Posted by Sascha After the qualification session you could see them all throwing weights to the back (except for us, we were out of front end weight already - something that needs to be changed for next season). I am not going to complain about it anymore - we did worse with our track last year and also couldn't keep the water content up... Anyways - the track was absolutely perfect when wet enough. We started out with 8 plys on the current tractor and then went to 10 plys. The 10 plys gave us quite an advantage over the competition that ran with 8 plys. The 10 ply is an easy to handle tyre that gripps well right off the line, lifts plenty of front end weight and can be run with very low tire pressure. On our little tractor they don't work for sh.t though (only when having a super good, sticky track in the 3.5t). No way do we get them to work in the 2.5t at present and in 70% of the cases we do better with 10 plys in the 3,5t. If you look at the 3.5t results from the weekend, you could see there was LOTS of traction in the track. The guys on the 8 ply tires didn't stand a chance. That weekend in Sweden they did a lot of work on their track and put A LOT of water in and turned it into good grounds.
on 9/1/2005, 8:38 pm, in reply to "Re: Puzzled with Engine rules"
172.178.61.250
Tom, you'd better check the videos about your two scraper guys and compare that to the amount of water that is put in at other pulls at alike weather.
I just got a press release from a dutch team that ran in the 4,5t and they said exactly the same about the track going away.
If you check some pics and videos from the past Euro Cup events you'll see our tractor being sky high even with front end weights on at several pulls.
Back to the tyre story.
When the HPs came out it was quickly visable, they were the ones to beat on certain (good) tracks.
We got our share of getting beat trying to keep up with the HPs on the 10 plys.
Since we didn't want to drop any further down, we got us two sets of HP tires about two years ago.
The first experiences were:
They don't do any good on tracks with little traction, they do not lift near the front end weight the 10 plys can lift (screwing up the given balance we had in the Green Fighter on a lot of occasions) and they start slow no matter the track. But if there is traction they will outperform the 8 and 10 ply by at least 5 meters, or break a lot of parts. The change of tires made us break and improve:
Ring & pinion gears, the differential (don't even try to run them with a non billet diff in the 4.5t), ring gears in the planetaries, sun gears in the planetaries (axle / sun gear out of one piece now) and the 2 speed transmission we have in has spend most of it's time in our tractor, too.
Still - when the track is hard and you can't get those big diggers into the ground, you are screwed.
Good example was last years EC on our concrete ground.
We got a pretty good beating of 8 meters with the Green Fighter from e.g. Breaker (which is on 8ply) in Sweden on a dry, hard track earlier this summer.
At the 3.5t at Gt. Eccleston he couldn't even make the Pull Off in which the Fighter went 99 m and change.
We blew our crossbox at 76m in the Pull Off, when the tractor was at full speed. (Cougar, which won the class went 101 m)
Breaker went 62m without breakage in that Pull Off...
Last weekend Breaker went 1m further than our machine.
If you check the results from Bakel in 2000, where we was still on 10 plys, you can see Breaker has been no match for our machine - and they didn't change anything on it.
Actually the few occasions we ran against DDan, the good ole british machine didn't look to good either (remember the 2002 british finals?).
I am not too sure how much power we lost because of that crack in the intake, but we for sure couldn't adobt our machine to the track conditions in the Pull Off.
I think that is what you call "got beat"...
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