Quote:
Originally Posted by kevincrispie
Also, a note on the pleather material that HOT uses: they would be better served to talk about this than me, but I was talking to Mike Schreiber at championships, and he mentioned that pleather is very slippery on Cordura, but gets stuck to field elements. The positive of these other materials is that generally doesn't happen.
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The Pleather was very slippery on the Cordura, but the combination of it's stickyness on the walls and the degraded appearance (stretching) after aggressive play, we will not be using it moving forward into 2015.
I am most hopeful to find the sail cloth material that 254 used, since it had a great appearance all through Champs, and was extremely slippery.
As Kevin mentioned, their Ballistics Nylon material also seemed like a great material that was very durable, good looking, and slippery.
I will say that I think the bumper material is really the icing on the cake to a properly designed drivetrain and driver training. Effective drive design for # of wheels, wheel type, track width, wheelbase, etc... are probably far more important than finding the very best bumper cover material. Even with the slippery material that we had this year, we had a drivetrain that was extremely succeptible to t-bones, side pins, being pushed off course, etc... We will be working this summer and next year to design a better drivetrain that can either get out of and/or make it harder for us to get stuck in these situations. I don't think we know exactly how to do this, but we have some ideas.