Month: May 2022

SR3 Oval Ready To Go

The oval layout is operational and ready for Saturday’s test session.

I ran a few magnet and gravity cars and it feels pretty fluid and fast. It’s not as fluid around the banks as I expected but it’s a lot better than SR2 in that regard.

The cars still straighten out between the banked corners but not as pronounced as SR2. Turns 1 & 4 are sharper than 2 & 3, which makes this oval more challenging than the SR2 oval layout. Some of you have experienced the last corner before the start/finish line, it’s tight and alluring, with a decreasing radius entry that makes getting to the finish line a bit more difficult than SR2.

Anyway, it’s all set for some fast laps this Saturday. Again, we’ll just do a bunch of laps and a race or two to make sure all is good with the timing and fuel management setup.  Bring some loose cars as well as your fastest magnet cars, and any six-lane IROC sets you may have.

The difference in lap lengths between each lane is about .78-feet. We’ll have to determine what lane is the fastest and make that the pole position. Yes, there will be staggered starts for all oval races.  We’ll also do individual qualifying for the Feature races in the upcoming NASCAR MADness Series, which starts the following Saturday, May 28.

Hope to see you this Saturday.

Okay, shut up and drive!

 

SR3 Grand Opening Report

Straight Road Course

While we didn’t get a full field to shake out SR3, I think we pretty much accomplished the goal of verifying that the Road Course configuration is ready to go racing.

First off, I’d like to thank George Peters, Russ Toy, Kevin Webster, and Jerry Pearson for braving the warm weather and beach traffic to help shake out the new track and provide excellent feedback on the new raceway.

We ran a whole lot of laps with all kinds of cars and did one fuel race to make sure there were no issues with pit-entry detection or other issues. That race was completed without a hitch and all looks good to move on to configuration and testing of the oval layout.

We did discover a very slight power degradation involving two sections of the fabulous Bowman circuit. More than likely just a simple matter of reinstalling power shunt pins between the two sections involved. Surprisingly, SR3 consists of nearly 80-feet of roadway over 22 sections of routed track, but it has been deployed using only two power taps. Brad insisted that I only needed one and all would be good. I decided I’d go with two, just for yucks. Actually, two for the road course and two for the oval, but not more than two in either configuration.

So, everything seemed to work as designed and everyone commented that the track was challenging and very fun. Not sure how many drivers took advantage of the very unique individual lane power supply features, but I know a couple did. This is going to be a key differentiator in terms of testing and tuning. No other track I’ve raced on allows you to run any car, at any voltage, on any lane, at the same time. This allows drivers to test/tune a Viper-Jet (12v) while the driver next to them is testing/tuning a TFX car (18v) in the same session.  Think about that one for a bit.

Finally, I’d like to introduce Jerry Pearson to the whole group. Jerry messed with H.O. scale cars back in the sixties–like most of us. He recently got interested in slot cars again and is venturing out into the local slot car scene to find out if it is something he’d like to pursue.

Jerry is a great guy and just might be our next Rookie of the Year. He claims he’s “not competitive.” But he was here for about 3.5 hours and went from mid-10-second early laps to mid 5-second laps in late practice. No, not competitive at all.

I hated to throw Jerry into a race his first time back in the driver’s seat in many, many years but we needed as many drivers as we could muster. He cautiously agreed to help with the test race and had a great time.

All in all, Jerry got the full immersion: drove quite a few different cars, ran a IROC fuel race, and generally took in everything with incredible poise and a big smile. He sent me an email later in the day thanking all of us for a fun and welcoming day and mentioned he’d “see us again.”  Hope so, Jerry. We’d love to cut laps with you anytime!

Okay, next Saturday is a “Day on the Oval.” We’ll do a bunch of practice laps, probably an IROC race or two, and make sure the oval config is all set for the upcoming NASCAR MADness Series starting May 28, 2022. NASCAR livery is not required for next Saturday but if you have some cars or IROC sets ready, bring them on!

Okay, shut up and drive!

SR3 Update: Bingo!

Phidget 8/8/8 card replacing the “road slug” 0/16/16 card. The 16 card requires a minimum of 16ms under the sensor to trigger. The 888 card only 4ms.

Just a quick update on the Pit-Entry limitations I warned about in my previous update.

