For the first eight months of racing Mini-Z, my setup process looked like this: show up, drive, feel like the car was doing something weird, change a random thing, drive again, feel like it was maybe better or maybe worse, change something else. Repeat until race time. Hope for the best.

I was guessing. Every single week.

The Problem with Guessing

When you change something and don’t write it down, you lose the data. Even if the change worked, you won’t remember exactly what you did three weeks from now. You’ll try to recreate it from memory and get it slightly wrong. Then you’ll make another change to fix the thing that isn’t actually broken, and now you’re two steps sideways instead of one step forward.

This is how you end up with a car that was “really good that one time” and you can never get back to. Because you don’t know what “that one time” actually looked like.

What I Started Tracking

I bought a small notebook — nothing fancy, a pocket-sized Moleskine — and started writing down five things after every session:

1. The baseline. Before I change anything, I write down the current setup: T-plate (stiffness and brand), front and rear tire compound, wheel offset, gyro gain percentage, diff type and tension (if ball diff), spring rate front and rear, and ride height if I’ve measured it.

2. The track conditions. Surface type (our club runs RCP), approximate temperature (warm gym vs cold warehouse), grip level (low early, high after 30 minutes of traffic), and any layout changes from last week.

3. What I changed. One thing only. If I swapped the T-plate from medium to soft, that’s the entry. Not T-plate AND tires AND gyro. One variable.

4. What happened. Two or three sentences. “Car turned in better but rear felt loose on fast left-hander. Lap times 0.3s faster on average. Lost the rear twice under braking into hairpin.”

5. The verdict. Keep or revert? If keep, this becomes the new baseline for next session.

That’s it. Five entries per session. Takes about three minutes to write up while I’m packing up.

What Changed

Within a month, patterns started emerging that I never would have noticed without the notebook.

I found my T-plate. I’d been bouncing between soft, medium, and hard for months. The notebook showed me that every time I ran medium carbon on our RCP surface, my lap times were more consistent — not always the fastest single lap, but the smallest gap between my best and worst laps. I stopped second-guessing it and committed to medium. My race results improved immediately because I was consistent.

I learned how temperature affects our track. Cold nights (when the gym heater was off) always meant lower grip for the first 20 minutes. The notebook showed me I was faster on cold nights when I started with slightly softer rear tires and then switched to my normal compound after the surface warmed up. I never would have connected those dots without data.

I stopped making changes that didn’t work. The notebook has a running tally of changes and their outcomes. After six months, I can see plainly that increasing gyro gain above 60% on my car always makes it slower — every time, without exception. Before the notebook, I’d try it again every few weeks thinking “maybe this time.” Now I know. I don’t waste practice time on it anymore.

I can recreate my best setup on demand. When our club ran a special event at a different venue, I looked through my notebook for the closest surface match, loaded that setup, and was competitive in practice within 10 minutes. Without the notebook, I would have spent the entire practice session guessing.

The Digital Version

Some people use their phone. A notes app, a spreadsheet, even a dedicated RC setup app — whatever works. The tool doesn’t matter. The habit matters.

If you go digital, a simple spreadsheet with columns for date, track, surface, temp, each setup variable, and a notes field is plenty. Don’t over-engineer it. The goal is to capture the data, not to build a database.

I still prefer the paper notebook because writing by hand forces me to be concise and I never have to charge it. But I know guys who have beautiful spreadsheets going back two years. Either approach works.

What to Track by Platform

MR-03 / MR-04 (RWD):

MA-020 (AWD):

MX-01 (Crawler):

The Part Nobody Talks About

The setup notebook doesn’t just make you faster. It changes how you think about the car.

Instead of reacting emotionally — “the car felt bad, let me change everything” — you start thinking systematically. What specifically felt bad? In which corner? Under what condition? What one change would address that specific symptom?

It turns setup from art into engineering. And in a hobby where a millimeter of ride height change is measurable, engineering wins.

Start writing it down. Even if it’s just on your phone between heats. Three months from now, you’ll have a setup library that no forum post can match — because it’s yours, for your car, on your track.

→ Need a printable format? The Session Setup Log in our free PDF pack has fields for all of this. → For T-plate tuning reference, see the T-Plate Setup guide. → For gyro tuning reference, see the Gyro Setup guide.

— MiniZ Modder

Product images courtesy of Kyosho America.