You never really know anything, unless you measure, at least, something. So, a while back I started to keep track of my lap times recorded during racing.

Now that my NOVICE R/C days are behind me, I thought I’d look back at how long I’ve been racing and how far I’ve come from that first round of racing on 27-December-2010.

My run in NOVICE consisted of 14 events, between 27-DEC-2010 and 21-FEB-2011. Roughly 2 months worth of racing every available event at BRCR (Bremerton R/C Raceway).

All of the racing represented here was done with the following setup, with the exception of 21-FEB (I’ll cover that next).

Truck:	Team Associated Factory Team SC10
ESC:	Novak GTB speed controller
Motor:	Novak 13.5T brushless*
Power:	Venom 3800mah/35C and Venom 5000mah/50C
Radio:	Futaba 2PL

* Ran single race with Novak 7.5T brushless

Now, here is a look at the data in graphs. Where the lines start to converge, those are the heats or races where I was most consistent. Looking over the 14 round history, my fastest times have not improved that much. However my consistency has, and that’s one of the more important factors in winning. Crashing is a REAL time killer. It can easily cost you 1/2 a lap, sometimes more.

Heat Races

It’s pretty clear in this graph, that although I had one of my best laps in my first race, my consistency was garbage. I was trying to go fast, really fast, and what I ended up doing was a lot of crashing, and a few decent laps.

Towards the end, in the last few nights running in Novice, you can see that my times have tightened up a lot, and my 5-lap average is starting to get pretty close to my all-time fastest laps. Not crashing, and running good consistent laps is crucial to being able to win races.

A-Main Finals

Here it’s a little less obvious. In my 3rd round of racing, I put down my fastest times, and my averages were pretty good too, but I was not yet winning. It was just a fast race. Track conditions are also a factor, this is why it’s important to include the fast-5 and fast-10 averages, to give some context to that fast time. It looks like the track was just ‘fast’ that night.

It’s also important to point out that right about the middle of January the track underwent a massive chance for ETC round #4, head at my local track.

When I start the analysis of my ‘Stock Short Course’ racing times, all of those will be on the same track we are currently running.