Drilling is where it's at, I can't agree more. Every other year we visit my parents for the Holidays, and I drill our cars on my dad's old Craftsman - wonderful machine, and the table is not adjustable... it's square and it's not going to move. We tend to have pretty awesome alignment those years. I cant by using feeler gauges to get the right angle. Alternate years I try to borrow a press or do the old hand drill and axle press, but only last year did we finally develop the skills to overcome (for the most part) the drilling deficiencies that caused. This year we had a beautiful base drilling on the craftsman again, and won convincingly despite my rushing the alignment a bit (bad dad!)
I've lived chromegsx's point. Our wooden, roughly 32' Track, if well set up, tends to turn in best times around 2.23... one year we ran downhill and times got to 2.15... This year, with a fairly ugly track build, my son had the best time in the Pack at 2.42xx (picture is cut off
), next best at 2.44xx, and there were a lot of 2.5's and higher. That's a .3 variance based just on the attention to detail of the track builders and the slope of the floor where the track was set up; I mean that's just huge!