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Infinity IF14 Build review and Settings

The Infinity IF14 is one of the latest additions to the 1/10 RC touring car market. The car’s original concept was made by SMJ (Speed Min...


The Infinity IF14 is one of the latest additions to the 1/10 RC touring car market. The car’s original concept was made by SMJ (Speed Mind Japan), but later taken over by Japanese manufacturer Infinity.

This procedure may seem a bit odd, but happens all the time, even in full-size F1 racing. One of the first times this was done in the fifties, when the Italian car manufacturer Lancia faced bankruptcy. Enzo Ferrari, who was desperately looking for a competitive car, bought the remaining Lancia D50 racers, upgraded them and won the world championship the year after.
In our hobby, Tamiya bought the Tech Racing concept, improved it and badged it as the TRF415 and made one of the most successful tourers out of it.

The people at Infinity probably know their history as they hired some of the greatest RC drivers on this planet to race this car to success. The design was finalized and improved by former world champs Jilles Groskamp and Andy Moore, and is currently also raced by Marc Reinhard, Naoto Matsukura and the great talent Akio Sobue.

The car is packaged in a neat small black cardboard box, with the Infinity logo on it. The box is protected by a gloss outer sleeve. When you open the inner box, the red color gives you a hint of the high-end quality of the car. The carbon chassis and bumper are the only loose parts in the box. All the other parts are packaged in plastic bags and badged from A to N.

The manual is very clear and precise and is a good guide throughout the building process.

The first things I normally do when building a car is to clean the bearings and to glue the sides of the carbon parts. As this car will be primarily used for mod racing, I didn’t bother to clean the bearings. I was a little disappointed about the metal shielded bearings. I was hoping to find rubber shielded ones for easier maintenance. The bearings run real smooth, but I have no clue if they are better or worse than those of the competition. It might be a good idea for Infinity to indicate the ABEC value of the bearings (the higher the value, the better the bearing).

The carbon parts themselves were top notch. The finish lower deck is perfectly symmetrical and really nice looking.

First thing to do according the manual was to build the diff. This was done without issues. I only slightly grinded the opposite gears of the satellite gears with 400 grid sandpaper. As the first test of the car will be immediately a race on brand new carpet, I decided to fill the diff with 7000 Tornado oil. This will perhaps be a little too heavy in the beginning, but will become right for the finals. The car doesn’t come with fluids, so you’ll have to purchase them separately.

The spool also assembles without dramas. You just have to pay attention to the orientation of the outer plastic spool ring. The rounded edges need to face inwards.
The chassis with the drive train installed. I checked some of the online setups and decided to put the diff and spool in the lower position.
I normally always run these items in the upper position, but decided to give it a try as Marc Reinhard seems to do it as well. The belts are a bit tight in the lower position.
I really liked the fact that the lower bulkheads only make contact with the chassis around the screw area. The diff and spool holders can easily be adjusted because the dented area is quite large.

The carbon damper mounts fit very well. The only small issue is that the rear screws can’t be completely taken out without removing the lower horizontal ones first.

Like all the other aluminium parts, the servo mount is a thing of beauty. I really like the design of it with the integrated floating servo mount.

According to the team drivers however, the chassis mounted steering posts give a bit more steering. Because Florian is always on the look for more steering, I also purchased these option parts. (picture 11).

The plastic parts are very hard, so I inserted a screw before mounting the turnbuckles (which is something I really hate! ).

Another very neat feature of the car are the integrated antenna mount/battery stoppers/central chassis mount. It’s such a simple idea, but very ingenious. It allows you to perfectly position your battery. .
The suspension mount holders are a bit different then the ones from other touring cars. The mounts themselves are bolted to the bulkheads with small 2.6mm screws. The mounts come in different sizes. At the front 6.0 mounts are provided and 4.5 and 4.0 for the back.

The inserts are plastic parts with which you can adjust kick-up, anti-squat, toe-in, etc. As I said before, the aluminium parts are really high quality. In order to facilitate the mounting of these mounts

I put a small drop of light oil in the inserts.
In order to insert and remove the arms, it’s better to take both of them out at the same time, not one at the time.

