Something else is going to be needed.
Want to get better at placing the car where you want it?
Autocross....
Something else is going to be needed.
I didn't think the suspension was all that soft before hitting the track, either (well, there are a couple of spots on the commute home that hint at it). Once I got it out running at speed I could feel just how much suspension movement there was. No, not a showstopper, but having had a lowered car, I know there is a ton of improvement available in that one place alone.
Ah. I'd forgotten that it was autocrossing that you've been doing. Have you taken the car onto a race track yet?Now that I've got a year of autocrossing and a track day under my belt, I'm comfortable with starting to throw parts at it. I'm a set of camber plates shy of getting it lowered. Hopefully in about a month, that will be done. Then to see what effects it had--and play with/learn tuning with the adjustable shocks.
Want to get better at placing the car where you want it?
Autocross....
Smoothness isn't an issue. In fact, just about every time I've had an instruthor in the car, this is something they comment on--my inputs are very smooth. The instructor for the track day mainly just showed me the line for the first couple of laps, then kept telling me to get on the power earlier, hit my apexes better, and let the car track out more--basically fine-tuning the basics.I have to wonder if the perception of suspension movement is largely dictated by smoothness.
Which is to say, I have to wonder if, when you drive the car really smoothly, the movement of the suspension winds up being much less noticeable than if you drive it with abrupt transitions.
I drive my car smoothly perhaps to a fault, with everything being done as gradually as possible, including left to right transitions. Enough so that I actually want to slightly modify my line at Sonoma Raceway to make a couple of the transitions smoother!
Yep, once thus far. Completely different world and that experience displayed the suspension's characteristics in a different way. Things happened a bit more slowy, so I actually had time to analyze what the car was doing.Ah. I'd forgotten that it was autocrossing that you've been doing. Have you taken the car onto a race track yet?
Yes, autocross transitions can be quite violent and everything happens really quickly. It's all tight, quick transitions. With that, the stock S197 suspension wallows all over the place; it's just happening very quickly and I am concentrating so much on my line & next move that it isn't so apparent to me--aside from loss of traction at either end (depending on how I screwed up that particular corner). I've found autocross in an S197 is largely composed of rear traction management. This is a good thing for me, since I really needed to learn that.I've done autocrossing before, but it was a long time ago. I know from that experience that autocross transitions are much more abrupt than track driving transitions, because everything happens so quickly and in such tight confines that you really don't have much of a choice. I expect the Mustang in stock trim isn't going to be terribly good at autocross (but would bet money that the stock 2011+ S197 GTs with the Brembo Brakes are miles ahead of the Fox bodies as regards suspension behavior).
I won't argue that. The car performed amazingly well and that was not a big surprise to me--this characteristic is what attracted me to the S197 platform. I was able to place it about where I meant to, and it held the corners really well. The Mustang in simply much happier on an open track vs a tight autocross course. That said, as I mentioned with input requirements slowing down a lot, I was able to spend some brain power analyzing what the suspension was doing. Part of that was running at nearly 130 on a superspeedway front straight--lots of time to think about suspension movement. There was a lot of it. Watching some external video a friend shot of the car verified what I was feeling. He also shot a recent autocross & I saw the same thing--lots of lean, and worse, massive brake dive.On the road course, the stock GT Track Package is really good. I may be speaking from lack of experience here, but I have ridden in other cars with much tighter suspensions, and those cars simply didn't feel substantially more precise than my car does. I was really impressed with the kind of precision I was able to get out of my car, and that's with just being a novice at this.
I think you need to learn to trust what you are feeling back through the steering wheel and seat, and what you're hearing from the tires (at least). If the situation starts heading south, I think you'll pick up those messages before the car has aimed itself far enough off line for you to see that you're going off line, and it'll help you keep your head/eyes up more of the time. I hope I'm explaining this the way I think I am. 50 years driving has a way of putting conscious thought of what I'm doing under any given situation off in the background.
I've been thinking about autocross. My experience with it wasn't terribly good. 60 seconds worth of intense driving followed by a couple of hours of waiting followed by another 60 seconds of intense driving isn't a good way for me to learn anything, because there just isn't enough repetition.The frantic pace of autocross is good training - there are relatively few places on the big tracks where you'll need to be steering from a right turn directly into a left turn with no hint of a straight in between, so in that respect the track is a bit more relaxing. Further, you have to keep looking up, and you should eventually learn to ignore chassis roll and pitch. Truthfully, I hardly notice roll at all any more and nose dive under braking only during hard stops when I'm specifically paying attention to that. The way I figure it, it's what the car is going to do no matter what I think, and worrying about it isn't going to make it go away.
