You have my sympathy ! We have been in a similar position to yourselves over the last 8 months since starting.
itpro is correct - the most improvement you will see initially is through practice. My advice is to team up with another dad/lad combination at a similar stage of development and ability to you and try and practice with them on a regular basis. There is nothing better at this stage than to give your lad someone to 'race' directly with. They will both get faster and have a great time doing it.
Eventually, you will see that the laptimes 'stabilise' and become more and more consistent each outing. It is at this stage that you can start to 'tweak' things. It is also vital that you and your lad speak the same language when describing handling characteristics - start this as soon as possible so that when you do start tweaking, you both understand each other.
Pick a track that is quiet (preferably during the school hols) and that your lad knows well and enjoys driving.
Go for a day - preferably dry to start with - and have a plan.
Let him do a set of 10-20 laps to settle into a rhythm and then start adjusting things. Make ONE CHANGE AT A TIME (tyre pressure / tracking / wheels etc), and make a radical alteration. Only let them do 5 laps with this alteration and see if they can notice a difference. If they can, make a small alteration back the other way and see what happens. Repeat until an optimum is found. Repeat process in opposite direction. KEEP DETAILED RECORDS (weather, temp etc) and use an Alfano or Mychron - be objective, the stopwatch doesn't lie !!
Whilst this is all great, you do need to start from somewhere. On our Storm chassis with a standard 970mm axle and no camber/castor pills, the baseline settings are:
Dry: Black Comer rims, 3x5mm spacers at front, rears out to the circlips,24psi all round
Wet: Gold Comer rims, 7x5mm spacers at front, rears at circlips (or in 5mm if very wet), 30psi all round.
NB this is a baseline setup only and works for us, on our chassis.
I was very sceptical about the gold rims, but a session of back to back testing in the wet resulted in improved laptimes with the gold rims as well as the lad reporting a more balanced feel.
I did some measuring after this: Gold wheels 112/140 (front/rear) Jet silver offsets 104/130
Comer black slick rims 112/146 Jet black slick rims 104/140
Further testing with the black Comer rims again showed improved laptimes over the Jet rims, however this was only minimal and within the limits of expected error due to other variables.
It is my opinion that the difference in the gold rims results in a different tyre profile and therefore side wall stifness, which seems to suit the Storm chassis. I have subsequently learned that the chassis was developed with these particular wheels.
I hope that some of this helps - however, as itpro has said, this may work for us but may not necessarily work for you !
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