tube80z

This works better if you have more than factory caster http://forums.hybridz.org/topic/41611-tc-rod-pivot-relocation-bad-dog-subframe-connectors-slotted-crossmember/page-6?do=findComment&comment=567622 Cary

Is there a reason you are making them so strong? You really want them to rip off or fold up if they are hit and not damage the frame rail. My personal preference is to put all the heavy adjusters on the inboard end where they move less. UB Maching and others offer adjsuters that allow you to use a 3/4 bung and run a 5/8 rod end in a left/right combo so you can adjust in place. For the tire end rather than putting a rod end in bending I'd use a spherical in a cup. You can weld that to the end of the control arm tube. For the TC to control arm weld some thin wall tube laterally across the TC tube and then hook this to ears welded onto the lower control arm. This is very light and strong and pretty easy to do. Very similar to this http://store.motorsportsconcepts.com/dtm-front-suspension-e30-e36.html Hope that helps, