2013 GT STX-ESP autocross build

[chilema]

Update on ESP plans:

I know I know, I said I would wait it out the rest of the season in STX before I start to run the car in ESP. It probably looks kinda bad that I'm bailing on all the excellent competition in STX to run in a much more sparsely populated local ESP class but I do have my excuses . As far behind as I was in STX compared to the National-level competitors, the car was still great fun to autocross and received a lot of praise from co-drivers. My perspective has always been that any car with decently sticky tires and some suspension work can be quick on an autocross course, but the certain cars in the cars-to-have for a reason. Sometimes you just can't fight physics .

Maybe it was just great timing that the Hankook RS-3's are all but bald now and it just so happened that Hoosier was getting ride of their stock of 295/40/18 A6's for 500 A SET SHIPPED! Seriously now...how can you say no to a deal like this!? I ended up ordering 8 tires, which should last me a season and half or two, hopefully.

For wheels I decided on a set of 18x10 Forgestar F14's from American Muscle. Now, I know they aren't the absolute lightest wheels you can get in this size and cost, but I've always been fond of this spokes style. The plan is to run the 295 A6's for a year or two and develop the car some more for ESP. If I can get myself up the the pace of some of the quicker ESP driver/cars in the area I will probably try my luck at some Tours and/or Nationals, at which point I will probably go with a 18x11s and 315 width A6's and use this set of Forgestar's for daily driving duty (damn they look nice on the car!)

Wheels and tires arrived this past weekend so I got them mounted at a good friend's shop

These suckers are HUGE! Here's the 295/40/18 A6 the 18x10 wheel compared to a super short 285/30/18 A6 squeezed onto the stock 18x8 wheel which I used for a short time on front of the Mustang for F-stock. This really drives home the point that you need proper width wheels to maximize the useable tread width on a tire! On top of that, the 295/40/18 Hoosier 27.4" in diameter which is pretty close the height of the stock tires on the car. This tall tire may not be great for center of gravity, but the much greater longitudinal contact patch will hopefully help a great deal with putting down power as well as braking traction.

Upon testing fitting the tires on the front I came to the realization that I had used the threaded swaybar brackets on the wrong sides of the car! This made the clamp-bolt side of the collar sit facing the wheel and it turns out the tire makes contact with this extrusion.

After spending a good part of the afternoon taking both sides of the suspension apart and swapping the left and right struts so I don't have to completely un-thread all the adjustment collars and what not, I finally got the wheels mounted on the car. Sadly, the tire still sat too close to comfort (phone ran out of battery or else I would've taken a photo of the clearance, or lack thereof). I ended up ordering a pair of 5mm Eibach hubcentric spacers from Summit Racing, which will hopefully give me safe clearance and save me from having to back out some of the camber I gained from using the slotted strut hole that came with the AST struts. BTW did I mention how much I love Summit Racing? Ordered the spacers late Saturday night and it looks like they'll get here Tuesday!

A teaser...no full photos yet - right after I finished up the test fit it started to pour rain outside. >=[

I signed up for the Golden Gate Lotus Club autocross this coming Saturday at the Marina airport on the concrete lot. Hopefully I can get some decent testing done on the new R-comp setup, though I'm not allllllll that enthused about the course the Lotus guys have put together. See course map here:

http://www.gglotus.org/ggautox/GGLC040613.pdf

Will also try to take some actual pictures while I'm at it!

 

[chilema]

I'd like to ask, how far off were you from the top STU competitor? April 20th, the next FasTrack comes out that has the response to all of the "Move the pony cars to STU" letter. Hopefully we get moved as that would be a HUGE boon to these cars in ST.

STU has gotten pretty quiet in the San Francisco region recently but we do have Sean O'Boyle and Josh Salvage co-driving Sean's Evo 9 that got 2nd and 5th at National's last year, I believe. The best I've ever done was get within the second raw time against Sean and tie him for PAX on a couple of the courses at Evo School we attended. At most SFR events I'm at least two seconds behind the STU Evo.

To be honest I'm not sure that going to 285 street tires on 18x10 wheels will make enough of a difference to catch the STU cars. Assuming I'm a halfway decent driver, two seconds is about how much you'd expect to gain going from 265 width street tires to a Hoosier A6 (I'm of the belief that our cars gain a bit more time than the smaller lighter cars going from street to R-comp tires). I would think that to make up that kind of time just by adding 20mm worth of street tire width is a bit of a stretch.

