Episode 049: Are Your Brakes Just Slowing You Down?

Jon, Ryan and Scotty sit down to talk about how the last NASA Rocky Mountain event went at High Plains Raceway. When you are building a car to compete in a specific class, it is natural that your focus would be the cars and drivers that you are competing against. What Scotty and Ryan discovered was that sometimes taking a look at what is going on in other similar classes can be enlightening, too. That change of perspective can give you some ideas of new things to try as well as new benchmarks for how competitive your car actually is. Scotty and Ryan are usually focused on the NASA Time Trials classes, but the classes that got their attention this weekend were GTS2 (German Touring Sedan) and GTS3. These are typically BMWs that have lower power-to-weight limits in their class (14:1 in GTS2, 10:1 in TT3) and these cars race wheel-to-wheel. There is no guarantee that they will even get a clean lap. But with all that, those cars would dominate the class they would fit in for Time Trials. This led to two important realizations: First, that it can really help to run a car in a class where there is a clearly tried and tested upgrade path, with parts that are known to be effective, and second, that sometimes your brakes are just slowing you down. Thanks for listening! And thank you for your support. We hope you enjoy this episode, and #staytuned.