NSR presents Tourist Trophy 2019

[GT6]

Amazing event! Great to meet up with old friends and make some new ones. Congratulations to all the participants on ALL the teams for such an excellent show of racing. Hats off to Leon (Heli_ca), Marcus, Dariusz (Radarek), and Tom C (midagekid) for the win - incredible driving and incredible car prep :text-bravo: To the Edmonton club, well done for staging such a well run event, and for your amazing racing facility (we are now all in a state of envy). Finally a big thank you from all of us to Tom M (Giddyup) for organizing this event and doing such a great job of herding cats.


The field; finish order: 1st #88 (Edmonton 1), 2nd #4 (Vancouver), 3rd #1 (Edmonton 2), 4th #05 (Calgary 1), 5th #15 (Kelowna), 6th #78 (Winnipeg), 7th #59 (Calgary 2)

Had a great time. Thank you all

cheers
Scott

[Giddyup]

Thanks again for all your help yesterday Scott, appreciate it! So glad you made the trek.

Here's a few pics I managed to snap on my old phone... starting out on the road trip



And in no order....in between cleaning tires :lol:





























































































Some of the items from the giveaway bags...missed out on one of the BNIB cars that were door prizes



Some pics from Tech Inspection:

Winnipeg's P68


Calgary's Autobots 917K


Edmonton's Dominator's P68


Vancouver's 917K


Calgary's Team Bravo 917K


I can't find the 908/3 from Kelowna or Edmonton's GT40 pictures. The latter weighed in at 90.3 gr - the heaviest in the field and basically had weight on every open space on the chassis/pod. Can't recall the 908/3's weight, but was in the low 80's for weight and had weight everywhere as well!

[Giddyup]

Here is the 2019 TT results and stats summaries by lane, driver and teams

[cgingras]

I have to go back to work in a few minutes so I'll be brief.

I flew across this great country to participate in this event and I have not regretted it a single second. I enjoyed finally meeting many of the great customers I had over the years at Slot Car Corner Canada. Slot car racing is a fantastic hobby where you meet people from every walk of life and that makes it very interesting.

The Edmonton crew has a «wow» facility and I'm envious, like all of us were. Tom M invited me to join the Calgary 2 team and I think I can safely say that a new friendship has officially begun. We drove a well-handling car and it was as good at the end as it was in the beginning. Missing the podium by only 3.2 laps was frustrating but we gave it what we could. Thank you Tom for your dedication to this event.

I also want to acknowledge the Vancouver crew (Alwyn, Perry, Dan and Brian) who were gracious enough to let me share the house they rented (and the car they rented). Great roommates, great guys to be around with and new friendships too. It was a lot of fun.

Finally, thank you to everyone from the Edmonton club (including wives and children) who helped organize this VERY well-run event. Everything went well and everyone had fun and this is what this hobby is all about.

My pictures of the practice and of the race are here:

Friday - Practice
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cgingras/ ... 0517148301

Saturday - Race
https://www.flickr.com/photos/cgingras/ ... 0543404063

[bill from nh]

Nice photos Christian!

[Slot GT]

Here's a pic of our (Edmonton Team 2) GT40 entry. This is post race.



Here's another interesting picture of the inside of our body showing the tire wear after 1107.7 laps. This was on one set of Paul Gage tires. They lasted the whole race and never gave up any grip even though we were not allowed to clean the tires during the race.

[AndGoliath]

Tom asked me to create some graphs so I did.

In processing the data to do the graphs I had to do some data accumulation so I thought I would start out with the lap totals and rankings by lane. It is nice to see that five teams ended up with lane podiums.



Here is the accumulated laps in round/heat order. This is the sum of each team's heat results based on their rotation through the various lanes in the order they went through them. There are some divergences due to some teams starting on more difficult lanes than others.



Since it is difficult to see the data for the first two rounds, the next graph only shows the results from the first two lanes for each team.



Finally (at least for now), we have the accumulated laps in order of the lanes as if everyone ran from the black through to the red lane. This accounts for lane difficulty, but not car/tire wear or driver fatigue.



If you see any problems with these, please PM me and I will fix them up. I would rather the thread be about fun stuff than criticism. Graphs are fun.

[Duke7777]

This was a remarkably well-run event. The effort that must have gone into planning and running it is mind-boggling to me. Everything ran flawlessly. The Edmonton crew take fastidious care of their track and the race conditions were great. The track itself is a pleasure to drive, somewhat technical but with nice lane spacing and flow. The scoring system and data entry worked to perfection. All the rules around pit stops, penalties, etc were clearly and fairly designed to avoid any potential disputes or protests. It really was a pleasure to participate in this event.

Kudos for a dominant performance by the Edmonton-1 team. Their determination, strategy, car preparation and driving were all quite inspiring to behold. I can see we need to make a couple of adjustments to our approach if we want to challenge them next year, especially with regard to tuning the car for local conditions.

Brian

[AndGoliath]

I would also like to thank everyone involved with organizing, sponsoring, and hosting this event (hopefully I thanked each one personally at the event). I really appreciate our Edmonton hosts taking off time from their work to support us while we practiced during the week, the racers for keeping it fun, and our Tourist Trophy wives for allowing us to do this (I'm sorry if Alwyn used that joke last year). It was nice to meet you all and race with you.

[F1Fan]

Congratulations Tom and CARS for another well promoted event and excellent turnout, from everything I read and saw on the feed, this was another great endorsement of the slot car hobby. I don't think people realize the time and effort it takes to promote and organize an event like this, the entrants and sponsors should all be very proud to have been part of this event.

Well done TEAM EDMONTON on a very fine win, I am proud to relinquish my small part of the crown to what on all accounts was a TOP notch effort. From car preparation to driving to strategy you did it 110% right. The paint job on your car(s), is some of the best I have ever seen on a slot car. The design and execution with a modern twist on the classic Gulf livery, looked amazing, not to mention the fantastic matching shirts. Please post a picture of all your cars on the forum. The best compliment I can give you is to say that Ron Dennis would have been impressed.

On all accounts you raised the bar very high, maybe you can ask the City to put the "City of Champions" sign back on the highway! :D

Chris

PS: I notice in the above pictures that car #88 in the tech inspection (body off) is a different body than the car that is pictured as the winning car (the names on the side are different) - did you have two different cars and did the winning car have the same weight tuning?

[Radarek]

[quote="F1Fan]

Chris

PS: I notice in the above pictures that car #88 in the tech inspection (body off) is a different body than the car that is pictured as the winning car (the names on the side are different) - did you have two different cars and did the winning car have the same weight tuning?[/quote]

Hi

The car is the same on all the pictures. Tech pictures were taken a day before I think. Original paint work had only Leon name so for the race itself we had put a small sticker having all the drivers names on it.

I think I can speak on behalf of my friends from Edmonton club...
It was a great pleasure to host this TT here in Edmonton. As not for the weather this summer will be the one to remember. What a fine time it was. Big thanks to Tom M for bringing us together one more time, as all been said about preparation for the race only Tom can know what it really takes. This year we had a lot of new people showing for the very first time into the inter club competition as well as old friends coming back. What a experience for everyone. I want to say thanks to all of them, I hope you guys had a good time. Big thanks to our sponsors, today’s market situation is not the best but you have come well beyond with gifts. Paul G - that is one fine tire for the competition, thank you for supporting us. Thanks to all who volunteer their time to help us enjoy the event Ken, Scott, Jackie and Curt the true A team. Also big thanks to my club mates, lots been said between us but once again thanks.

O gosh... our space is so empty without you guys.... can’t wait for the next one....

As for the win... it wasn’t so dominant... I think Vancouver did the same last year to us, we just quick learners...

Thanks guys

Dariusz aka Radarek

[VTECFOUR]

Was my first time attending such an event and what a great time, on and off the track.

The things that stood out for me were the:

- organization, dedication and caring shown by race creator Tom M (Giddyup) and the core group from the Edmonton host club including Tom C (midagekid) Leon (Heli_ca) and Dariusz (Radarek) with their families, It was a busy time maintaining the facility and running race logistics over and above their own team preparations, but they carried it off seamlessly.

- grins, smiles and easy laughter expressed by everyone involved and attending.

- generosity of the sponsors including Ron and Lynne from LEB Hobbies (NSR distributor for Canada), Paul (Paul Gage Tires), big Ron ((Beast Lee) Slot Car Mods zine) and Tom C (Slot Car Universe).

- fantastic facility offered by the generous owner, Ernie and enhanced by the host club's sweat equity and funds. Wow, what a place! Room enough for three tracks, a kitchenette, washroom and two works spaces with a pleasing race decor. Loved the Gulf colors. Absolutely, the envy of everyone attending.

