Red Light Answer

[Ian Hill]

I have played around with light beam and signal strengths, color and reflective signals for slot car drag racing tracks I was involved with designing. I haven't seen the video, but I did see the photo here and read the above posts. My comment is this: it would not have taken until the camera flash was complete for the track sensor to react to it. Today's timing systems do not take excessive time to react to a sensor being tripped. So if the cameras flash had tripped the beam, I think the video would show the red light coming on almost instantly after the flash turned on.

With my limited knowledge of transmissions I don't now how lightweight reverse clutches can over come first gear torque and role the car backwards when the transbrake has been activated, but I have been standing one foot away from a super stock in the beams with its transbrake on, it rolled back about 1 inch, caused a red light and then launched. My jaw dropped as I hadn't seen anything like this before. When I told the car owner what I saw, he looked at me like I had a hole in my head.

Just my two cents

Ian