the video, all the drivers had a great time driving them.

So, thanks for the opportunity and privilege to have your creations in our hands and under our control.

My apologies for the hiccups at the start of the streaming and the poor quality of the scoring screen later in the day. I will concentrate on getting those right next time!

Good luck to all of you at Jim Hansen's beautiful track in Montana, the cars will be leaving SoCal tomorrow on their way north.

Take care, all!

Dennis

[old23]

Congrats to Slo1quick/Stu for another dominating performance in GP1.5. The #22 Brabham will be very difficult to beat this season. Cheers to CharlesX/Chas for his racy 2nd place qualy and race finish, and for nabbing the fastest lap of the race. The #6 Cooper must have discovered another gear in the crashbox! After starting only 10th on the grid, who would have predicted that Ferrari1950's #69 Porsche would race to a surprising 3rd place finish? Not me. And probably not Marek either! But to top that with a 2nd in the GP2.5 race? What can I say? Pigs must be flying over the Autodrome. Well done, my friend. And well done as well to Phil's Grandkids for their excellent 3rd place result in GP2.5. In a race where only a single lap covered 3rd through 6th places the little yellow Ferrari claimed the final podium step.

My thanks to Dennis and his team of drivers/marshals. The live broadcast was the closest thing to being there.

Old23/Stewart

[David Mitcham]

Hi Stewart

Please thank Dennis and all the people who made this round possible. I watched a bit of the live feed and subsequent videos which was really interesting and I was very impressed with the way the cars were driven and cared for. I won't comment one the disastrous performance of my cars!

Best Regards

David

[old23]

More from Dennis:

I'm glad you all liked the video stream, I promise it will be even better next time you send us your magic little cars to play with!

All the drivers who race with me enjoy these Proxy races immensely, as you no doubt could hear from the somewhat loud enthusiasm at times.

As for the differences between qualifying and race times, this often happens here. The #69 Porsche felt a little loose in quali, but that translated into a lovely car for the race, as it was easy to get it sliding predictably in the turns. The #6 car was a sleeper all day, never doing anything spectacular, but just a very competent race car.

[Andrew Rowland]

Thank you to everyone involved, I know the organisation required to run these.

On balance i'm relatively happy with the results of car #8!

Qualifying is often a bit of a lottery as drivers are often testing the car's limits but 7th is significantly better than the first race.

The fastest lap times too sets the car in 6th place so clearly it has the pace.

The fact that it then dropped a few places in the overall standings is I suppose a reflection of the car being a bit tricky to handle? Some feedback on characteristics would be useful to help with future builds. I suppose the car was also just a bit unlucky as it clearly struggled for consistency in L3, dropping around two laps in each round despite posting good fastest laps in those lanes.

Oh well hopefully the gearbox is slowly loosening up and things will get quicker in due course. Now i'm just hoping that the gear mesh stays good for this experimental ratio and spacer combination.....

Thanks to all once again!

Andi