Tommy R's RWD Drifter

[Tommy R]

So last week I needed to head to Dallas for a company dinner and I managed to get over to DARC for a bit. For those unfamilar, DARC is Drift America RC located in Plano, TX. They have an amazing drift layout that I've been dying to try out. It was pretty amazing, but I didn't have much time to play. Anyway, here's some pics...













They even have a little rock garden to play on.

[Tommy R]

How about some tuning updates?

The car was working so well a few weeks ago that I got a little cocky with the setup. Thought I'd try to make it look a little more radical as a drifter and I added a lot of camber front and rear and changed the offset of my wheels (adjustable) from 7mm to 9mm. Went back to run on the polished concrete track my friend has in his garage and the car was awful! The back end was just too loose and unpredictable. I put the alignment back to something more reasonable and put my wheel offset back to 7mm. The car was back to normal (Whew!!), but was a little slow out of the corners compared to the other (AWD) cars I was running with. It was great otherwise.

So in order to get a little more grip under power, I added some anti-squat by raising the front hinge pin mount on the rear suspension. Take a close look at the hinge pin mount and you'll see what I mean.


If you look closely, you'll see the washers I added under the hinge pin mount. I think they were about 1mm.


Believe it or not, it seemed to help a bit. I was able to put down power exiting corners a bit better. Sweet!

Now fast forward a bit... We now have several RWD cars locally so I don't have to worry about keeping up with AWD cars. Our local group also decided to go back to carpet. So far I've been running all kinds of tires and they all seem just a bit too fast. Compared to the other RWD cars mine always seems to be a bit faster, which makes tandeming pretty difficult. I removed some front droop, stood up my rear shocks, and those seemed to have helped a bit. I'm also going to get rid of the rear anti-squat in hopes that'll help. I haven't yet started messing with springs/shock oil just yet. That'll likely be next. I also have carpet-specific tires on order.

But the last time I was out at DARC I recalled hearing a weird "tingling" sound from time to time. Over the weekend I decided to investigate. This is what I found in the rear end:


The set screw that secures the pinion had backed off and was letting my pinion walk back and forth on the input shaft. Looks like the screw also took out some teeth on the ring gear. So I installed the stock gear set. It's supposedly too slow like that (with a 10.5), but I had no other replacement parts. Fortunately, it worked out just fine. I didn't miss the extra wheel speed. A bigger track may be a different story, however! But for now, the stock gearing seems to be okay.

[BigChevyTruckin]

Cool man! I've been getting mine tuned to my liking and it's working great. Such a great chassis.

Sent from my N9518 using Tapatalk

[Tommy R]

This past weekend our group was asked to put on a demo at a large charity car show. Had a blast!

[Tommy R]

The new drifter, in case anyone here is interested...

Tommy R's Eagle Racing RWD Drifter, V2