The suspension arms are of a similar design as the TRF416WE car. There are 4 different shock positions by swapping over the arms. (Picture 14 and 16).

The IF14 comes with double joint CVD shafts front and single joints ones in the back. Both of the shafts are 43mm long, but the rear ones are made of aluminium instead of steel like the front ones.

I normally put anti-wear grease on the drive shafts, as per most manuals. At the ETS in Ettlingen however I saw Jilles Groskamp putting only some light oil on these parts, in order to minimize friction. Therefore I put some Dryfluid on mine to see if it would work as well.

The front ones weigh 9,29gramms and the rear ones 6,72gramms.

You use two bearings on each of the front CVD’s, but the inner one needs to be only 3mm thick, not 5mm.

The Suspension arms are a great fit. I polished the metal pins and inserted them without drama in the arms. They were a good and free fit.

The only part that needed reaming was the front C hub carrier.

The front assembly weighted in at 21.54 grams.

Now we are onto the sway bars / stabilizers. I always thought that finding the correct position of the stabilizer holders was a bit awkward. On the IF14 you can position the holder in-between the two marks on the stabilizer itself. A really handy idea!

The car is equipped with a metal ball raced stabilizer mount (The RC Racer developed one for the TRF series cars as well), which makes setting up the stabilizer really easy now.

The kit comes with high quality shocks. No drama over here, just some short shock bodies with the normal design of an upper adjusting ring. There is no mark on this ring, so I grinded a marking on it for easier adjustment. In the front I used 3 turns and in the back 3.5 turns to get it to the right height.

I also put the shocks up the scale and it weighed in at 8,01 grams. The 2017 Xray dampers are a tad heavier at 8,73 grams.
The chassis is now nearly complete. Just need to fit the electronics and the bumper etc.

I was eager to check if the body mounts of the IF14 fit those of my Tamiya cars, and they do. I was a really happy camper after this discovery :)

The battery needs to be taped down with battery tape. The car comes with a rubber sticker to prevent the battery from moving around.

The stoppers allow you to adjust the for/aft movement of the battery by about 3mm, which also comes in handy.

This picture shows everything that was left over. I hope someone finds a new packaging method soon, because this is really annoying.

So other than the packaging, not many other negative points. Infinity didn’t add fluids or double sided tape, and they could add some more spare screws and parts. Especially the 2.6mm screws and small e clips are easily discarded, so a small help bag would come in handy.

Overall though I really enjoyed building this car. The quality of the carbon, plastics and aluminium is really impressive. The car also has some nice features, like the bulkheads with limited surface contact, stabilizer mounts, battery stoppers and suspension mount holders. The car is slop free and comes with a good set of dampers and springs as well.




Infinity Set-Up and installation


I will use the following items for the setup and the upcoming races:
  • Hobbywing XR10 Pro ESC
  • Hobbywing V10 G2 4,5 motor
  • Gensace 6000 RS batteries (300grams)
  • Sanwa RX482 receiver
  • AMB transponder
  • Highest DLP650 steering servo
  • Sweep 28 or Volante 28 tyres, depending on the race.
The purpose is to use the same items so I can really compare different cars to each other in the future.

As my racing days are far gone, I had to look for a “Stig” to test the cars. Fortunate for me, my 14year old son Florian is a rather good RC car driver, so we got that problem sorted as well!

Introduction

I built the kit more or less according to the manual. I changed some items, based on the Infinity setup sheets that you can find via Petitrc and some knowledge I have from setting the TRF cars up.

The items I use are a glass base plate, Hudy setup station, which include a camber gauge, droop blocs, droop gauge, height gauge, setup wheels and some other items like a tweak rod and turnbuckle wrench. In the past I never took setting up so seriously, but for this tests I will go the extra mile!

Droop


First thing I did was to put the car on the droop blocks and measure the downstop. You can adjust the droop setting by adjusting the downstop screw in the suspension arm.

The IF14 uses small downstop screws that need to be adjusted with a 1,5mm hexdriver. I put the droop at 4,6m in the back and 5,6mm in the front, measured under the lower part of the arm.