In the end I'm definitely still FOR the proposal though, despite whatever fate may befall the Mustang should it get moved to STU. Simple logic would suggest that letting the Mustang run on 285 tires will at the very least make the car much easier to drive, this is especially true for the Coyote-motored variants.

 

[Sky Render]

What wheels are those?

 

[Whiskey11]

What wheels are those?

Third paragraph, first sentence.

STU has gotten pretty quiet in the San Francisco region recently but we do have Sean O'Boyle and Josh Salvage co-driving Sean's Evo 9 that got 2nd and 5th at National's last year, I believe. The best I've ever done was get within the second raw time against Sean and tie him for PAX on a couple of the courses at Evo School we attended. At most SFR events I'm at least two seconds behind the STU Evo.

To be honest I'm not sure that going to 285 street tires on 18x10 wheels will make enough of a difference to catch the STU cars. Assuming I'm a halfway decent driver, two seconds is about how much you'd expect to gain going from 265 width street tires to a Hoosier A6 (I'm of the belief that our cars gain a bit more time than the smaller lighter cars going from street to R-comp tires). I would think that to make up that kind of time just by adding 20mm worth of street tire width is a bit of a stretch.

In the end I'm definitely still FOR the proposal though, despite whatever fate may befall the Mustang should it get moved to STU. Simple logic would suggest that letting the Mustang run on 285 tires will at the very least make the car much easier to drive, this is especially true for the Coyote-motored variants.

Well STU is traditionally only half a secondish on average faster than STX. Last year at Nationals they were slower, at the San Diego tour this last weekend they were about half a second. I need to go look at the results from Spring Nationals last year. If Norm's chart from when I asked a similar question in my own thread is to be believed, then about 1.25-1.5 second drop from a 245 to a 285 (both on sufficient width rims) assuming compound remains the same. I imagine your guess is on the safe side of correct going from a 265 RS3 to a 295 A6 (that I believe has more in common with their 315's than it does a 295).

I still hold hopes for STU. It may not be for a Coyote, but those of us with that horribly asthmatic 3V's STU could be a boon since the Coyote has pretty much kicked us out of everywhere else, except those aliens in that yellow 2006 in ESP. Plenty of power to get in trouble with, adequate (although still not ideal) tire size and other cars in the class that are at least in the same zip code for weight. Either way it goes, I'll be continuing on in ST and with the amount of national level competition that comes through my region I should have some pretty reasonable gauges of how I'm doing and the car is doing and that excites me.

The goal for STU is not an absolute "we win" class placement. I'd rather us come up very short in STU to see if we can't ask for a few small allowances for live axle cars that would make us more competitive similar to Terry Fair's letter (extra tire width, relocation brackets and LCA's, etc) to creep up on parity. There naturally is going to be periods of "it still wont work" that we will have to fight through but I'm determined to get at least a fun place to play in ST where we can at least be reasonably competitive. That is MY goal anyway. First step is getting us out of STX where the tire limitations hamstrings us to mediocracy.

 

[sholzer]

Scared me for a second with the clearance issues you were having. With my setup (18x9.5 et35) I should have 13mm more inner clearance than your setup. Still need to get mine mounted up and do a test fit. I also should've done what you did and ordered 10 from the get-go. Went back a couple days after I ordered mine and they were all gone =/

Can't wait to see how you do this weekend. I have to wait until the 21st for my next event

 

[jayel579]

Update on ESP plans:

These suckers are HUGE! Here's the 295/40/18 A6 the 18x10 wheel compared to a super short 285/30/18 A6 squeezed onto the stock 18x8 wheel which I used for a short time on front of the Mustang for F-stock. This really drives home the point that you need proper width wheels to maximize the useable tread width on a tire! On top of that, the 295/40/18 Hoosier 27.4" in diameter which is pretty close the height of the stock tires on the car. This tall tire may not be great for center of gravity, but the much greater longitudinal contact patch will hopefully help a great deal with putting down power as well as braking traction.

Ah so you are one of the guys that bought out the discontinued tires from Hoosier! I called them yesterday and they where sold out! You beat me too it!

 

[Norm Peterson]

To be honest I'm not sure that going to 285 street tires on 18x10 wheels will make enough of a difference to catch the STU cars.

