A maintenance routine that keeps a car fast

Nearly every mid-race failure announces itself beforehand. A routine is how you hear it. None of these checks take long; the discipline is doing them when the car seems fine.

After every run

• Blow or brush off the dirt. Grit trapped around the shocks and driveshafts grinds parts down. Compressed air, or a soft brush.
• Check the wheel nuts. They loosen, and losing a wheel mid-corner tends to break something.
• Feel the motor and ESC. Learn what normal is for your car so unusual stands out.
• Look at the tyres. Wear tells you about your driving and your setup, and worn tyres change your effective gearing.

Every few meetings

• Bearings. Spin each wheel by hand. Roughness or noise means a bearing is on the way out. They are inexpensive; a seized one on track is not.
• Shocks. Any oil on the outside means the seals are going. See the shock rebuild guide.
• Diffs. Hold one wheel and turn the other. It should be smooth and consistent. Notchiness or grinding means it needs opening up.
• Slipper clutch, if fitted. Check it still slips slightly under hard acceleration rather than being locked solid.
• Screws. A quick pass over the chassis. Thread-lock the metal-into-metal ones; do not thread-lock into plastic, which it will crack.
• Driveshafts and CVDs. Check for play and wear at the pins.

Once a season, or after a big crash

• Strip the transmission and inspect every gear for chipped teeth.
• Rebuild the diffs with fresh oil.
• Replace every bearing rather than diagnosing them one at a time.
• Check the chassis is flat. Put it on a known-flat surface — a bent chassis makes the car handle differently left to right and no amount of setup work will fix it.
• Inspect the wiring, particularly where it flexes near the ESC and motor.

Write it down

The value compounds only if you record it. Knowing a pack has done forty runs, or that the diffs were last rebuilt three meetings ago, turns maintenance from guesswork into a schedule.

That is what the maintenance log is for: log the job against the car with the date and what you used, and set what is due next. When the car starts feeling odd, the history usually tells you why.