New Season, New Mardave Rules
 

CHASSIS AND COMPONENTS
GENERAL CONSTRUCTION RULES
Cars to be Mardave V12 chassis and suspension.
Ball races allowed on both front and rear axles.
Either 32 or 48 dp pinion and spur gear to be used.
Mardave Differentials will be allowed.
V20 & V20a wheel carriers & S1048Z – S1054Z white delrin Gears are allowed.
Car suspension and wheel carriers shall remain as kit although any commercially available springs may be used.
The use of countersunk holes and screws on the underside of the chassis are mandatory.
Body mounts may be changed or altered.
Battery mountings may be changed from original.
The motor may be fitted to either side of the pod, either directly or via a spacer/plate(to prevent heat transfer and
softening of the blocks, or for weight distribution) providing that there are no alterations to the mounting blocks.Mardave V8AB alloy
pod may be used.
No external bumpers are permitted, and no metal bumpers are permitted.
Any make of servo, servo saver or track rod ends can be used on the cars steering system.
Heat sinks with cooling fans are allowed.
Plastic whip aerials are allowed but no metal whip aerials or rollover masts

BODYSHELL
.any commercially available shell can be used
ELECTRICS
BRUSHED
Any type, make and capacity of speed controller may be used
Cars to use a maximum of 2s lipo or 6 cell nimh all lipos must be in a case Battery mountings may be changed from the original.
Brushed Motors will be the hpi saturn

BRUSHLESS 13.5
Only the hobbywing ez run 17.5 motor and esc to be used
a maximum of 2s lipo or 6 cell nimh all lipos must be in a case
TYRES
The tires may be changed from the original kit tires Any foam tire make or compound allowed
GENERAL SETUP
Minimum car ride height will be no lower than 5mm,

Looks good to me.
One point regarding the rear pod. There is an optional alloy pod produced by Mardave, which by the rules above would be perfectly legal. I don't see why any other aftermarket pod should not also be allowed. I think a more directed version of this rule should be used - floating rear pods must be used and no independent rear suspension is allowed.

trouble is dave if you do that it would mean you could use any rear pod from a 12th car which would give a massive advantage

Not sure about that, wouldn't that push the rear out to beyond the standard track width? Might also want to stipulate the use of standard Mardave width wheels, as the big advantage that 1/12th pan cars have probably mainly comes from the tyre width.

even the original rc12 rear pod is a far superior design to the mardave and would give a huge advantage over a stock mardave pod. if you start changing things like that it wrecks the whole one manufacture class and you might as well be running 12th pan cars. the mardave alloy pod is a direct copy of the original in function so other than motor cooling and ride hight gives no advantage.

Looks gd to me gordy area already legal, well when mark/James has countersunk the chassis it will be :-)

Think there be a few people that moan like anything at are club tho who don't hav c/s chassis and like to run there care slow as f***

Be interested in seeing how this works out, I'll hopefully be back at club very soon and always said that hall is perfect for 'daves.

Do we need any specific rules around front bumpers? i.e. that it needs to sit inside the shell and be made of plastic? or be restricted to the genuine Mardave one, I know the one I've got is the "Mardave Racing Rebel" bumper.

Might want to specify a bumper is required, but really it is mainly your own shell that gets trashed if you don't have one so I am not sure it should be in the rules. Definitely shouldn't be plastic only though, as I would much rather run a foam one which is also safer. Maybe welded steel or billet alloy bull bars should be outlawed though ;)

What about robot wars style hypnodisk defence system?

AWOOGA!

Had a chat with all the Mardave drivers last night (i think all) and all seemed happy with the new rules bar one. but at the end of the day we'll gather all the Mardave drivers up and have a vote on it. And if most are happy then the rules will go through .
Oh yes, no metal bumpers, no hypnodiscs and defiantly no small shot guns hidden under the shell!! That's not the write way to blow your competition away !
The rules should be easy to stick to, as Mardave now produce a bloody good range of cars and upgrades, and they also have a really good website now for parts. I'm not sure who's in charge of Mardave anymore but who ever it is they're doing a bloody good job of it.

I'd heard there was a reasonable amount of Mardave activity over on http://rccircuitcars.com/ so I thought I would post a question on there about Mardave power rules. I know a lot of clubs don't run with 2S and use a 4 NiMh or 1S rule which I personally think is a bad idea. Without going in to detail the thread turned into a complete mess with various stupid comments coming across as seems to be so common on Mardave forums. However there seems there might be an undercurrent of appreciation for the 2S LiPo battery amongst a few clubs, running with a 21.5T motor limit so that the performance is equal to a 1S car on 13.5T. This sounds to me like a really nice idea, and it would possibly pull the Mardaves at our club more into line with what might well be happening BRCA-wide in the future.
At the moment we are running rocket ship Mardaves at Gloucester with way more power than other places seem to be. Maybe if the Mardaves get much more popular at Glos we should consider a fast and a slow class.

