2022 Season Points Standings

Points leader, Sir George, accepting the 2022 NASCAR MADness Series trophy.

Well, it’s a little late but here are the current points standings for the 2022 racing season.

Veteran Sportsman driver, Kevin Webster, is currently leading the Sportsman Class points chase. Kevin has done very well in nearly all of the 2022 season events and is well positioned to take top honors.

2021 Junior of the Year driver, Jordan Walker, isn’t too far behind Kevin and certainly has a shot at the points championship and the 2022 Junior of the Year award.

The Rookie of the Year points battle is between Jerry Pearson and Eric Lane. Both drivers entered the season fairly late but have demonstrated outstanding driving abilities and amazing success against much more experienced drivers, including “Home Cook’n”.

Sportsman Class
Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 Kevin Webster 5024 328 40787.13
2 Jordan Walker 4420 262 40542.1
3 Russ Toy 2403 146 11253.26
4 Jerry Pearson 1423 120 16802.69
5 Eric Lane 229 25 2558.784

In the Expert ranks, the battle for top honors is pretty much a moot point. No driver can catch the 2022 NASCAR MADness Series Champ, George Peters, providing he makes appearances in at least one of the remaining events. 2021 ROTY champ, Brad Sandahl, has a shot at the podium in the season points chase but he’ll need to make dominant appearances at every event remaining this season.

Expert Class
Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 George Peters 7719 672 55081.97
2 Greg Kondrek 3657 307 14456.61
3 Ian Douglass 2674 256 10887.75
4 Brad Sandahl 1496 99 11627.83
5 Steve Stewart* 8299 861 53878.37

* Home Cook’n

There are three more events in the current 2022 IROC Championship Series. That series will likely be the last series of the 2022 season. Don’t miss any of the final three events if you like big hardware in your trophy room.

Okay, shut up and drive!

 

Slot Car Racing Video Is Nice!

Still pursuing video recording of races at Stewart Raceway. The initial goal was to display the whole SR2 track on-screen, which was possible using inexpensive cameras. The next goal was to get the Race Management screens/windows in the recordings so viewers could see what the heck is going on.

Thanks to Open Source software developers, and just plain incredible talent in that realm, displaying the race management computer’s screen is possible. In fact, you can even display windows and areas of another remote or local computer’s screen–way cool!

So this video is a 10-lap segment race, utilizing fuel and tire allocation settings of SlotTrak’s RMS. SlotTrak is an amazing race management system.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp0UH0ZbSdY[/embedyt]

Let me know your thoughts on this addition to the raceway. We can also do live streaming of race events with this setup. However, we have limits to how much data we can push to the Internet right now. That said, we could certainly live stream special events if warranted.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Race Report: 2022 IROC Championship Series – Round 1

Round 1 of this exciting new series kicked off Saturday, October 1, 2022 with just five drivers but a competitive bunch for sure. We ran exclusively on the SR3 “straight” road course and with a 4-race format instead of 6. New driver, Eric Lane, joined in for his first “official” race at Stewart Raceway. Eric raced 1/32 cars back in the day and looks to be getting back into slot car racing with a large collection of HO-scale cars.

Round 1 Overall Results
Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 George Peters 265 55 2561.742
2 Jerry Pearson 248 39 2577.19
3 Kevin Webster 243 32 2573.008
4 Eric Lane 229 25 2558.784
5 Steve Stewart 268 61 2540.275
Race 1: Retro Vipers (12.5v)

We started the day with the challenging Retro Viper platforms and decided to run three lanes so we could allocate a couple of drivers to marshaling, which worked out well for this class.

The Retro Vipers are really better suited for oval track racing but it was surprising how well everyone adapted to the cars. Of course, the seasoned Fray/T-Jet drivers dominated this one. The big story here was that Jerry Pearson bagged the final podium spot in this one, only four laps off the pace of 1st and 2nd, and won his final heat. Impressive driving for a guy who seemed to prefer L4 Vipers. (Details)

Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 Steve Stewart 60 16 636.668
2 George Peters 60 13 668.988
3 Jerry Pearson 56 11 722.443
4 Kevin Webster 51 7 660.196
5 Eric Lane 46 6 676.079
Race 2: Tyco-Jets (12.5v)

