Cardboard RC Hovercraft

You need one more thing that is very simple and will make it work 10 times better you need a bag on the bottom that will fill with air and float over stuff. It would be very simple to add you just need a durable trash bag put it under the cardboard plate so when it fill with air the bag will have about 2in of clearance off the ground you will need to cut a hole in the bottom the same size as the prop
Here is a video of mine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl_MkituZws
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You might need to mix your two throttles together - so that when you reduce your forward speed, you also reduce your lift, so that you can brake. Similarly you could mix your directional control into your lift, so that when you steer you reduce your lift so that you can bite into the corner. Some sort of skirt (rip-stop nylon from the fabric store is what you generally find used on RC hovercraft, tyvek house-wrap might work, you could probably find a big enough scrap on the ground at any job site) would give you these effects naturally as the weight transfer induced by changes in throttle and direction causes the hovercraft to lean and induces drag. Of course, it leans "out" of the corners which would technically cause adverse yaw (drag on the outside of the turn) but in practice the yaw control of hovercraft is so authoritative that it doesn't matter - and a little drag is helpful in making your turns happen faster. You will definitely need to balance it better if you want it to be controllable.

Your little course is pretty tough for a hovercraft - in order to actually make it around there without stopping, you would need to be turning one turn ahead of where you are positioned - eg. you would enter the hairpin corner backwards, in order to be applying thrust in the direction you need to be going down the next leg.
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