SLOW - 1S 13.5T minimum
SLOW - 4 cell 13.5T minimum or any brushed motor
SLOW - 2S 21.5T minimum
Anything 6 cell or 2S with less than 21.5T is FAST.

This way people wanting to fall in line with the speeds seen elsewhere and possibly also race elsewhere can do so by running in the slow class.
To summarise why there is a little bit of friction with this, running 1S LiPos does not work if you are trying to make a cheap class of racing work. You need an expensive speedo and often also a voltage booster to run your electronics, and even then the 1S packs and are much more heavily stressed than a small 2S. If Mardave continues to be seen as budget racing I don't think 1S is going to cut it.

I must admit Dave, I've also been round a lot of the Mardave forums and the hostility between the people who do the BRCA events is horendous and worse than any other class I've raced in. I'm sure this isn't all the people that do it, but it's a good few of them.
I also must admit my personal view on motors and blah blah blah is that 13.5 and 2 cell is way too fast, it's alright for someone like yourself who has the reactions of a rattle snake, but for us mere mortals it's just too fast.
I personally prefer the old rules of 2's Lipo and 21 turn saturn motor, which was plenty quick enough for our club.
Doing a stock and modified class is absolutely fine, but we need 5 people to make a class. and at the moment we have about 20people in mod and one or two in stock.
At the end of the day everybody needs to vote on this, we don't run the club as a dictatorship, it's got to be what the racers want.

The rules I posted above are just an idea, if people want it different they need to speak out, but we have to go with the majority.....

Agreed. As I was alluding to in the previous post, I'm not sure there are enough people racing Mardave at Glos to justify what I was saying just yet. I also think the Saturn and 2 cell setup is a great sweet spot, but also it isn't sustainable to have no brushless equivalent. If you have the gear already that's cool but I think in the long term something of equal performance but brushless is eventually required.

go on then mate find me a equivalent brushless and we can go from there :thumbsup: there must be one somewhere

version 2 of the rules now at the top of the page

dave I wouldn't worry too much about your thread on the other forum I spent a lot of time going round the Internet today researching everything i can on rules and what's going on in the mardve world. it would appear from an outsider looking in that not many are even doing mardave nationals this year due to the bickering and the very dated rules .however there does appear to be really healthy club scene with most clubs running their own variations on the rules so I think our rules will be absolutely fine as most clubs run different ones to each other anyway

Yeah looks like you're right there Gord.
Still I think 21.5T brushless might end up being the Saturn equivalent. I might buy one to perform this experiment. There's a nice looking motor here:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Speed-Pass...item2a17b17a76

Which is a decent price. Should be somewhere around 1800kV which gives an added Mardave bonus - getting the gearing right is going to be much easier. With 3000kV on 2S I am running the smallest pinion I can fit and 75T spur and in reality my car is still over geared. The motor can't get any closer to the axle. Pretty sure most of us are up against this. With a 21.5T something more like 26-70 might be suitable which is a much more comfortable ratio in the car. Also smaller spur = smaller diameter tyres possible which will be better for stopping roll-overs of course.

That motor does seem a good price Dave. Your probably right about 21.5 and Saturn being fairly equal, trouble is i need a motor that's easily available from a UK supplier to be able to put it into the rules. A 17.5 may also be fairly close. Do giant cod do any ez systems around this performance?

Can I just say gord 2 things, u got brushed limited to hpi Saturn motors n brushless limited to 13.5 which seems a huge gap as 13 brushless is miles faster then saturn. I think faster brushed motors should be allowed to race against the brushless car or it's instantly a class of its own 'mardave brushless' which there is currently only one off which I'm sure isn't the idea

Also ride hight of 5mm n the brca rules are 3mm duno of u new that but just so ya no ;-)

Yes mate i know theres a huge gap at the moment, between brushed and brushless which is why we are looking at 17.5 and 21.5 motors. and you really can't run hotter brushed motors due to the lack of gearing available. and i know what your going to say, but your throttle is turned down and reiglers Saturn was far faster than yours down the straight anyway. as for ride height, when we tried 3.5 mm before we spent most of the night re-laying the tape.if you say 5mm it gives a bit if leeway. personally i would like to limit the hole class to saturn motors but that's probably not moving with the times

Chris, you are right - the 13T brushless being pretty much the fastest you can go in Mardave. There are enough of us running at a similar speed at the moment for it not to matter too much, but with a little more practise and set-up time we will get to the point where differences in power are going to be more noticeable because we will all be driving well. My car on 13T with the Extreme Stock ESC is quite a bit more powerful than anyone else's car I think. That's why I'm thinking a future plan to equalise the BL motor to something a little more gearable and not too fast might be wise, seems like Gordy agrees.

