12 hours of Hamburg, that was the name of the race we where going to. 10
teams driving on a 5 lane almost 50 meter long track meaning that each team
would drive for 6 hours. We where 5 drivers (one for each lane) in our team.
For us this was going to be our first time on this track, the first time with
this type of 18 Volts motors, the first time with sports car bodies, the first
time with night race in the dark and finally our first time as a team. Could
that really go well?
This is what we started with. A box with two Tamiya plastic kits, Plafit chassis
and motors etc
After painting by Torbjörn and Peter Bjurman, the bodies looked like this.
The team name was choosen to "Ace of Race" to link to the swedish
pop group "Ace of Base" (known for the songs: "All that she wants"
and "The Sign"). The latter one felt good we though. The sign of victory
maybe? Or was it the sign of danger?
We wanted a swedish connection also on the cars so they carried a modified swedish
flag on the sides. We built two different cars, with different bodies. One Porsche
956 and one 962. As you can see they are somewhat different. Also we choose
two different versions of Plafit chassis.
The interior is a thin very light molded thing from Betta. Since the rules said
that we have to have a plastic head we glued one into the Betta molded helmet
from the underside ;-)
Lars is either thirsty or scared of flying. We still haven't found out, but
here he is in the airport bar having a whiskey just before the take off from
Skavsta Airport some 150 km outside of Stockholm.
We landed at Lübeck one hour later and took the rental car we had booked
and droove to Hamburg. It would be better of course to go directly to Hamburg
with flight but Ryanair doesn't go there and they are so cheap (65 Euros both
ways per person) so we did it this way instead. It takes about one hour to drive
to Hamburg from Lübeck.
When we got to the track lots of teams where already praticing so we started
to prepare the last things on our cars to get going also.
In the forrest of the track these two elks are found. We wonder how they got
there? ;-)
We quickly learned two things:
1) Our cars didn't hold good enough for frontal collisions, they started to
crack badly.
2) Niclas own designed lighting curcuit didn't really hold either. First the
lights beamed extremly bright and then after a while came a bad smell of burning
electronics. All the other teams started to smell at thier cars and controllers
to see if it came from thier equipment. We said nothing, just driving on knowing
what slowly happened: Our lighting curcuits was overheating and after a couple
of minutes the lights started to die one after another. Luckily we had another
lighting curcuit design we had bought from Martin Bartelmes that we could switch
to. Niclas version is lighter but needs some reworking to coupe with the 18
Volts on this track it seams ;-)
There is two things that a lighting curcuit does. First the diods (LED) only wants a few Volts and the track on full power gives 18 Volts so it has to regulate the voltage down. Also the rules says that the lights must glow for about one minut even if the cars deslots so you need some type of rechargable "battery" onboard. What one uses is a condensator that basically works like a rechargable battery.
The carousell is the trickiest part of the track. You don't see it clearly and
have to really time the braking and gas on just the stomach feeling.
There was a que system to the track. It has five lanes and there was 10 teams
with 4 drivers in each in average and all wanted to test cars and learn the
track. Here you can see Torbjörn closest to the camera training.
Both swedish cars are on the track We noticed that the 956 was more stable and
handled better so we decided that it was the one to use for the race.
We had to reinforce and repair the front of the car and Niclas changed to the
lighting curcuit from Martin.
More work going on with the cars.
Final preparations for the race.
Damn, these guys do look professional with the T-shirts and the team logo on
the wall so they must be good?
The logo made by Roger and a friend of his connects to card playing as you can
see. Where we really the Ace, or more the wildcard?
The starting field. 10 teams, one race car each. 6 hours driving time per team
where 3 hours in daytime and 3 hours night time in darkness.
Front row from left to right:
Back row from left to right:
Since the track has five lanes the teams where divided in two groups. The qualify
decided which group to start in.Where the slowest five teams started first.
Time to qualify. When it was our turn, the car did go fine but in the wrong
direction! ;-) Well, you can't win them all. It showed that since we had disconnected
the lighting curcuit to save it during the day time race (when the rules says
you don't have to use it) the motor got reversed polarity.
Qualifiing.
Racing
Since we got in the first starting group we soon where racing. Here Anders and
Lars driving in the race.
One of the many problems we encountered during the race. The right this tire
just "exploded". Probably to little gluing in combination with the
very rough and bad braid on the Hamburger track. Also as you can see on the
left tire the edges have been badly teared.
Some curious people looking trough the windows.
After our 3 hours of daytime race we went for food while the second round of
teams was driving thier daytime race. The steaks where really good and the beer
was even better.
We discussed why it didn't go so well for us in the race and here on the picture
Lars tells his view or is he ordering more beer? A lot of beer it was. And a
lot of reasons why it didn't go well for us. Each time we ordered a new beer
we came up with a reason why it didn't go well. After about five of these we
knew pretty well what the problem was... ;-)
When we came back to the track, our groups night time race had already started.
Why we missed the start is our secret, but let's say like this, Hamburg is a
nice city ;-) It didn't really matter, we where so much behind anyway. A fun
thing we noticed was that we drove better in the night than during the day.
Torbjörn actually won his heat. We think the better driving was because
we couldn't see how jumpy our car was around the corners as we could during
the day segment and that we therefor drove it a little harder. Or was it all
the beer that we had drunken that did that? ;-)
Yellow lane is the trickiest of them all since you don't see the car going up
the carousell. Lars was our yellow lane driver and he finally gotten the hang
of it and droove better and better.
After the race our car looked a little banged up one could say...
We have cracks all over the front going quite far back.
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Results
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We learned alot about long distance team racing with sports cars. The name Ace of Race isn't so badly choosen despite the result. It's just like in any Poker game, sometimes you win but most often you loose! ;-)
Next year we will be back!
/Anders Lattermann