Ride height


Afterwards setting the droop I installed the dampers and put wheels on the car. It is also important to put a battery in the car to have the exact weight. I put the car at 5.0mm in the front and 5.2mm in the back.

Camber and toe setting


The camber and toe can be adjusted with the Hudy camber gauge. I put the camber at 2 degrees negative both front and rear. I also checked the rear toe-in to make sure the car was mounted correctly. In order to measure the rear toe-in you need to cut the rear body posts because otherwise they will interfere with the measurement.
When setting the toe, I used +1 degree at the front, and they used -3 degrees at the back.

The steering throw needs to be adjusted with the steering EPA on your transmitter. I set it at 27 degrees left and right.

Tweak

One very important setting is the tweak. Ideally you need to do this after every run, so it’s very important to do it to check if the car is built right. it is If you are not sure how to do it, you can have a look at Martin Hudy Setting Droop on this video by Gareth Coates


While adjusting the tweak, I found that I needed to adjust the dampers screws way too much. I was sure that the damper lengths and the other settings were spot-on, so I rechecked the downstop setting. I found that the front setting was incorrect, mainly because I didn’t take the front bumper off to make this setup and secondarily because the lower arms are rounded off at the extremities. I checked everything again and decided to measure the downstop value under the lowest part of the suspension arm.

The 4.4mm you see in the picture correspond with the 5.6mm value I was looking for initially. I checked the tweak again and now it was spot-on.

Cross weight.

One thing I don’t often do is to check the cross weight of the car. Sky RC makes a handy electronic scale set that allows you to precisely measure the four corners of your car. They use it in full size car racing as well and sometimes spend an entire day to get the balance right.

In order for your measurement to be correct, you need to put the scales on a perfect flat surface. The wheels also need to be perfectly aligned. Ideally you could also use set-up wheels, but I wanted to know the overall weight of the car as well.

I put the car on the scales and, tada…. Everything was spot on. When checking the weight, you need to check the combined front right and rear left weight, as well as the opposite values. You can see from this picture that the car has a 50/50 cross and front-right weight balance. The left hand and right hand weights are also nearly identical.

With the body on the weight was also spot-on. Some people told me I should replace all the higher placed screws with aluminium ones to get the CG lower, so this will be our next purchase!

We will test the car in a local race before putting it to it’s first real test at the EWS race in Essex. You’ll read our endeavours in a next article :)

At the Track, Infinity IF14 Race report

We really wanted to explore the potential of the Infinity IF14 so here is a rather in-dept race report about the Infinity IF14 that Florian raced over 4 different race events, from a low-grip club race to the ETS race in Vienna Austria.

The first race was at the new Lovan track in Alveringen, Belgium. It was a brand new ETS carpet track, so there wasn’t much traction from the start.

We used this race as a test for the first Essex Winter Series race so we used Sweep 28 tyres.

To cope with the low grip conditions, we tried different things and finally settled with this setup. The car was still tricky to drive, especially on-power and mid corner. It lacked steering as well, so I put 3mm bump steer shims.
His competitors were running the faster Volante 28 tyres, but he managed to win the race.

EWS Race Report

The next race we did was the EWS race at Thundersley. This is a nice one-day event and it attracts about 100 races. Florian again participated in mod. There were 4 heats, so he was up for a tougher opposition.

The track also started off as low grip, but the new carpet gradually evolved to medium grip levels. His car was again difficult to drive, and Florian couldn’t accelerate out of the corner. The car sometimes had snap-oversteer mid-corner as well. I exchanged his new set of tyres with a set he used at the previous race, and his car was better afterwards.
Daniel Booker, a fellow TRF driver who also raced an IF14, redid the diff. He used 5000k oil, but more importantly exchanged the Infinity o rings for black Tamiya ones.

The diff was smoother afterwards, and Florian eventually managed to squeeze into the B main by recording the 19th time. He was however one lap and 6 seconds off the FTD, and his fastest lap time some .8 seconds off Olly Jeffries’ time.

