Page 11 - March 2019 IWMA News Interactive

Time to Get Technical By: Jereme Boyd. IWMA VP of Operations
Hello everyone out in racer land! My name is Jereme Boyd and I am the VP of Operations for the IWMA. Some of you may know my daughter TK Boyd, she has been an am- bassador for our organization and has done some interviews for the IWMA. We are starting a new series in the magazine involving the Technical aspects of racing! I myself raced dirt and asphalt for many years and TK now races a dirt micro sprint race car. I get asked all the time about setups, tires and many other things about our racing program that has made our team successful. I do give suggestions but as we all know it’s many factors that come into play. We have all been given advice from other racers or even fans lol, but the real infor- mation comes from learning about your particular form of racing. If you have a chassis built by a manufacturer then use them as a resource. They are going to be a good asset to get you the basics of the car setup for starting points or a good baseline to at least get it going. One of the best things I could offer in advice in this area is to get some setup sheets, start a notebook and keep it with you at all times at the track. Record all your information each and every race, this includes when you unload the vehicle and each time you turn laps and come off the track.
Many years ago I hopped in an asphalt sprint car in Anderson IN that I had never been in before and I couldn’t get it to turn to save my life. Now having said that I had just watched the car owner turn an amazing set of laps in the same car! Well, as many of us know that each driver is the key to setups also. All chassis manufactures have a base line setup that can be achieved that they use for a baseline setup. Then the fine tuning comes into play. TK likes an extremely tight car, I myself like a loose car which in the beginning of set- ting her car up I couldn’t get it right. So I grabbed my handy setup sheets supplied by our car manufacturer and threw a setup at it completely opposite of what I would normally do. TK went out and turned a half second quicker and gave a big thumbs up as she came off the track. I took her feedback and my knowledge of what to change and a resource to find it and it worked. Then I could fine tune her setup better as I
watched and checked things as she came off the track. I talk- ed earlier about recording this information in a notebook, I have blank setup sheets that our chassis builder has available on their website. I record all the information each and every time, such as tire pressure, ride height, air temp, time of day, and many other things that I have found useful.
We would like to introduce a Technical element to our monthly magazine, and would love to hear from all of you on what you would like to discuss. As I was discussing my daugh- ter and I liking a tight or a loose car, I am sure that many may not understand that terminology. Many drivers can tell you things like “it won’t turn”, “ I can’t get any traction” and many other statements. But what does all that mean in technical lin- go? Most of the information that I have in my head over the years relates to racing cars on dirt and asphalt. But we have drivers, team owners and members from all over the world in many forms of racing. And many of the connections we have made are with manufacturers, team owners etc that have the personnel to help answer questions regarding the technical side. I myself know very little about Drag racing for example but we have many drivers and owners that we have met along the way that would be happy to help with some tech.
So everyone get your technical thoughts, questions etc sent to me. We also have an awesome facet to our mag- azine now, it has video embedding. This means that we can add a video to an advertiser, an action video of someone we are doing a story on or some Q and A with someone in our technical section. So get your questions ready, and any of our members or if you know someone who is a builder, manu- facturer or just a smart setup person, let us know. Send your questions/ideas to jereme.iwmanation@gmail.com. Also any potential advertisers can contact me for rates for the mag- azine. If you are sending a video to us, make sure it is in HTML format if possible. Also check out our facebook page at International Women’s Motorsports Association. You can also contact me by phone @ 517-212-6295.
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