ORIGINAL: Joojoo

ej6,

RCU still has a long way to go before being recognized as a serious contributor to the R/C drifting world. You may find that rc-drift, rcdrift, or any of the other places have a slightly more expansive audience.

As for your question, it sounds to me as though you haven't tried drifting yet. If this is the case, I would recommend that you ignore all your suspension settings and just go out and practice drifting. I've used electrical tape, clear tape, and ABS tires for drifting, with the latter giving by far the best results. If your experiences are at all similar to mine, you'll quickly find that drifting forces you to use the controls in a manner very different than you may be used to with touring car racing or even off-road racing. In particular, you'll find that both the throttle and steering require a much higher rate of control input. The setup and approach phase to a turn become very important, especially when you consider the coast-brake-throttle-countersteer sequence you need to input just to get the car to drift properly.

I spent several days playing with the car in an open lot just to get a feel for it. I left my suspension length, damping, spring rate, and geometry the same as I use for road racing. I have yet to touch the setting - since I'm still noticing dramatic improvements based on learning and practice alone. For any car with a 4WD drivetrain and reasonable balance, you can start drifting with ABS tires with extremely little modification.

In my mind, the setup 'needed' for a drift car tend to be more based on subjective preference rather than absolute requirement. There also directed at people looking to tune their drift technique as opposed to learning the basics of the control.


Once you start feeling comfortable controlling your car in a drift, then it seems logical to begin tuning your suspension settings to get better performance. I've heard that spring stiffness is supposed to be set as stiff as possible, but have also heard that it must be fairly soft. The conflict is better understood when you realize that different tire compounds and different road surfaces all play into what works best. My setup on wet asphalt is terrible, but works tremendously wel for dry asphalt. It's reasonable for slightly rough concrete, but very difficult to control properly on smooth concrete.

Unfortunately, I don't have any ability to compare at the moment, but I've tremendously enjoyed making use of the one-way clicker on the StreetWeapon chassis. This is essentially an adjustable one-way bearing that sits right before the front differential. The basic idea is that you can apply a positive torque to the front wheels (acceleration), but negative torque is absorbed or lost at the clicker when it's loose. This amounts to your brake system turning into a handbrake. I'm not familiar with the other cars you mentioned, but I understand that some other models have one-way bearings for the front wheels.

The biggest benefit here is that you are better able to force the car to oversteer. Without a weight shift via a feint maneuver (look it up) or braking, most of these R/C cars have an initial tendency to understeer. The car basically turns the wheels and continues following a largely straight line. If you have a clicker setup, you can apply a jolt of break and force the rear tires to lock and break traction. This will almost always induce oversteer and help you setup in a stable beta angle. For cars without this, you'll just have to rely on braking shifting the weight enough to cause the oversteer or even pulsing the throttle to power over into the drift.

Good luck with your drifting.