Another “loose” but much easier to drive platform. This race debuted two new cars for the SR3 IROC set. Both without weighted front-ends for the orange and green lanes. While one weighted FE car won two of the five heats, the two unweighted cars won three.  And, both Jerry Pearson and Eric Lane won heats in this one–nice! (Details)

Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 Steve Stewart 59 16 637.996
2 George Peters 59 13 647.849
3 Jerry Pearson 55 11 614.09
4 Kevin Webster 54 7 684.675
5 Eric Lane 50 6 630.976
Race 3: MegaG+ 1.7 Camaros and Mustangs (15v)

The usual suspects battled it out in this race utilizing Kevin Webster’s nicely prepared set of MegaG+ 1.7 cars. Most of us have driven these cars before and they are very smooth and predictable. Jerry Pearson won the final heat of this fuel race with some nice fuel management tactics. Jerry is well on his way to a 2022 Rookie of the Year award. (Details)

Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 Steve Stewart 75 16 758.092
2 George Peters 71 13 732.61
3 Kevin Webster 70 11 716.082
4 Eric Lane 68 7 724.382
5 Jerry Pearson 66 6 727.872
Race 4: Jag Hobbies TR-3 “Augorans” (15v)

The TR-3 is an amazing car. An inline 6-ohm chassis that fits old-school screw-on bodies, including JL, AW, Aurora, MM and Dash. Still, it’s a blazingly fast magnet car with superb handling and driveability.

2022 NASCAR MADness Series winner, George Peters, dominated this final race of the day by winning all of his heats. Jerry Pearson took the final podium spot with two second-place heat finishes. (Details)

Place Name Laps Points Total Time
1 George Peters 75 16 512.295
2 Steve Stewart 74 13 507.519
3 Jerry Pearson 71 11 512.785
4 Kevin Webster 68 7 512.055
5 Eric Lane 65 6 527.347
2022 Series Points Standings After Round 1
Sportsman Class
Place Name Points Total Time
1 Jerry Pearson 39 2577.19
2 Kevin Webster 32 2573.008
3 Eric Lane 25 2558.784
Expert Class
Place Name Points Total Time
1 George Peters 55 2561.742
2 Steve Stewart 61 2540.275

Round 2 is tentatively slated for October 29, 2022. Stay tuned for details.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Video Might Be Nice

Well, I’ve had the equipment for well over a year now so I decided to play around with video recording races. At the moment, I’m trying it out on SR2, which is easier and more comfortable to test and dink around with this stuff.

I’m using cheap CCP 4K cameras, which are not ever going to produce professional looking video, but they are cheap. Right now I’m just focusing on capturing the whole track for the duration of a race. The issue with video is storage, just one heat of a short race can be as much as 10GB of data, depending on the length of the race.

H.O. scale racing adds another complexity in that the cars are the smallest and require the best possible capture resolution, which adds to the storage and video quality problems.

Anyway, this is my first crack at it. I need to work with my lighting director and improve in that area but it looks like–with a bit more tweaking–we can record a full race and be able to replay it, not only for posterity, but for entertainment and forensic evaluation afterwards.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAA9HaAAiE8[/embedyt]

Theoretically, I could also include the RMS screen (SlotTrak or RC) in the video, that would be way cool. I’ll work on the that soon.  After that, it’s going higher frame rates and producing good slo-mo action of crashes, starts, and finishes.

Please let me know what you think and any ideas you may have to make this more beneficial to us and our massive race fans.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Stewart Raceway II’s Clone

Yes, SR2 has a clone. After Dan Cronin of Viper Scale Racing finished building SR2, he quickly made another version. The only difference I can see is that he spaced out the pit and start/finish gantries to make fuel races a bit easier than the original version of SR2.

The original SR2 was designed by me but with a whole lot of input from local racers who own routed tracks and have raced on some of the most magnificent racing tracks ever built.

SR2-2 is no longer in Utah at Viper’s facility but it is still in use. In fact, the last time I saw it was at Musgrave Racing’s shop in Riverside, CA.

Right-click and open the image in a new tab to see a larger image.

SR2-1 is still alive and well in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We haven’t raced on it in a while but I recently did a whole bunch of laps on it building two new Tyco-Jets for my IROC fleet. It is a very cool layout and the fact that it has multiple layouts, as well as converts to an oval, is very special.