Long slot car races (Enduros)

[Dogsbody]

While I race with a great club here in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Slot Car Club, but I'll be damned if I can get these guys to race more than 5 minutes per lane and that's with proposed teams. Any mention of racing longer than that is met with stares, mumbling and people wandering off pretending to look for something. I see 8, 12, 24 hour races in Europe and even occasionally on the east/west coast and even with our friends up north in Canada but nothing central US. Is there such a thing? Does anyone central(ish) want to hold such an event (non magnet of course)?

[War Eagle River]

We race a minimum of 4-5 minute heats in our regular races here, but only if theres more than one class racing. If just one class, like this past weekend, we ran 8 minute heats. We also do 2 Endurance races a year, 1 team race thats 6 hours, and 1 individual Enduro thats 6 hours. Would like to bump them up to 12 hours, but we are old and decrepit, and would most likely need a break for a nap, and also an EMT on site,lol

[RichD]

My club, Shoreline Model Raceways, has run in a number of endurance events. Running long periods of time by yourself is too much like work, so endurance races are usually team events. Many clubs do not have enough members to do that unless they held an event that included teams from other clubs. On a smaller scale you could do a shorter event with two man teams.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BPVudAkaOKKtvn3kPx9G9DUrOWcN44HK/view?usp=sharing

[RichD]

Several aspects of long races that are not very important when you only run short races are pit stops and building a car to last the race without mechanical problems. In a long race cars with a less than perfect gear mesh may eventually chew up its gears sending the car to the pits. A motor may slow down or burn up. Tires can wear out and have to be replaced. If the cars have lights those may need to be repaired and the car will need tire and braid cleaning as well as oiling. Possibly there will be crash damage. You can just cross your fingers and hope that nothing goes wrong, but a well prepared team will have the necessary tools and spare parts on hand and will have practiced all of the possible repairs. If the racing is close doing fast pit stops is critical, usually the cars will need periodic tire and braid cleaning.

[Eric P]

So we talk about doing hour long enduros, but never seem to find the time. We often practice for about two hours and then run some 7 minute heats LOL

[Giddyup]

While I race with a great club here in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Slot Car Club, but I'll be damned if I can get these guys to race more than 5 minutes per lane and that's with proposed teams. Any mention of racing longer than that is met with stares, mumbling and people wandering off pretending to look for something. I see 8, 12, 24 hour races in Europe and even occasionally on the east/west coast and even with our friends up north in Canada but nothing central US. Is there such a thing? Does anyone central(ish) want to hold such an event (non magnet of course)?

I know what you mean Mark. We’ve just moved to 4 min heats, and with most of our tracks being 3 lanes (1 active 4 laner), that means almost 12 min of continuous running (but there’s usually about 4-5 min in there for lane changeover, recording results). This has been a big change from when our cub started with 10 lap sprint heats. We had moved it to 15 and eventually 20 laps. So whether the guys realize it or not, we’ve slowly been building up their tolerance to race longer 😂

Our next race season starts in January, and we are running every race as an enduro, 36 min per driver (spread across all lanes in one day), which will be roughly 12 min per lane. The total race time will be is exactly what we do now, in this current season - just across 3 classes.

So I floated the idea of 12 min heats to the group this past Sunday..basically met with the same response as your crew. I was even going to stagger the lane rotation so drivers would get at least one 12 min heat of restaurant before driving again. But it looks like we’ll end up with two rotations through of 6 min per lane. Meh, not much of an “endurance” race. Slowly but surely hopefully we can bump that up next year...baby steps!

We’ve done 10, 12 and 15 min stints in past enduros. 10 min stints seem to be a “happy” limit. The longest I’ve done is 3 stints in a row of an hour each. But I was burnt out after and my right hand looked like the “claw”! I can’t believe what the drivers didn’t back in ten day at LeMans....much respect!

But as someone said, the age of many of the slot racers is the major consideration. We’ve got 4 racers 65 or older. And standing is an issue (many complain about their feet), so chairs may help you...maybe they can get some “Michael Jackson” gloves for their throttle hands 😏 but eye strain will still be there.

While our enduro format counts individual distance raced by racer, as part of an overall season championship distance driven total, your best bet will be switching off whenever teams/drivers want, if individual numbers don’t matter.

Regarding team size, teams of two are “ok”, I’ve found teams of 3 to be a sweet spot as the need for teamwork seems much more prevalent than with duos. Three also helps with moderating personalities especially if you have two people who may not be close or the best of friends. The best set up I’ve seen for determining team size, is the number of teams match the lanes and then you divide the racers amongst. Or if you’re off, then factoring in one more team to make the numbers work and it allows the possibility of one team sitting out to handle marshaling.

One last point, to keep things “interesting”, and avoid people stacking teams - we’ve done one of two things. Nominate the slower drivers as team captains and then draft their teammates a la the old school ground pick’em. The other thing we’ve done, is balance who goes with who. For instance, we have ten regulars and say if I’m top ranked, I’ll be paired (if we’re doing teams of two) with the bottom ranked driver. #2 ranked goes with #9, 3-8,4-7,5-6. What that does is eliminate the usual suspects from winning. The best teams are usually 3,4,5th ranked driver duos...so it helps to mix it up.