I'd expect 285s to gain about 0.6 to 0.7 per minute against 265s. Assuming similar tread compounding (likely) and that the tread width is proportional to section width (not always true).


Norm

 

[lost won]

WOW

Update on ESP plans:


Maybe it was just great timing that the Hankook RS-3's are all but bald now and it just so happened that Hoosier was getting ride of their stock of 295/40/18 A6's for 500 A SET SHIPPED! Seriously now...how can you say no to a deal like this!? I ended up ordering 8 tires, which should last me a season and half or two, hopefully.

Congratulations! That right there is the deal of the century.....ENJOY!

I see all the rest (16) are on 'customer hold' this morning...

 

[chilema]

Third paragraph, first sentence.



Well STU is traditionally only half a secondish on average faster than STX. Last year at Nationals they were slower, at the San Diego tour this last weekend they were about half a second. I need to go look at the results from Spring Nationals last year. If Norm's chart from when I asked a similar question in my own thread is to be believed, then about 1.25-1.5 second drop from a 245 to a 285 (both on sufficient width rims) assuming compound remains the same. I imagine your guess is on the safe side of correct going from a 265 RS3 to a 295 A6 (that I believe has more in common with their 315's than it does a 295).

I still hold hopes for STU. It may not be for a Coyote, but those of us with that horribly asthmatic 3V's STU could be a boon since the Coyote has pretty much kicked us out of everywhere else, except those aliens in that yellow 2006 in ESP. Plenty of power to get in trouble with, adequate (although still not ideal) tire size and other cars in the class that are at least in the same zip code for weight. Either way it goes, I'll be continuing on in ST and with the amount of national level competition that comes through my region I should have some pretty reasonable gauges of how I'm doing and the car is doing and that excites me.

The goal for STU is not an absolute "we win" class placement. I'd rather us come up very short in STU to see if we can't ask for a few small allowances for live axle cars that would make us more competitive similar to Terry Fair's letter (extra tire width, relocation brackets and LCA's, etc) to creep up on parity. There naturally is going to be periods of "it still wont work" that we will have to fight through but I'm determined to get at least a fun place to play in ST where we can at least be reasonably competitive. That is MY goal anyway. First step is getting us out of STX where the tire limitations hamstrings us to mediocracy.

I absolutely support the additional allowances proposed for solid axle cars such as relocation brackets in ST and SP classes as I think things that we can all logically categorize as "catch-up" mods should be given a chance. I get that a lot of the hesitation with this stuff lies in potential for creeping interpretation into other classes, types of cars, etc. But at this point I'd say if we just go with "only solid axle cars get to change rear pick-up points on the axle via relocation bracket", is anyone going to realistcally start complaining about being dominated by cars with truck-like suspension? After all it's just another rule in a very fat book of rules, give it a shot first and see what happens right?

Back to your point about the S197 in STU. Short of creating another ST class where minimum weight is 3400lb and max tire width is 335, this is the best and most appropriate class we can ask for so I support your effort 100%! I mean in the end we are either casual racers who don't care that much about competitiveness and classing or serious competitors who wants to race on an even playing field, so it's do or die time if you're the latter, no matter what class you run.

 

[modernbeat]

We tried the 295/40-18 Hoosiers on our '11 GT and found them lacking. But our alternate tires are 315 Hoosiers!

http://www.s197forum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1719768&postcount=247

 

[chilema]

We tried the 295/40-18 Hoosiers on our '11 GT and found them lacking. But our alternate tires are 315 Hoosiers!

http://www.s197forum.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1719768&postcount=247

Great timing on the update as I'm going to run the tires this weekend! I'm expecting the same kind of sidewall stiffness deficiency but at least I got the A6 instead of the R6, should be ok for a couple of seasons of local events !

 

[Vorshlag-Fair]

Car looks good, and great write-up. Keep sharing these updates as everyone learns more when people share tech like this. But if you had been following my S197 build thread from the beginning you might have different rear shocks now, though...

Finally found the time to do the write-up on this past weekend's autocross and testing the ASTs! ...

