Monthly Archives: October 2021

ARC R12FF Late Summer Report

Following on from my mid summer report on the ARC R12FF, it’s now time to summarise all the findings of the 2021 summer season with the car.

Unfortunately it’s already October, and living in this climate that means no more outdoor testing. This year we were fairly unlucky with the weather conditions in both August and September, meaning that testing opportunities were more limited than one would have wished. I still managed to do a lot of testing with the R12FF after I wrote that mid summer report in Late July though, with the last session one week ago.

While the early summer testing was quite focused on trying different option parts and configurations of the car, during August and September I focused more on basic setup work and fine-tuning, and hence the setup I’m running has has changed slightly from the setup I posted in that mid summer report.

There are no huge changes though, as with many of the things I tried I ended up going back to what I had been running.

All the details are in the setup sheet posted at the end of this blog post, but besides making the front end narrower, most of the changes are small changes in roll centers, damper angles, bump steer etc. I also bought some thinner roll bars for the car, which I found worked well for me.

As I mentioned in the mid summer report, adding the flex plate gave the car some sharpness I had been missing until that point. I tested a lot of different settings with the flex plate, but always ended up going back to the same setup, as that gave the best feeling for me.

Making the front end slightly narrower really worked well for me.

I also played around with bump steer shims and found 2mm to give good corner speed but still with a good steering feel.

For the rear droop or downstop settings anything from 4.5 to 5.5 works well on our track, and it’s a very good way to fine-tune the feeling of the car. The best compromise for me in most conditions is 5mm.

It would still be interesting to try the short front arms on the car, and I would also like to try the graphite arms.

Having run the Bittydesign HC-F body for several seasons now, it would also be great if another modern body with enough realism was released in time for next season. One of the things I mentioned in my previous report on the car was the fact that in over half a summer of testing I had not once crashed with the car. Obviously I could not go the whole summer without crashes, but even so the HC-R body is still in very good shape! 🙂

After one full summer season with the R12FF I’m really happy with the car. It follows in the footsteps of the R11F, with both cars being huge positive surprises. I have not broken one single part on R12FF, and it has delivered impressive lap times and results. I can warmly recommend the car.

It remains to be seen if I will continue running the car next season, or if there will be something new and interesting released.