GCRC Late Night Sliders and Speedline 2.2 review

Photography... Some days we struggle.

shooting in low light well after the sun has disappeared is tough. I did manage one or two shots with a nice focal point.

This ol' soarer is pretty damn cool.

I bagged this shot. 18degree front knuckles give you some decent imagery.

Mark X has had it's lip spoiler trimmed, cool!. I tried a few different rims on the FD tonight  starting with these Kazama items ... but I'll get to that later.

 Firstly a few static shots of the Soarer.

Low Yakuza Style.

With gold highlights looking groovy. Speaking of Gold.

Speedline2.2 wheels... I was excited to get these on the car, but actually, once on,  I couldn't wait to take them off.

Tonight we sampled some Speedline 2.2 Wheels and tyres. 22" rims on an RX7? Definitely don't suit mine.

but... these rims may suit the Veilside fortune rx7 from ABC Hobby. That's about the only place I can think of at the moment I'd use these as the Veilside body is so huge it would need silly rims like these.

The rims are very large, you can see that the rears stuff right out to the fender lip on the body. I ran these for a few seconds as the raised lettering on the tyres were scraping on the body. Personally, I'm not a fan of these Oversize looking rims. Kind of a caricature of reality.
 

It looks like you are running on no tyre which is very unrealistic. Immediately the scale image disappears.

As for the driving experience at GCRC. These tyres are not suitable. Even though these tyres were the hardest available, the compound had too much grip.  Simply too soft for GCRC. They actually had chunks out of the tyre after a few minutes of use.

At GCRC It takes roughly about 35 seconds to lap the circuit in a drift machine. Note : we don't race. But I tried it as a measure tonight.

Within 5 laps, I had lapped my other test car. That means they are about 7 seconds per lap faster than our regular HDPE tyres that suit our circuit. That's 20% faster!!! But what you notice most is the off throttle grip and stopping power.

When you run a drift car, you need to be able to s    l    i    d    e. You need to be able to hold your handbrake but not slow the car to a stop immediately. Off throttle you need the front to slide a little too, not grip and throw the car into a spin. Reality is not like this.

So. Speedline 2.2. If the compounds suit your surface... maybe super low grip asphalt might be better suited. But at GCRC, they simply don't work well. After 10 minute test I was totally exhausted from concentration, trying to keep the car off the fence with no margin for error at all.

Two of us running these tyres crashed more than we were side by side.

I couldn't wait to put my HDPE back on the car and relax.

My tyre testing tonight also showed that I have 2 sets of HDPE RC-Art tyres that behave very differently. Once the tyres become coated with dust and pick up dirt, they get a shiny coating that becomes too slippery (almost no grip) thats bad in the other ways.

So they need some cleansing.  Maintaing the natural plastic of the tyre is important to keep a constant level of slide.

We tried a few things tonight, all fun. But one thing is for sure. The control tyre is very important for fun drifting.