Another concern that I have about the setup is how little travel the inverted rear shocks had. Remember that this is with the 175lb Steeda Sport rear springs that only lowers the rear about 1 inch. As is the shock barely has more travel than the distance between the shortened bump stop and chassis. Now I can totally see why Terry quickly moved on to a non-inverted rear shock setup which offered more than an inch of additional travel. I will elaborate a bit more on the implications for autocross later on. Here is the extent of the problem:

Yes, the rear shock bump travel is quite short with the inverted "1st gen" AST 4100s you have. The first batch of I think 10 sets was built this way, but as soon as we put them on my 2011 GT we noticed them bottoming out from lack of travel. Your car is likely bottoming the rear suspension with those, if you have a lowered ride height. We sold a handful of those from that batch but we worked with many of our customers + AST-USA to shorten the housings, which will effectively increase your bump travel.


Above: The "First gen" AST 4100s for S197, and installed on our 2011 GT on Jan 18, 2011. These were quickly changed.

Looking back I see that we installed this 1st style S197 AST 4100 back in January of 2011 and drove on them this way for a couple of months. By March of 2011 I had gone over to AST-USa and found a pair of shocks from another car. We then switched to this completely different style of AST 4100, a non-inverted shock with more stroke, shown below.



It took making some custom machined bushings on our lathe to make them fit out back, but in the end this shock fit the S197 chassis and the ride heights we tested with perfectly - adding almost 2" more more bump travel. They thought we were crazy for trying this shock but it worked VERY well and ride comfort instantly improved a HUGE amount - because we stopped bottoming out from lack of bump travel.

Later this very set of shocks was revalveda couple of times by AST-USA, DDP pistons were added, and this set was tweaked off and on for many more months. This set we had eventually became the set-up used in the current AST 4150 shocks for the S197. They tried the inverted style on some other dealer's 4150 orders but all of the ASTs after March 2011 ordered by Vorshlag and all 4150s we have sold since use this long stroke, non-inverted rear shock design. It is easier to adjust (reach into trunk and turn a knob vs laying on the ground) and it will always have more stroke.

Anyway, PM or email me and we can give you an idea of what it would cost to modify the inverted style for more stroke, or to replace them with 4150 rears (we have a pallet of 4150 shocks inbound from Holland next week).

...I adjusted the front rebound to 3/12 clicks (1/12 being full soft) and 6/24 clicks in the rear (I found it odd that the rears had 24 clicks of adjustment, I thought AST's all had 12 clicks?).

Yea, that set might have been revalved for somebody before you got them? When it has 24 clicks instead of 12 that just means there are two ball bearing detents in the adjuster assembly instead of one. This is sometimes touted by one brand over another as being "more adjustments", but it really isn't... it is the same range just broken up into smaller increments. Old shock trick. So double the number of "clicks" when comparing to another AST owners shock settings.

The front damping response to small bumps and gaps on the road was excellent, part of it I feel was from taking out a lot of the preload on the swaybar but I was pleasantly surprised at how much better the front felt even with the 450lb springs. I am, however, still trying to figure out the setting for the rear for street driving comfort. I've tried 6/24 clicks, 7/24, back down to 5/24. and now 3/24 clicks from full soft. At 3 clicks from full soft the rear felt "soft" enough to be comfortable for cracks in the road, but actual BUMPS and large undulations in the road surface made the car feel a bit bouncy and nervous. Maybe Conekiller can give some input on setting the rears for comfort!

It is bouncy in the rear because it is bottoming out. See my comments above. Firming up the rebound setting isn't going to fix that. We can work with you to get these rear shocks shortened or replaced with the proper length rears. That was only on the first batch built and we don't order them that way at Vorshlag. PM me...

Read my reply in an all new thread here on S107 forums about the S197 Mustang in SCCA Solo - STX vs STU vs ESP classes

 

[chilema]

Car looks good, and great write-up. Keep sharing these updates as everyone learns more when people share tech like this. But if you had been following my S197 build thread from the beginning you might have different rear shocks now, though...

PM coming your way soon!

I've actually been following your build thread religiously even before I bought this car! Your build was actually one of the major reasons I decided on a Mustang when I was car "shopping" (okay, not really, I walked into a Ford dealership and bought first/only 5.0 I saw, whole shopping thing took me a day lol).

I have to admit I've been taking the cheap-n-cheerful route a lot with this build. Yeahhhhhh....I must sound crazy considering I just bought a bunch of wheels/tires and have AST coilovers. I was aware that you guys had steered away from the inverted rear shock early on, but for $1K barely-used I couldn't really complain about AST purchase.