Giant Cod do have a few potential candidates. Even down to a 32T 1200kV M-car motor which is probably a bit too slow. Best bet looks to be the EZ-Run 17.5, but it would need testing as the low speed smoothness might not be great. These high inductance sensorless motors don't drive as well as the low turn ones. Exactly how much worse, we would have to buy and test.
You know what would be really great? A stock axle where the diff housing was an outrunner motor. Less pod weight, no gearing issues, controlled power with everyone the same. No gear meshing so one less thing for newbies to get wrong too. Anyway we'll have to keep that one in the dream cabinet for now.

I agree Dave we not gettin the most out of the cars yet and ur far from making the most out of the power you have which I'm sure you will soon but then again team Dave is currently only running 65% power on the handset so we got more power if required we just got it turned down to the speed of Si's Kinda pace as that's who we keep havin close racing with.
+ a solid axle can't take more power ;-)

Ha ha Dave, I do love your vision! Always thinking outside the box. It'll make you very very wealthy one day.

Brushless
 

Hi Gordy,
unsure if this brushless limit has been decided or not yet (guidelines above still unclear). However, with the advent of the CE version of the Mardave, it is now clear that the standard chassis restriction of 17.5 brushless - 20turn brushed no longer applies. The new chassis can clearly handle more power than the previous aluminium slab. I would suggest that we keep the class open to 13.5 brushless / 19 turn brushed as you still require good driving skills to keep these cars on the track with that level of performance. I for one will be sticking to the Saturn 20T as this coupled with a decent battery/esc is quick enough to compete with the NKOTB :p (I hope so when the new battery arrives). As this is still a budget class of racing, I would not want individuals to go out and spend more money on a brushless motor that is only suitable to one class of racing. 13.5T brushless motors can be used in TC's as well so are interchangeable between classes. I agree that blinky mode (non turbo/advanced timing settings) should be set to factory.
On another point, the standard of racing in the Mardave class has improved significantly during recent weeks. Popularity seems to be increasing week on week. I have been saying for years this is the best class for indoor racing. Now if only everyone had one....:thumbsup:
2011/12 Winter Champ (LOL)

And I can't c the point in changing the rules so that lots of people have to change equipment. There not been a problem with things recently so y change it?

I suppose now team Dave has a diff mr beeby will be having challenging races

Si you realise Shane has a mardave now :confused:

Yea but what's fun y is the standard has improved since people from other classes such as TC hav started racing mardave ;-) there just a gd heat of drivers now with the exception of Simon who takes people out when ur lapping them on the last lap costing sum1 (team Dave)5 seconds and the extra lap ;-)

But watch mardave die out now shane got one lol

can we add the new schuey stox to the chassis listing..... please.

It looks awesome and would improve the racing competition no end :thumbsup:

I'd still like the clarification on the motor classes before the new season starts. The 'rules' still state 17.5.

Me too - I'm really keen to try a 17.5. Not much point until we can find a reliable UK source though.

so when are you gonna take the 10.5 out of the team dave car then chris????

When we can afford to buy summit that won't quadruple the value of the car :)

wabbs....only one problem with adding the stox......its not a dave.....:eh?:

baldy...best not break a ball link then as that could write it off :lol:

no longer interested in the schuey supastox as it requires saddle packs for 1S and 2S lipo :thumbdown:
Hopefully a stick conversion will be available soon

Si

I don't think it will be a problem fitting the 'small' size 2S LiPo packs that we all use though.

Ok, so just read through the latest posts and following on from Ash's comments on Friday night, where do we stand for the summer championship?

My view is that we should stick with 2 classes based around the core rules outlined at the start of the thread but with the following class rules-

Stock - motor limit set at 20t HPI saturn:thumbsup:

Open - whatever! :p

I realise this would mean that we will have mixed finals, but if we get an A final with half open and half stock thats ok isn't it?? I don't see the problem i.e. It just means that if there are 2 stock runners in the A final and the B final is won by a stock runner they would effectively be 3rd. I think this is how it currently works.

Also this approach means there are no issues with low numbers that we would get if we were to formally split the class, i.e. stock and open can always run together if there are only say 2 of each at a meeting

We would just need someone (gordy?) to check the stock cars to make sure they are legal, otherwise they either change it or get changed to an open runner:blush: