The Starting Line is a biweekly column for our Sportsman drag racers brought to you by Schnitz Racing. Every other week we will feature a frequently asked question and have it answered by a panel of experienced sportsman racers, led by Ben Knight. Having questions answered by multiple racers will give our new racers several perspectives on the information they want. If you have a sportsman related question, submit it to editor@dragbike.com.
Some people log all of their runs and are always looking at old timeslips. How does this help them?
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Logging your runs will help you with consistency and help you in different conditions. If you keep track of the weather and track conditions at the time of each run, you can refer to your log book at a later date with conditions are similar. This may help you determine a dial in for your next run. Keeping track of your runs can also help you determine when your bike may need a little maintenance, say if your et or mph start to consistently trail off, it may be time for to look at your clutches or other things. |
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Logging your runs can help in different ways. First as a bracket racer, you can check the weather and how it affects your runs and how to adjust for it. Checking the slips of your time runs tell you where to put your dial. Logging runs also help you determine if changes you’ve made to the set-up or tune have helped or not, by looking at the different stages of the track on the slip you can see where it has picked up or fell off. |
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Weather is a big factor with bracket racing, especially temperature, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. Having a database of your bikes performance with different weather for each track you race at is very helpful. If you have a photographic memory or you are one with your bike that’s wonderful. For the rest of us, keeping a database, log book or writing weather and bike information on a time slip is a great tool to reference for your dial-in. |
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Logging and keeping records of your runs is a great tool! If you keep up with all the air temps and humidity you can anticipate what your bike is going to do according to the conditions! If you tested on a friday but on saturday you have no idea what to dial, you can find the closest conditions to the current conditions in past logged runs and get an idea as in what to dial the bike! Anyway you can improve your knowledge of your bike the better hope this helps ! BE SAFE! |
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I have a app to log my runs on my iPhone. I don’t really look at anything older than a day old unless I’m trying to make it run a certain number for a index class. I really use old full out runs to try to compare/figure out what it would have run on passes that I let off before the finish line. Old run tickets, weather station, and some kind of prediction program or app is needed to help ET Predictions. |
We’ll see you in two weeks for another addition of the Starting Line, in the meantime check out our column sponsor Schnitz Racing.