From my experience the rear shock travel hasn't been a big issue on perfectly flat concrete lots like the airplane parking pad I race on, but it could be very problematic on undulating surfaces where you can see compression from roll as well as bumps mid-corner (I also can't go crazy on upping the rear rebound or it'll probably start to jack down onto the end shock travel). I got a Lotus club event this weekend on flat concrete and SCCA event on the bumpier stadium lot on 4/21. Let me test out the current setup and weigh my options, if it gets real bad I can throw the Koni Yellow's back in the rear for the time being and work something out with you guys for the rear ASTs. I need to watch my budget haha!

 

[chilema]

4/7/2013 Update:

The Golden Gate Lotus Club round 2 event this past Saturday was my planned test day for the new 295/40/18 Hoosier A6's I picked up from Hoosier for a steal.

Course:
This event took place once again at the Marina Municipal Airport so I knew the Hoosier's would hook up well on it's well-maintained concrete surface. Initially I had some reserves about the course after getting the course map via e-mail, it looked painfully tight for the most part.

I was pleasantly surprised when driving the actual course as it was a lot more open than it looked so you could set yourself up early if you needed and it flowed pretty well despite the relatively steep angles in the turns. The run format is a 3 group morning session followed by an afternoon session running the course in reverse, so I got a look at it driving both directions.

Car setup/adjustments:
As I've noted before, the 18x10 Forgestars w/ the 295 width A6's came uncomfortably close to the strut so I ordered a pair of 5mm spacers from Summit. With the spacers I found enough room to push the camber all the way in via the sloted bottom strut hole on the AST's. Note: I also have the Vorshlag CC plates set to full static negative camber as well, so the car is literally MAXED out all all available camber at this ride height. I'm eyeballing it at 3.7 ish degrees but I'll report back on the actual number when I take the car in for an alignment to get the toe straightened out.

I didn't want to get drastic with damper settings so I just tried to stick pretty close to my STX settings on this surface. For STX I use 8/12 for front rebound and 6/24 on the rear so this time I set the front to 9/12 and rear to 10/24. This probably sounds weird but I actually did not change the shocks at all the whole day because I couldn't think of any adjustments in either direction. This is not to say that the car drove PERFECTLY, but I just couldn't definitely relate a behavior I would like to change to a shock setting. Maybe I just need more time with the Hoosiers...I think I was just still too much in awe of the amount of grip I had to think about shock settings!

For tire pressure I went with 38F/35R cold. After about 3 runs (relatively fast moving grid, about 5 min between runs) the front pressure crept up to 43 psi and I decided to bleed it back down to a more reasonable 39. By 4th run the outside shoulders on the front tires were getting pretty hot so I sprayed them down a bit. More camber would be nice, so it seems. Surprisingly the rear tires were barely heated, I bled them down from 37 to 34 and they stayed pretty luke-warm through out the day. You can probably tell from my videos that I tend to try to be pretty neat and slide-averse so I probably didn't work the rear tires as hard as I needed to (in other words, under-driving a bit?).

Performance:

To start off, here are the videos from my best runs in the morning and afternoon:

Morning run - this lap was good for 2nd fastest in the morning session out of 68 entries despite missing two apexes by a MILE!


Best afternoon run in reverse direction, awkward camera angle due to having a passenger:


Slowed down by about 0.1 on the final afternoon run, but it felt pretty good and the camera angle is back to normal:


The car definitely felt A LOT easier to drive than in STX form! For the first 3 or 4 runs, every time I braked for a corner I regretted how much/if at all I braked, the car just stuck so well! Coming out of the tight right hander before the long straight-bend-straight I could feel the front right tire lift off the ground, so I knew the car was gripping like it should. I managed to stay flat on the throttle end-to-end that section going both directions and rode the limiter (now topping out at about 67-68mph in 2nd) from about halfway through in either direction - WHAT A THRILL! Probably should have shifted to 3rd but got put off by the work station going clockwise and lack of run-off space going the other direction - I really didn't want to have to brake and downshift at the same time going into shut-down corners >.> .

In the morning session I was holding top time of day until an XP-ish prepped Elise with about 380hp and also running on Hoosier A6's ran a 43.8 to my best of 44.2. But hey, I'll take 0.4 seconds behind a 1800lb car with almost the same amount of power as me any day! As it turned out, the Lotus driver told me later in the day that his variable valve timing system was having issues and he might be down about 100-150hp, so that's that. However, later on in the afternoon session the Elise got me by a whole 2 seconds, so the driver must have found some of his power/driving mojo back .