There was only a single final, and this plaid into his advantage. With some smart and conservative driving, he finished in P3 of his heat and P13 overall. You can see a video of his final here:

The setup of the car can be found here:

The main changes were a lower droop value in order to get some more grip into the tyres, harder shock oil, softer diff oil and a bit higher ride height to cope with the bumps in the carpet.

Tonisport Masters, Arena 33

Arena 33 is the racetrack of the Rheinhard family. It is a great facility in Andernach, and is about 300kms away from where we live.

Marc was present at this race, and he headed a strong Infinity squad with Yannic Prumper and Dominic Vogl as the other drivers. Xray’s Marco Kaufman was also present while Awesomatix had a strong squad with Viljami Kutvonen, Freddy Sudhof and the young and talented Thimo Weisbauer.

The track had extreme grip, perhaps the highest grip level we have seen so far, so Florian not only had a tough competition but also faced a difficult track.
Wesley wrenching on the car
We were again faced with a very difficult car to drive, as it again had snap oversteer in the fast corners. Florian had to be easy on the throttle. I had Wesley Van Dijken, a fast Dutch driver who also races an IF 14. We compared the car to his IF14 and we found it had too much uptravel. Wesley kindly offered to set the car up and he reduced the damper length from 9.5 to 9.0. This improved the car, and it was easier to drive.
Uwe Rheinard and Florian at race control
There were only two mod drivers not to use an aluminium chassis, and Florian was one of them. His pace was highly impacted by this.

At last year’s TOS, Florian’s best laptime was .7 behind Ronald Volker. Now it was a massive 1.3 seconds during qualifying. He just managed to scrape into the B main with a P20 starting slot (out of 26 drivers).

Thanks to Wesley’s modifications, his car went a bit better in the finals. As we had nothing to lose, I decided to put all the screws in the lower deck. Thanks to this modification, his car went faster, but still 1 second off the pace.

In A3 I also screwed the screw in the upper top deck, but Florian didn’t like it that much. You can see a video of his last final over here:


At one point he was running in P4, but got taken out by a backmarker. A car heavily crashed into him, but his IF14 survived it without a problem. He carried on with a heavily tweaked car (after the crash he lost .2 per lap compared to before) and finished P16 overall.

The setup can be found here;

TRAINING RACING ARENA LIMBURG and ARENA 33

After the race in Arena 33, I disassembled the car and replaced the worn parts (front outdrives)
Aluminium chassis, damper mounts and Hiro Seiko screw kit.
More excitedly I was able add some new parts. I mounted the optional aluminium chassis and optional shock towers. As Florian also received his first delivery from Hiro Seiko, I also mounted the red and titanium screw kit on his car in order to compensate the additional weight of the aluminium chassis.

Florian noticed the car was easier to drive and the corner speed was also higher.

On his first run he got a 12.7 out of the car (his previous best was 12.6 so this was already encouraging). I still had to find some more time though.

For the second run I went to an Xray 2.7 spring in the back and put the rear dampers one position higher (hole 3) to give the car more onpower steering. This worked quite well and his laptime was down to 12.445, his personal best on this track and a bit faster than his TRF419X (12.556).

For the next two runs we tried different bodyshells. As it didn’t yield an advantage, we reverted back to the Bittydesign M410 and did one last run. Florian did a 12.447 so we headed back home.

Test Arena 33

As it was the weekend before the first ETS race in Vienna, many RC hotshots were present, with reigning world champion Ronald Volker spearheading the Yokomo team.

Our first run was pretty bad. Florian managed a 14.4 (during the Tonisport Masters he recorded a 14.2), but his car was extremely difficult to drive. I had a quick chat with Ronald and he kindly offered to drive the car. After two laps he said there was a major issue with the car, and that it was probably down to the tyres.

We left the car unchanged and only mounted new Volante tyres. From a hyper nervous beast, the IF14 transformed to a mildly understeering car. Florian ran the tyres in for 2 more packs and then we started to work on the setup again.

During his last run, he recorded a 13.9, which was .3 seconds faster than his previous best at the track.