Big track


Hill climb


Original track


Pit room 1


- fun, non-racing time with my Vancouver teammates, Alwyn (Superslab), Perry, Brian (Duke7777) and our rented house mate, Christian (cgringras) of the sorely missed Slot Car Corner Canada. You get to know people a lot more when you live in the same space and travel together.

Looking forward to the next time.

Dan

[ken weir]

On behalf of the Kelowna tean and slot car club a big shout out to The Two Edmonton teams. Great event , great hosts, and great people. To my friend Tom M (giddup) you out did yourself AGAIN. To all the sponsors ..THANK YOU...hope we can do it again next year!! To all the new friends (and old ones) hope to see you again soon.

[AndGoliath]

I did some more processing of the results. First up is a graph of the frequency of lap counts for the lanes. I binned the counts into two count ranges. Higher counts means more people were getting results within that range. You can see the concentration of lower lap counts on black versus the other lanes.



Next up is just a small table of some lane stats. The interesting thing is the standard deviation. It is a measure of how closely packed our results in a lane are. A smaller value means closely packed. As is expected, the black lane has the widest range as some people were really good on it and quite a few had difficulties. Although most people found the blue lane easier to drive, what they were really experiencing was it was easier to drive fast. As it turned out, in the red lane people had closer results with each other (possibly less deslots). In order to make the values more significant (and because I was using them for the Z scores described below), I fudged the values for Ken, Brad, Thomas, and Marcus otherwise the standard deviations would have been skewed for reasons other than driving. I do not know when Vancouver took their pit stop so I did not fudge their numbers.



Finally, I analyzed the driver stats and rankings to give individual driver rankings for their driving on each lane accounting for each lane's difficulty. Basically, determining your best to worst lanes in a way more meaningful than comparing your lap counts. I did this two ways. First, I calculated the rankings of each driver in each lane (I hid that data for privacy). Then I ranked each driver's rankings across the lanes. Your best lane is the one in which you had the highest ranking among the drivers on that lane. I highlighted these with colour to make them more apparent and to better see inter-team strengths. These values are in the Rankings of Rankings columns. The problem with this is that there were a number of tied rankings among the top and bottom teams. So the second set of columns are the rankings of each driver's Z score in the lanes. A Z score is a statistical measure of how far a value is away from the average taking into account the standard deviation. The upshot is that it is much less likely to result in ties and gives a more meaningful value. Summary: bronze is good, silver is better, and green is best.

[Giddyup]

Geez, it's already been a few weeks since we raced … just now catching my breath.

Thanks everyone for posting their thoughts and as well to those who have emailed me.

And thanks David for posting the stats. While I don’t pretend to understand “z scores” etc…I know there’s at least one engineer out there who might! LOL

2019 was huge step forwards for this event, both in terms of size and scale, as well as having a manufacturer and key distributor support the event. While I've sent personal thanks, a public thanks to all who helped host, support and participate in this year’s TT.

By expanding this year’s event, we had 17 new racers. The highlight to me was forming some new relationships – sharing a pit room with our friends from Winnipeg was fun in addition to finally meeting some “slot car celebrities” in the flesh. Lots of smiles and laughs, stories shared. By all accounts - mission accomplished!

While slot cars is still a niche hobby, it’s become clear that it’s a hobby craving these types of events to bring us together.

I don’t pretend to think we’ve got this nailed down. As even with the nearly 20 enhancements incorporated into this year’s event, there’s still a few lessons learned to think about moving forward.

One of which is the pre-race track condition/maintenance. We lost ALL track grip in the Black Lane mysteriously at the end of the Thursday practice session. A special thanks to the EDM crew for staying to midnight to figure out the issue. Glad you guys took home the trophy, you deserve it alone for your yeomans work to restore the track grip. Similarly, we still had people putting on way too much gear grease and oil, causing some frantic moments on race day morning as we tried to clean up one lane.

Another area is in the event planning and coordination, more time up front to help shoulder the load.

While I can see areas for improvement …I’m interested in hearing others perspectives to see what other themes we’ll need to consider moving forward.

Feel free to post here, PM me or best yet - email me at: tourist.trophy.canadaATgmail.com (replace the “AT” with a “@”)

Thanks gents, it was a lot of fun this year!
Tom