Trials Day

This page contains information about Trials Day.

On Trials Day, you'll have the opportunity to:

Work on your car.
No, you shouldn't be just starting to work on your car. Your car should be mostly built by this time.
Trials day is a time for getting your car within specs, for fine-tuning activities like axle and wheel polishing, and that sort of thing. Many people bring tools and supplies for performing these final adjustments.

Weigh your car
Not everyone has a scale at home that is accurate to 1/10 of an ounce. But scrambling to add weight at the last minute on Race Day is not a sound strategy.
Thus, this is a good time to use the official scale to weigh your car. Typically a car will weigh between 1 and 4 ounces after you've sculpted the car body, so bring extra weight to add. You want your car to weigh as close to 5 ounces as you can get it.

Measure your car
This you can do at home, but it doesn't hurt to place your car inside the official "box" to make sure you're okay.

Test drive your car
Possibly the saddest sight on Race Day is a car that can't make it all the way down the track.
There's only one way to be absolutely certain that your car is road-ready, and that's to run it down the track a few times. There's no better time to do this than Trials Day.

Test Driving Rules
Contestants are subject to the following rules when test-driving their cars.

Cars may not test-drive with cars against which they will race on Race Day. Specifically, this means that:

Cars from the same Den may not test-drive against each other
Cars from the same Grade may not test-drive against each other
Cars competing in the Open Competition may not test-drive against each other.

On the other hand, the following are allowed:

Cars from different grades may test-drive against each other
Cars in the Scout competitions may test-drive against cars from the Open Competition
Cars in either competition may test-drive against cars which are not competing

Thus, if a Scout brings his new car for the Scout competition and an old car for the Open competition, he may test-drive them against each other. Further, if a Scout builds two new cars, one for each competition, he may test-drive them together also.

All contestants must be outside of the racing area when they are not test-driving. Thus, at any given moment, there will be at most five people in the racing area: The three (or fewer) contestants who are test-driving, one adult at the starting line, and another adult at the finish line.

Last updated December 7, 2001, 10:00 AM
Copyright 1998 © by Cory Young. All rights reserved.