Looks like an Exige but may just be because of the hardtop, and look at that huge rear diffuser! Pretty cool car!

Since the majority of the attendees were Lotus owners who autocrossed casually, the only person I could compare my performance to was a local STU M3 driver, Praneil Prasad, who consistently PAXed in the top 10-20 at SCCA events for as long as I can remember. The PAX numbers for ESP and STU are pretty close at .849 to .846 so I'm pretty happy with my times. I led him by about 0.7 seconds in the morning and he got me by about 0.02 in the afternoon session. The two of us were the quickest cars behind the XP Elise and led the rest of the field by a pretty good margin.

Areas for improvement:

My driving! I definitely felt that I under-drove the car in a lot of the elements, but this is something that will hopefully improve with more time and runs. It's a bit different than STX in this regard because on street tires it was more about dialing back the aggression until I'm at the optimal point whereas with the Hoosier's I need more time to dial the aggression back up to the performance envelope of R-comps.

Setup-wise, I'm pretty happy with the car's overall balance which is generally neutral with a slight understeer bias. I will need to see how the car behaves on less grippy/bumpier asphalt before I decide if I want to make it "looser". However, I felt that the car was still using the outside shoulders on the front tires too much. Since there's no easy way to gain more camber at this point, I may have to look into increasing the spring rate like Terry did after 2012 Nationals or at the very least setting the front sway bar to the stiffest setting. Also, it's not that easy to rotate the car on throttle right now, most of the time the car puts down the power really well on those super tall tires and end up pushing a bit instead of tucking in. One other thing to note, there was no slaloms on this weekend's course so I have ZERO idea how the car does in a slalom (well, there were those offsets and they felt okay, but they're not really evenly spaced nor long enough to feel like real slaloms).

There isn't a whole lot of things I want to do to the car mods-wise for now, but I really do want to get a tune with a linear throttle response. I've been holding off because I wanted to wait until I put in more power-related mods before I get the car tuned. Now that the car has moved to ESP, I can finally open up the taps on power. With the 3.73 gears the car definitely doesn't mind more top end power, so I might try the Boss 302 intake manifold and a off-road x/h pipe for starters and call upon the much-celebrated tuning skills of Shaun @ AED for a dyno tune and see if we can't perfect a tune for autocross use with few/no compromises on power. E85 is a tempting option as well but since I daily drive this car and have to drive long distances for some autocross events, it may not be feasible to have 30% less range on a tank.

Almost forgot about photos!

I took the car aside after wrapping up the morning session and took some shots photoshoot-style, so here they are. My apologies to Conekiller for stealing his screen name to use for a decal, think of it as an homage!

 

[Norm Peterson]

Harbor Freight or similar digital angle finder might be a worthwhile investment. The kind that displays to 0.1°.

Sorry about the picture size.


Norm

 

[sholzer]

Awesome write up! Any issues with rubbing in the back like Terry was having?

 

[JesseW.]

Congratulations! That right there is the deal of the century.....ENJOY!

I see all the rest (16) are on 'customer hold' this morning...

I bought them all. really.

 

[chilema]

Awesome write up! Any issues with rubbing in the back like Terry was having?

Nope, no rubbing here. Granted, you can probably tell that my car sits a good bit higher in the rear than the Vorshlag car, unlike on a road course I might just not be putting enough load on one side. Plus I think the panhard arc is helping me out a bit in this case, since it moves away from the tire when leaning left and my weight helps a bit leaning right. I'll report back if it rubs on bumpier courses where I'm seeing compression from roll and bump at the same time (I might bottom out on those short rear shocks before all that anyway though).

 

[sholzer]

Good to hear!

 

[chilema]

4/21 Update - SCCA SFR Round 4 @ McAfee Coliseum

Just wrapped up the San Francisco Region SCCA event for the Mustang in ESP trim. I'd say it was a fairly successful outing as far as in-class performance and getting points...but I knew there were still a lot of improvements to be made!

The only real competition I had in ESP this Sunday (and for the foreseeable future, unless somebody local starts a build soon) was Brian Jacobson and his 98 Camaro seen here:

Pretty much your typical laundry list of ESP modifications. About 3100lb and making 300whp and most recently started to run on 315/35/17 BFG R1-S's.

