It has been a few weeks since I last posted, but in that time we have ran the car at the San Diego National Tour and the El Toro Pro Solo. Both weekend were not without issues, but we are getting much closer to completion.
I will start out with the San Diego National Tour weekend. I arrive a day early to get everything sorted out on the car and ensure that it was ready. We spent quite a bit of time on the small stuff, including several hours to get the car corner weighed and aligned. There are just so many adjustments that it takes a while to get them all working together.
Once we had everything completed, it was time to test drive it up and down the street in front of the shop and get it loaded up. Just as we were about to load it in the trailer, the transmission decided to grenade and no longer function. We pushed it into the shop and were able to pull out the transmission, rebuild it, and reinstalled in 1hr and 9mins....it ended up just snapping the arms off the slider hub and we upgraded to a later model 915 slider which is much thicker.
With that fixed, we headed to San Diego.
Since the shake down runs, we added a front blade adjustable sway bar, lower the spring rates, upgraded to racing brake pads, and put on the new tires. It was basically a new car at this point. We basically spent the entire event making set-up adjustments and reteaching our brain how to drive this think. It is odd to get into a car that you have been driving for so long and to break all those habits that it took to make the previous set-up work.
Here are some pictures of the car in San Diego. The ride height is about 2.5inchs higher than optimal because the front wheels would hit the fender thru the turning arch. The set-up that I went with is QRS Fiberglass front fenders widened about 1.5" and GT-Racing Rear Fenders.
The next weekend I returned to So-Cal to run the El Toro Pro Solo. This time around we had time to cut the front fenders for more tire clearance and lower the car to the desired height.
Unforeseen issues with this new ride height was that the front lower control arm was hitting the sway bar bracket under bump and therefore resulted in the car having basically "infinite" front spring rate. This explained the bad corner entry push and corner exit snap-oversteer that occurred the first day of the event. We returned to the shop to relocate the front sway bar to a higher location to gain the necessary clearance.
The car showed much improvement while running the next day. However, now under hard breaking on corner entry we had the splitter hitting the ground and the wheels rubbing the inside upper fender well due to the car sitting too low. This really cause the car to get upset on low-speed corner entry and greatly effected my run times.
I have since raised the front end, reset the bump steer, set the toe and I am ready to go racing again this weekend for further development time.
I will get some more pictures posted soon, I have spent most of my time underneath the car with dirty hands.
-Britain