USA F3: China

I fought corner entry, middle and exit oversteer the whole race. If I could have dialed that down a bit I think I may have had a shot at 3rd, but I ran out of time in practice trying to get it working right. A few corner exit spins and the inability to get on the throttle really made this race a handful.

Had a scary moment with a few cars I was about to lap but then the words 'LPI' came to mind and I backed it off a bit :).

Very happy with a 4th place finish considering how uncomfortable the car was to drive.

JJ

Ackkk! I really need to start getting some laps in; these no-prep races are doing me in.

Managed to get 5-6 initial laps in on the track this morning before heading to the office, but that was all I'd seen of it. Got home late, missed qualifying and started DFL in 17th. No clue about fuel consumption so I just dumped a bunch of gas in it and hoped to get lucky.

Somehow, I went from 17th to 7th on the first lap and could see the front guys just ahead! Made a pass for 6th on the second lap and then hit 5th when Esteban dropped out. Unbelievable...

It started south on lap 3 when the car started feeling really loose in faster corners, which was a surprise since I was using a setup from Mills or somewhere that I'd liked before. Plus I completely blanked going into a few turns and had no idea whether they were rights or lefts or how tight - just didn't know the track well enough without cars right ahead to key off of. Good thing Jiading has great runoff because I was using it, and slipped back a spot on one off.

Turned out the runoff wasn't enough when the rear end let go on turn-in to one of the many seemingly never-ending corners. I went sailing off backwards, flying right through the gravel trap and knocking the rear wing and right rear wheel off the car.

Had been hoping to race with Justus for 5th as it looked like we were close on pace, but that's probably about as far up as I'd have gotten barring incidents ahead. Truth is my luck ran out and the cold fundamentals bit me in the arse! As they should... ;-)

At least my USA-F3 went better than my Euro-F3 event!

It tooks TONS of time to improve the setup so that it had far less rear end snap-oversteer AND be fast still. Overly difficult to achieve.

I could see that I still had not learnt 3 or 4 areas well enough to do them as fast as they can be done, so those areas cost me a reasonable amount per lap. (0.5sec or so?)

The race was reasonably uneventful, except for two taps with Peter Byun when trying to capitalise on errors he had. The second one flicking me into a spin and then the end of any close racing to try for 2nd spot.

And then another incident in the closing laps when I caught Bert Owens as we headed to the mid-way left sweeper(?) and I maintained pace so I could flow by and make a pass (he was a back-marker) on the exit area of that, but he slowed suddenly mid way around and that caught me off-guard.
A quick swerve to prevent contact meant a snap-spin when the rear end broke loose and I went spinning off madly.
Luckily I had a huge gap to the 4th place car so it didn't really matter.

I was amazed that Augustin seemed to run about 18 laps before pitting?? That can't be too optimal a strategy and driving on tires for that long must be difficult in these!?
But he had great speed and thus lead to spare.

I sucked as usual, even with quite a bit of track time.

At first I thought this track really sucked, but I came to enjoy it after a bit.

I would love for one of the fast guys to post their setup so us slow guys can see where we need to work. No matter what I do in these cars, I am 15-20MPH slower down the straights than nearly everyone else. No matter what I did, my top end was about 140, and others I watched were about 160.

I suppose that is part of the challenge for me - trying to get better and keep improving.

Congrats to everyone, from what I saw it was a good race, while I was racing.

tks,

Tim, I added my Jiading setup to the F3 car pages (a bit hard to find I reckon!).

I found I could use a fair range of wings for very much the same lap times. From 3 - 17 to 5 - 20. The low set gaining in long fast areas and the higher set doing the infield areas better. The most important thing was keeping the wing spread right so that car is balanced.

The bigger battle is getting a good rear end so it is well planted, but also keeping the snap-spin dangers at bay.

Interesting... I was running 15/25 wings I think, or maybe it was 14/24 - whatever I'd run at Mills where the setup was from. Might explain my luck in traffic early, but the front-rear balance was definitely off as the rear would let go without much warning on the faster corners.

Thanks very much Peter.

I will give that a go and see what happens. I am hopeful that it helps me further understand these things.

Thanks again.

Tim

I'd never really driven the F3 cars before. I was assuming they would be something like the Formula BMW cars from the night before, but I was completely wrong.

The F3 cars feel extremely touchy everywhere. Accelerate... spin, lift off.... spin, shift down... spin. I finally got a sort of working setup, but the car was still insanely hard to control.

My qualifying lap was terrible, but I was able to make up some places throughout the race. I just don't remember dropping to sixth. One second(while on track) I was in 5th and then suddenly 6th. It certainly made sense looking at the replay, but it just didn't show up until later in the race.

I didn't know about the mandatory pitstop until after qualy and I didn't really know where the pit was when I went in, but fortunately the person I was chasing went in on the same lap.

I never really got in a good lap, or had any really close racing, but there were a few times where I just tried to keep the person in front and behind about the same distance away(pushing as hard as I could) and that was surprisingly intense despite the lack of wheel to wheel action.