Amy and I spent most of Saturday at an SCCA practice event, testing new settings, alignment, tire pressures, and new parts. Pennington Field's high grip concrete is a great test site, even if not that big. Brian came out for a few hours to help and we all drove the car in several iterations. We had some other known drivers there to compare to, namely Chris Ledbetter's STX prepped E36 and Andy Hollis' ST prepped Civic (Andy took an unusual number of runs, prepping not only for Nationals but also doing a test for an upcoming magazine article).
There was a timed ~23 second practice course that we could take 1-2 laps on at a time and we tested a lot of theories and setup changes, finding 1 full second from tuning by day's end. The skidpad was also helpful when coupled with our pyrometer tests, which showed us that the low camber (-2.5°) setup we had aligned to last week needed another degree of camber after all. The increased tire pressures helped considerably as well, going from the 29-30 psi range to 40-45 psi up front by days end. Big car, little tire, needs more pressure.
We had one more test to try but the event was shut down abruptly at 3 pm, so we left that setup and packed up the car/trailer/truck and headed back home until Sunday, when the competition event would be held at the same site.
Results:
PAX -
Final -
Raw (overall)Andy Hollis and the other fast ST Civics have made a habit of bumping up to STU at our Regionals as they have a good shot of beating the "Faster" STU cars on this smaller site's tighter layouts. On Sunday's event I started out with that last, untested change from Saturday, which proved to not be beneficial. My first run was 1 second slower than 2 of the faster STU drivers, so I quickly changed back to the last, proven setup. I made changes after almost every run yet again, but kept finding time. In the end my times were bested by 3 other STU drivers... Andy Hollis had me by .6 sec and Jason McCall in an '08 STI (that we've done a lot of work on) and Ken Orgeron's E46 M3 both had me by a little over .1 sec (they were .005 sec apart). As I was changing things between each run this made for more of a test event than a competition, and by my 4th run I felt like the car was handling pretty well, without looking at the car from outside or seeing data.
The front end looks higher because it is... we were testing another theory that didn't hold water. Its going back down by 1/2"Amy ran in in the last Heat of the day (temps were hovering around 99°F by that time), running in the local PAXed Womens class and starting with the setup I finished with. Her first run started out quicker than mine did but while watching her on course I saw some things going on in the front end and changed the rebound yet again, and she kept improving her times throughout the heat. By her 4th and final run she had bested my time by .01 sec and won her class by 1 sec, so she was happy.
Then Amy skirted me by a fraction of a second...We've come to realize that this 3700 pound car (with driver and fuel) is probably limited more by the 245mm section width than most other competitive STU cars, none of which are this heavy. The trick is to get the car to the limit of the tires' adhesion (a slight push in steady-state) and then keep it there, or it moves into a loud and ugly push. It doesn't feel fast around sweepers and at this overall weight it may never be. The SST transmission did work flawlessly in S-Sport auto mode at this site for both days, so the odd shifting issues we saw at Vail had to be altitude related, we think.
The unusual Figure 8 course layout made for lots of loooong sweepers.In the end we PAXed well enough (15th and 16th out of 126) but its not where we like to be right before Nationals. The grip was good (1.2g lateral and 1.13 under braking) so basics are there. As you can see above the course layout was laid out with a LARGE emphasis on long sweeping turns, having a huge figure 8 dominating the course design. There wasn't much room to accelerate as it looks, either, as there was a transition at the start of one of the long stretches in the "X" and a transition at the end of the other. This emphasis on sweeps does not exactly play to the 3500 pound EVO's strengths, which are: braking, acceleration, large speed changes (where we'd see lots of up/down shifting) and transitions. Not to take anything away from their driving, but the cars that outpaced us in STU were a good bit lighter (Civic is ~1960, STi is ~3150) and/or had much wider tires (E46 M3). Excuses - I've got a million of em! ;)
Hollis was on fire and PAXed 4th
Ken O was fast in his STU prepped E46 M3 on D-Force 18x10s & 275mm tires
Paul and Jason are getting quick in the 08 STi on ASTs
Todd M's Civic was one of the ones that didn't beat us...:PAnyway, we don't think these Pennington courses are indicative of what we'll see at Nationals, from what we've heard from the course previews by Howard Duncan. Our setup has changed drastically from the Vail Tour 2 weeks ago and hopefully the Lincoln site will play to this car's strengths... and hopefully Amy and I can drive well enough to show the car's performance. We'll be taking lots of laps at the Nationals Practice Course looking for the right setup.
Until next time...
Terry Fair -
www.vorshlag.com$2010 GRM Challenge E30 V8 +
E46 DSP Autox Build