ZipZaps Turning Radius / Diameter

The first thing I was wondering, before making a track, was how sharply the ZipZaps cars can turn a corner.   There is no use making a corner turn to sharply that you have to back up just to make it work.  So I thought I do a little testing of my own to see what I could find.

The basic setup was a yardstick set up so that the car could just pass the tip of the stick at full speed.  Then do a full turn and see how far down the yardstick the car would impact - this being, ideally, the turning diameter.  If I tried this enough times I could get a pretty good average of what this diameter would be.

Right Turn

I estimated that the diameter was about 12 inches just by running it and imagining a ruler.  Turns out that 12 inches was a pretty good estimate - I found that the right turn took about 15 inches on average to complete.  This is a bit more than I expected.

Left Turn

I figured that the turns would be about the same in either direction, but I was quite wrong - and I think I know why. The left turn radius was only a little over 10 inches - 1/3 less than the right-hand turn. This is significant!

But Why?  Then I remembered something I forgot to mention - that I had a two significant crashes in the first few hours of testing.  Namely a 4 ft. drop to a hard concrete floor (probably a scale 20 story building).  I had to recalibrate the setting on the bottom to make the car go straight again (I'll get a picture of that).  So because I had to compensate based on the crash there was probably more room in the turning mechanism to move on one side than on the other - thus the significant difference.

When I can actually find a third car (in the same frequency) I'll have to take more of it apart to see what might be out-of-whack inside.  But thinking to myself I thought this might be a nice modification to do on purpose if you knew you were going to be racing on an oval track in a specific direction.