RCR recently had a chance to try out the new Hella 350 LED light bars. Our E30 rally car affectionately named Nemo (Never Ending Maintenance Opportunity) has been running a cheap eBay light bar and stock ellipsoids for the last year. This combination seems very impressive on the street and playing around in the woods on open roads, but on the stage we have been consistently overdriving them. We have been looking at affordable solutions, so when these light bars came available through eEuropart.com we were ecstatic to have a chance to run them.
Up until know, LEDs are know to throw a ton of light in a broad pattern but often struggle to produce light at long range. I was a little skeptical to try another LED bar for distance but know Hella to be a quality manufacturer and figured it was worth a shot. I’m glad we did as they are great!
Hella offers the 350 bars with four lenses. Wide Beam (Flood), Driving (Standard), Narrow Beam (Self Explainatory), and Pencil Beams (Long distance spot). The optical lenses on these separate them from the rest. Most LED bars consist of forward facing LED’s sitting in reflectors (like my cheap eBay one shown below). This can throw a lot of light, but with a scatted and unfocused pattern with no distance. Hella defeated this by putting a small polycarbonate lens plate across the front of these bars, allowing the beams to be specifically focused for a much more useful end result.
We opted to get the Pencil beams. The pencil beam does just what it sounds like. Focuses the light in a narrow beam that shines waaaaay down the road. As mentioned before we had been overdriving our lights…going 100 on gravel, about 20mph faster than what are lights were giving us time to react to. Even with great notes this unsettling.
First impressions while installing the Hella 350 light bars were very good. The units were solid feeling and well built, with good weather sealing (unlike most inexpensive units). I had read the overall dimensions in the specifications but was still surprised with how compact and lightweight the bars were. They have a nice aluminum case and look to be very well made. The mounts are stainless and can be easily mounted with the supplied mounting template. The light weight and low height of the light bars greatly reduces the structure needed to hold them steady over a rough road. I constructed our mounts with some light duty steel scrap I had in the shop.
Once triangulated I saw no vibration over jumps and bumps. Hard to achieve that with traditional 8” heavy rally lights. We wired the lights in parallel with a relay, but at 10 amps you could get by running a single bar with just a heavy duty switch. After wiring and mounting the lights we took them for a shake down to adjust. Pencil beams are very sensitive to the direction they are pointed so you have to make sure they are correct BEFORE you get the stage. The lights are so bright that if they are too low or pointing at the trees, the glare/brightness will actually make it harder to see. With the lights aimed everything was tightened up and we headed out to LSPR, confident we would be in much better shape on the night stages.
Driving at on stage at night with the pencil beams is amazing. You can literally see as far as you can drive fast. At LSPR we were placing low to mid 20s on the first 6 stages (out of 66 cars). The first night stage we dropped to 19th over all and the second night stage down to 13th overall. These lights made a HUGE difference and were very confidence inspiring on the high-speed sections. It is difficult to gauge speed in the video, but a lot of the stage was in the top of 4th and 5th gear. That puts us running 90-105 mph on gravel, in the woods, in the dark… and we could see!!! I’ll never go without nice lights again. If you are looking for easy to mount pencil beams that throw the distance and don’t use much power these Hella 350 light bars are a good choice.
LSPR Stage 8. Keep in mind the camera adjusted exposure due to the intensity of the light, to darken the surrounding area. We ran up to 100mph in this forest stage and NEVER outran the lights. 13/66 cars, 1st in regional 2wd.
Finally, proper lights.
If you would like to learn more about River City Rally Team please check out our facebook page for team bios, scheduled events, and car build pics…
