On the 14th August it was Round 2 of the Clubman 3 series, for this round the Project Ashgate car had a more challenging outing. In this update I'll go through why some heats are better than others for qualifying and how to handle it when making changes to your setup gives a different outcome to what you expected.
PRE-RACE SETUP CHANGES
For this meeting I had decided to try adjusting the roll centre of the car with hope that it might take the side bite away from the tyres and stop some of the grip roll. Roll centre adjustments are a bit of a dark art and should come well after experimenting with weight transfer settings like spring and dampeners. From my experience there is no set rule around roll centre settings and the same change can work very differently on similar chassis. I tried lowering the M08's roll centre by 1mm (front and rear), my theory was that there would be less camber change and weight transfer onto the axles. That theory was very wrong, my grip roll problem increased dramatically making the car undrivable. My conclusion to this was that the higher arc of the roll centre just transferred more force into the outer tyres and therefore more side grip. I now believe the M chassis are just too narrow for this type of change to work on medium/high grip levels.
QUALIFYING
For the first round of qualifying (Q1) I was hit with the roll centre mess up so the run was useless. There were two lessons to be learned from it, the first was you should always do a few shake down laps before the meeting starts when you make setup changes. The second more important tip is always be ready to reverse changes. I regularly see lots of racers applying a change and finding it doesn't work, then they apply another change to try and fix the non-working one. The best practise is to apply changes one at a time and in small increments. If it has no change, (or a negative one), remove it and try something else. Try to remember, it's better to take "One step back, two steps forward".
The setup was better in the second round but I got tangled up with some of the faster racers. This takes me to another point about qualifying. It's much better to be the fastest in a heat than to be in the top heat where you're likely to be lapped by faster drivers. You lose more time being lapped than you do lapping others. With this you can control the round and overtake racers when it's safe to do so. The top heat isn't always the best place for qualifying. The big problem I have in qualifying with the M08 (in the top heat) is because of its RWD drivetrain. The power transfer seems to be faster on corner exit, where as the FWD cars look to be faster at entry and mid corner. This makes it really hard with wheel to wheel racing and caused a lot of problems for me in Q2. I played it safe in Q3 and fitted the harder front tyres again. The car was safer but really slow during the early laps, I just managed to make it into the A final. Another lesson learned.
THE FINAL
My final was a similar one to round one, I got tangled up in the earlier stages of the race with the RWD differences. The setup felt much better though and during the mid section of the race I was able to set some good lap times and hold 4th place. This result keeps me joint 4th in the championship.
THE DEBRIEF
So after a very tough meeting I was very happy with the result and end performance of the car. I'm really pleased that at every meeting with the MO8 I've managed to increase my best lap pace by 0.1 second. In the final my best lap was 0.3 seconds from the fastest lap. I am doubtful this progression will continue, but if I can get within 0.2 seconds that should give me a good chance of a podium. For the next round I plan to work on the front of the car. I'm going to try making it wider which I'm hoping will help with grip roll and mid-corner speed. If that goes well I might also try laying down the front shocks a little more.
If you have any questions about this article or would like some help with your setup, please contact me via