ETS Vienna, Austria

His race was largely compromised by a very bad timed practice. His car was again quite a handful to drive. It didn’t have a lot of grip and was under-steering into the corner and over-steering at corner exit. It wasn’t down to an overpowered car, because contrary to the previous races I put a Hobbywing V2 6,5 turn with a 12.3 rotor in his car. To make up for the lesser speed on the straight I added 30 degrees of turbo and a higher gear ratio.

Florian ended with a 63rd practice time, which set him back in the first group of qualifiers. What worried us more was his complete lack of pace, as he was 1,7 seconds off the pace of the front runners.

Q1
Florian’s was downbeat before the qualifiers started. I had a quick chat with Jitse Miedema, one of the Infinity team drivers and Kotonori Fujiwara. They suggested to bring the rear arms completely to the front in order to change the weight distribution of the car.I also put SMJ 3.0 springs on the car. In his group, Florian had good pace, but as most drivers were slower, he lost some time lapping them even if they were very fair and opened the door.

His best laptime in Q1 improved and was at 14.1, but it was still too slow, and he had a lack of steering, especially mid-corner and exit.

Q2
I changed the springs to SMJ purple (progressive 2.8~3.0) and SMJ Pink (3.2) in the back. I fitted a 1.3 stabilizer to the back. I also changed the oil in the dampers to 350 Tornado and put the diff and spool in the higher postion. He improved his lap time to 13.8 and overall time by 8 seconds.

Q3/Q4
In order to get a bit more corner speed I used 2,5mm shims instead of 2mm shims on the inner bulkhead and reprogrammed his Hobbywing speedo (added 5 degrees of boost timing). His car was best in Q4, but he was inadvertently taken out by a back marker, so he couldn’t capitalise that run. His best laptime was down to 13.560.

He qualified in P53, which was lower than he hoped for.

Finals

In the finals, Florian started P2 and ended P3. His motivation had taken a big hit because he expected to be much more competitive. He did manage to squeeze a 13.394 out of the car (Marc Rheinhard did 12.7), but wasn’t driving as sharp as he could.

Conclusion:

During the races, we got quite a bit of help (Daniel Booker, Wesley Van Dijken) and on the ETS race Jitse Miedema, Akio Sobue and Kotonori Fujiwara were very knowledgeable. In my opinion, a good setup for a TRF or T4 works well for most drivers, but on the IF14 you need to experiment a lot to find the setup that suits you best.

The car is quick, but to realise the potential of the car it seems that you need to buy a lot of options to make the car more competitive (motor mount, damper supports, …).
Tip from Fujiwara-san - Wrap DJC in shinktape to prevent pin coming out.
There are also two important points I overlooked when setting up the car:

The diff needs to be absolutely perfectly build. Daniel Booker gave me the tip to use black Tamiya O rings to seal the diff. You also need to grind the gears down, because even with these O rings it wasn’t as smooth as it should be. I also replaced one of the large 0,3mm shims with a Tamiya 0,1 shim.
Jitse Checking the Uptravel
I normally set my cars up by doing the downstop. If you take the same measurements as on the TRF for instance, you have way too much uptravel. The damper length should be down to 9mm, and the droop should also be adjusted accordingly to get about 3mm uptravel in the front and 2mm in the rear.

The 2mm topdeck is too stiff to be used with the aluminium lower chassis. Florian prefers to run the 1.7mm topdeck on his Tamiya, so I think a thinner topdeck should help the car as well. Before the finals at the ETS, I put 1mm shims underneath the topdeck, and the car was easier and faster to drive.

Overall I would say that the Infinity IF14 is a high quality car kit, but it takes a lot of time and knowledge to sort it out. It has lots of steering, but the setup window is very small. Marc Rheinhard proved that it is a winning car, but if you don’t get the correct setup (like we did), it is extremely difficult to get the full potential out of the car.


Build by David Joos
Thanks to Tonisport
Tonisport is the official Eu importer for Infinity, and you can contact him via www.tonisport.de
review 3856183255057589064

Post a Comment

  1. Do you think Florian will continue with the IF14? Is he being sponsored by Infinity?

    ReplyDelete

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