From what I've heard Brian ran toe to toe against the Bergstrom/Dollmeyer Mustang (2nd place car @ 2012 Nationals) a few years ago. However I can tell that recently he might have dropped back a bit in terms of car development and keeping sharp against National-level competition. I believe he was 1-2 seconds back from the Bergstrom S197 for raw time at the SD national tour last month on 50-55 ish second courses.

Given the competition I was pretty happy to take the win my barely-prepped, daily-driven car. Other than a spin on cold tires on my first run, I was able to keep the lead through all 4 runs, ending with my best of 46.85 to his 47.34. Granted, I'm probably the first guy he has to try against in at least the past year or so. He was actually very excited about finally having someone to compete against so hopefully we can push each other to go faster! The 46.85 was good for 37th raw time and 29th PAX out of 192 for-points entrants. Not all that impressive of a placement but I will take that given all the Nationally competitive STX drivers in the region and the fact that almost all of the cars ahead of me in raw time were SM/Prepared/Mod/Karts including 8 Formula-style CM cars/Go Karts . Raw time list here, Howard Yang would be my name (Yes, I'm a Chinese guy with a Mustang hahaha) : http://www.sfr-solo.org/solo2/Results/2013/Championship/round04_lists.html#oa)

Video of best run:



The course was pretty good in terms of smooth flow and variety of elements, though it was a bit of a tough squeeze in some places for big cars like ours. I was also very timid with the throttle a lot of the times while trying to get used to grip of Hoosiers on bumpy asphalt and how the car lets go as it goes past the limits. I think it'll take me a few more events to come up to the theoretical limits of these tires on asphalt - I'm approaching this challenge of learning R-comps with the perspective that I will need to adapt to the knife-edge nature of A6's vs. V710s from the very beginning so I'm not building bad habits and out killing my tires in 10-20 runs.

A word on the car setup:

Started with 9/12 rebound up front and 6/24 rebound on the rear for this fairly bumpy/dusty lot. The first run was not pleasant at all, I could feel the rear end hop quite a bit and upset the balance in transition to the point where I'm not able to keep the car on the racing line. I ended up backing down the front rebound to 7/12 and rear to 3/24 and it was a lot better. You can tell from the video that I'm still bouncing around a bit in the seat through the first set of elements and leading into the short slalom but the rest of the course was a lot smoother and the car felt GREAT through those sections. I kept the front pressure at 34 psi but for some reason didn't realize the rear was only at 25 psi cold until runs started! As you know by now I tend to stay on the neat side and refrain from sliding too much, so the rear tires only got up to 28 psi and was barely warm (didn't see much rollover though, and car felt nice and planted coming out of low speed turns).

I'm definitely giving a lot of thought to sending the rear AST's to get them shortened or getting a pair of the non-inverted 4150 rears from Vorshlag. I would love to be able to lower the rear ride height just a bit more and still have enough travel, as it is right now the car sits pretty high with those tall 295/40/18 A6's.

Another thing I realized is how badly I need some race seats that hold my torso better now that I have race tires. You might see from the video that I hold myself upright in the stock rental car bench pretty well for having R-comps, but I later realized as I was kneeling down swapping to street wheels that my knees were sore from propping myself up by pushing against the door/transmission tunnel! =O

Thoughts on Nationals...

Heyward Wagner, a friend of mine (you might know him as SCCA Communications Manager and EVO instructor) came by on Sunday and made me promise to go to Nationals this year if work schedule permitted. I was hesitant but ended up agreeing verbally, so if luck is on my side I will see some of you at Nationals!

Heyward was adamant that if I drove the way I did at the school, I could do some damage with the Mustang in STX at Nationals. I'm not so sure about competitiveness in STX as this class is getting SERIOUSLY fast! Just locally I can count at least 3-4 drivers who on any given day can give Bryan H., driving the nationals-winning Charlie Davis E36, a run for the money. In fact the Tsang brothers in their 325i and Mark Scroggs in the newly prepped BRZ have already started to pull significant leads on the rest of the field locally (notice how Mack straight-timed me on Sunday with a 46.26). Granted, you can always count on Heitkotter to turn it up a whole other level when it comes to Nationals trophy time .

Anyways, until something else comes up, I will make a somewhat serious commitment to prepping myself for Nationals this year ,most likely in ESP even though trophy-ing is not likely with the current sub-optimal setup and not having years of experience dedicated to zooming around on Hoosiers hehehe...