One crazy thing we did a few years back was an IROC race. Everyone’s got to try the cars. Then the captains got to draft...but they could draft from one of the IROC cars, or their desired lane for the entire race, or theirs drivers. Made for really interesting choices in terms of what they drafted and when!

Whatever you do, try to make it fun (even if the stints aren’t as long as you’d like for now) and do what you can to prevent the usual outcome either by the same people always teaming together or the same results (as your probably experience that enough through your regular racing results).

I’ve always enjoyed endurance racing much more than regular racing andfrom what I’ve observed - the more people try enduros, the more open minded they become. It’s like anything else, people don’t like change, but if you can nudge them along in small increments of change, eventually they’ll come around.


Cheers,eh!
Tom

[LegOutOfBed]

The club I am part of, runs mostly 2 or 3 minute heats on club nights; but about 4 times a year we hold a 3 hour teams enduro.
Typically these would be a team car, either built on the day, over a 1 or 2 hour stretch if it is a weekend event, or pre-built by one member, if we are squeezing it into a club night.
We would usually have 45 minutes a lane = 3 hours, plus 2 minute changeovers, for quick maintenance - lube, clean tires and braids.
A team would be say 3 drivers, driving 15 minutes each, controller change is live. - You stop in front of the 3rd team member who is marshaling, and while the incoming and outgoing drivers swap out controller, that guy can give the tires a quick clean.

I think everyone in club considers these team events to be great fun, and one of the best days/nights of the club year.
We deliberately mix up the teams race to race, choosing 4 experienced and top drivers as team captains, then throw the rest into our best shot at a balanced order.

The cars tend to be slower than club classes, or something very basic, like a Fly or Scaley that has been made smooth and round - and PERHAPS had aluminum wheels put on the rear.

The slowest driver in each team often feels he is letting the team down, so we make sure he gets max encouragement, but mostly the #1s race each other and the #3s race each other, so lap advantages/deficits don't grow too much within one driver.
There is a lot of bluster and jokes thrown around between drivers like
"Gee you stayed on for two whole laps, that can't last / thats enough head start, I'm coming for you now"
"Did you fart, or did a horse die under the track" and so on.
- Anything that might make people laugh and put the guy next to you off.

Throwing a tanty because a #3 driver took you out, a wheel fell off, or the other guys car is 1/10th a lap faster than yours aren't so much frowned upon, as being a possible cause for a Salem Witch Trial revival, so everyone treats these events competitively, but with much humor, a lot of bagging, bluster, bravado and outright jest.

The main prize is bragging rights, and a cup which is generally given to the #3 driver to take home for the year. If your team wins by too much, you will likely get called a filthy rotten cheat and sandbagger for about 5 subsequent club nights, with all kind of bad taste jokes thrown in your [dis]-honor.

Longer enduros are a whole different ball game, I have done 6, 12 and 24 hour events. They tend to be pretty serious, especially if some guys have spent a lot of time preparing cars, a lot of money traveling across the country or further.
Your guys might enjoy the 3 hour type of thing, but be scared to try it because they have the 12/24 seriousness fixed in the back of their mind. Longer ones definitely need the cars built to a near bullet-proof standard, and be able to have motors or running gear swapped out in seconds.

[Giddyup]

Longer enduros are a whole different ball game, I have done 6, 12 and 24 hour events. They tend to be pretty serious, especially if some guys have spent a lot of time preparing cars, a lot of money traveling across the country or further.
Your guys might enjoy the 3 hour type of thing, but be scared to try it because they have the 12/24 seriousness fixed in the back of their mind. Longer ones definitely need the cars built to a near bullet-proof standard, and be able to have motors or running gear swapped out in seconds.

100% agree.

The longest our club has gone is a 3 hr. People have been quite happy with that...hopeful we can extend it into something longer one day.

[ZackM]

One of the things I have really enjoyed about the scale 1/24 racing we have here in portland is the longer races. We don't run a lot of minutes per lane, but we do tend go through multiple times.

The standard format is 4min heats 2x through. On a 4 lane track that is 32 minutes of racing to decide the race. One of the specialty races they just held did 4 times through on a 8 lane!

I feel this is a good balance, you get lots of run time to decide the race which you will find greatly impacts results, but you are also always changing lanes and have some sitout time.

Zack

[slothead]

For these various times that heats are run, approximately how many laps per heat? That matters, perhaps even more than run time. I have always raced for a number of laps rather than amount of time. On my oval the faster classes of cars are turning laps in the 3 second range. A 30 lap feature is over in around 90 furious harrowing seconds. On the road course laps take 9 - 10 seconds on average and a 50 lap race takes around 8 minutes of less intense but focused racing to avoid a deslot while being as quick as possible.

If I were driving in an enduro I think I'd prefer 2 driver teams with regular lane rotation but teams can swap drivers as they choose as long as each driver meets the minimum time agreed on and each driver raced on each lane. Mandatory pitstops would be another way to break things up and keep things close (such as a refueling stop every X number of laps meaning faster cars would have to stop more often).