Right. And that's the hurdle I'm trying to overcome.One thing I didn't mention earlier about track driving vs ramp driving - on the street there aren't any flag stations, so it's an easier mental load on the street that you have to consciously take another step with at the track.
Don't forget what Dave posted earlier. Boldface mine.By the way, I'm not going to entirely give up on the idea of using my peripheral vision for car control. I'm going to continue to practice it in situations where there's not even a chance of damaging the car in the process. That may limit the kinds of corners I can take in the process, but it may be that merely practicing it will confer some ability to use it in tighter corners on the track. For tighter corners, the only place I'll be able to try it out is on the track, and then only for corners where it's not a problem if I go off on one side entirely (e.g., as a result of clipping the apex or going off at track out).
I expect the track work for that will wind up taking a back seat to other things, so it may be a while before peripheral vision becomes really useful here, but I'm not going to entirely discard its use out of hand before I've given it a fair shake.
At 6/10ths or 7/10ths you have some extra margin to cover for a bit of sloppiness (early apex, too wide, a little too hot). Unless you momentarily get way in over your head you'll still have enough grip left to be able to make steering corrections if that's what it takes to stay on the black stuff.Approaching braking zone, quick mirror check, corner station check, then focus on your braking point, and the instant you commit (start to pull your foot off the gas), shift your eyes up to your turn-in point.
At the point where you start to turn the wheel in, lift your eyes up and over to your track-out point. Use peripheral vision to track A) progress towards apex (may have to flick vision there to confirm)*, and B) scan through exit for traffic, debris, flags, etc.
* Now the way that I teach cornering is based on the "single input" concept, so it really only takes a quick flick of the eyes perhaps midway between turn-in and apex to confirm your arc if you're not getting the right peripheral cues (Hmm, this doesn't feel right). Maybe 100mS total. Don't study it. "Am I close?" If yes, great, eyes back to exit. If not, then and only then, keep your attention on apex and correct. Usually if you're not on, it's going to take a wheel motion to correct and your corner is blown. Use the eye-flick verification if the corner just doesn't "feel" right.
This. I couldn't have said it better myself. THough only having a single track day under my belt & thus nowhere near an expert, this is exactly the differences I noted. In an autocross you get a lot of compressed practice in extreme transitions. I think it was excellent prep for the track. The couple of time I did actually get one end or the other a little loose, it seemed like there was plenty of time to analyze & react to it as compared to autocross. For my part, it isn't so much worrying about the movement as much as noting that it is a place for improvement.The frantic pace of autocross is good training - there are relatively few places on the big tracks where you'll need to be steering from a right turn directly into a left turn with no hint of a straight in between, so in that respect the track is a bit more relaxing. Further, you have to keep looking up, and you should eventually learn to ignore chassis roll and pitch. Truthfully, I hardly notice roll at all any more and nose dive under braking only during hard stops when I'm specifically paying attention to that. The way I figure it, it's what the car is going to do no matter what I think, and worrying about it isn't going to make it go away.
OT sidebar... Cool, as we know the 626/MX-6/Probe were the same platform. I also had a RRE custom front strut brace, rear strut brace & a custom rear sway (17.5mm from a Probetalk group buy). The car was amazingly well balanced wth that. The only two things I wanted to do beyond that was an MX-6 front swaybar & camber plates. After that it would have been a full coilover swap. I was sad when I had to sell that car.Incidentally, the '95 Mazda 626 that I still have has been modified in much the same way as your PGT . . . plus at least one other thing I doubt many people try.
Norm
350lb rear springs sounds like a lot. Any reason why you're ditching the "conventional" wisdom and going for a bigger rear than front? More spring in the front would help with your roll/camber/tire wear problems too.
Be a little careful here and don't be in any hurry to tweak this. Revising the LCA inclination for greater anti-squat also changes the axle steer, and in this case it will result in "looser" behavior (which I think that you in particular might find disconcerting at times when you're already kind of busy).Pitch due to braking will be reduced due to the larger amount of spring on both ends, but I may also use relocation brackets in the rear to change the geometry to help with that. I'll be making one change at a time, however.