I’ve been emailing a support guy at Phidgets in Canada, who has been very helpful. He came up with a couple of IR sensor config options for me to try on their faster 8/8/8 card. I couldn’t get this card to work in previous attempts so went back to their 0/16/16 card and decided to live with that card’s shortcomings.

The first and easiest option he proposed worked amazingly well.  A few of us will do some comprehensive testing on Saturday. But in my testing today, it seemed to detect every pit entry I could throw at it. And, to my surprise, it detected six cars entering the pits simultaneously. That indicates that the 8/8/8 card might just work for now on SR3–the 0/16/16 card had trouble detecting three simultaneous pit entries.

Anyway, time will tell, but it does appear that the pit-entry speed limitations on SR3 are removed, which is a good thing. No idea if it’ll support any conceivable “Hail Mary” drop into the pits, but I couldn’t perform an entry that it did not detect.

So, never mind my earlier update post. SR3 pit-entry speed limitations appear to be resolved.

Okay, shut up and drive!

SR3 Grand Opening Track Day

Race Fans,

Stewart Raceway is back in business. I’d like to get at least six drivers over for a track day either Saturday, May 14, 2022 or Saturday, May 21, 2022.

We need to run the new track through the paces and make sure everything works as expected, barriers are solid and in the proper places, and no gremlins exist. The first track day will be on the road course. You’ll want to make this track day or the very next to get used to the different pit-entry style on SR3.  I also want to run a 25-30 lap race on SR2 to make sure the intermittent pit entry miss is resolved there.

Please register here.

Hopefully, we can get enough guys over on the 7th to flush out the road course. If so, we’ll do the same thing the following Saturday to flush out the oval course.  The first “official” race of our next series is slated for Saturday, May 28, 2022. Details to follow soon…

Race Coordinator RMS Developments

While I was consumed with trying to deal with Phidget problems on SR3, I was also working with Dave Aufderheide, the developer of Race Coordinator (RC), to support power-cycling when out of fuel.

RC always supported fuel racing but it just quit counting laps when you ran out of fuel. It has audio to inform you you’re low or out of fuel but it did not “stutter” power to make it painfully obvious you were out of fuel.

In the midst of working with SlotTrak to resolve the SR3 pit-entry detection issues, I also reapproached Dave at RC to support the power “stuttering” feature exclusive to SlotTrak fame. If RC could support that feature, it would certainly make RC a comparable alternative to SlotTrak, which appeared to have serious issues with fuel racing on SR3 at the time.

Dave is a remarkable and clever guy and one who seems to enjoy solving complex technical problems…if he has the time among being a husband, father, and very busy professional software developer.  I first approached Dave on this feature several years ago but he felt that I was the only one out there requesting it and didn’t give it too much thought back then.

A few years–and a little spare time–later, he came up with a possible way to do it. RC has a mechanism called “Extended Protocol” that allows technical track owners to add custom features to RC largely independent of the actual RMS system. These features actually run on a Arduino microcontroller in a software environment called a “Sketch.” This is a C++-based programming environment that allows you to write code that interacts with RC to accomplish some purpose like controlling LED’s, lights, lane switching, audio, whatever you can think of that RC may not do but the independent Sketch can.

In this case, Dave determined that the Arduino Sketch could actually “stutter” or cycle individual lane relay power independently without having to change the code in RC. This, of course, is very desirable to a developer since he doesn’t have to change the main program and then support the new features into perpetuity.

So, after just a couple of weeks of finding time to test and write code, and retest, Dave came up with a Sketch that does the job quite nicely. All you have to do is “tweak” the Sketch code to communicate with your track hardware, configure the “stuttering” pattern, upload it to the Arduino, and bingo! When a car runs out of fuel, the relay simulates an out-of-fuel situation just like SlotTrak.

“So what,” you say? Well, there are only two systems out there that support this feature: SlotTrak and now Race Coordinator. I’m very pleased and glad I have an alternative to SlotTrak in this regard.

We haven’t used RC much over the last couple of years for serious racing. Mainly because SlotTrak’s fuel features had the “stuttering” capability and most drivers prefer that over the–not always reliable–audio alert when running out of fuel. Now we have two options. Both systems have their strong points, different features, functions, etc. RC is a very customizable RMS, whereas SlotTrak is pretty much a closed system with relatively little customization possible by the user.

I love them both.  But I sure wish they both supported the same hardware, which is frustrating, but they are exceptional RMS solutions that have unique features which make it difficult to always run one over the other.

Okay, shut up and drive!