Thomas Sasse: Lotus 56 B F1
Thomas Sasse sends along these images of his cars, to go with his article about
the
Hamburg Old Timers 2003 races.
Congratulations, Thomas, on your most successful racing weekend ever!
As always, your cars look as great as they run! --TJA
Thomas Sasse writes:
This car was build from a MPC static kit. The body is pretty often used in
F1/Indy race classes but there's a real problem: if you mount the body low
enough to look good (and for a low center of gravity, of course), a lot of plastic has to
cut away on the underside of the front nose to clear the guide. Usually some
styrene is used to make the connection (just in front of the windshield) to
the main body. If involved in a crash or two, the result is a broken nose
(of the car - normally), and without the nose the next thing to happen is a
bent front axle. Building the "Gold Leaf" F1 car without the sidetanks (would
have liked to but simply time ran out) I decided to mount the nose and the front
wings with the help of piano wire and brass tubes. After a little bending - you
don't want to lose the parts in the first heat - it worked great,
and if the guide needs some spacing: no problem- you simply take off the front
nose!
The chassis was scratched only with the bumpy "Greyhound" in mind. It had to be
smooth and flexible to generate as much grip as possible. The Greyhound track has
two big radius lefthanders and super tight righthand 360 degree + donut
(the
race report
shows the bigger lefthander and the donut), so I though it might be good to
build in a kind of asymmetry. A drop arm and a Riko bracket are the main chassis
components, connected with a brass tube on each side. First a pivot tube
(soldered to the motor can) was used but the design seemed to be too rigid, so
I decided to place piano wire inside the tubes instead. And to get that wanted
asymmetry, the left hand brass tube received a (appr. 3/8) longer solder seam,
pretty simple! The rest is state of the art: independant fronts on Cox rims,
"Wiesel" rears on Alu hubs with turned down (oh-oh!) Cox rims - as inserts
(sacrilege!), and of course a motor adequate to a "26D-gang" member. Well, one
thing to mention - if you have a close look at the pics, you can see a piece of
piano wire (bent into rectangular shape) soldered to the "droparm" to hold the
lead wires - this works perfectly!
--Thomas Sasse, May 2003
