Equipment all setup at the testing site
John Stranahan sweeping off the test area.
Its ugly but functional. The body and aerodynamic pieces are prototypes.
Its ugly but functional. The body and aerodynamic pieces are prototypes.
Today was a great testing day. I made awesome progress. Before today, I was having a ton a problems keeping the car pointed straight ahead. I could drive the car up to about 40 mph, then if I gave the car any kind of steering input, the car would fishtail and spin out. To fix the problem I tried changing camber/caster, spring weights, shock oil weights...anything. I was totally stuck then I got an idea. Run the car backwards. Run the car with the motor/drive wheels in the front and the steering in the back. I tried it and it worked great! Today I was able to get up to 60 mph (about 1/4 throttle) with no stability problems. I actually had too much straight line stability because I couldn't steer the car above 40mph. This issue has more to do with the sizing of the vertical stabilizers. I can use smaller ones for my next tests.
Acceleration was phenomenal and during braking the car would stay in a straight line without any effort. Today marks a huge milestone for my project "X2". I couldn't go any faster today because of the size of the area that we have to work with. Its only about 100 yards to work with. To get my car up to its full potential I need to find a much larger, flatter surface to test. Hopefully next weekend I'll be able to test at a much larger area.
The only problem for today is not being able to capture video of my car in action. We had technical difficulties with my camera and I wasn't able capture video with my car. But I did get a catch a close call with John's car. He was making a high speed pass and his car almost hit my full size car:
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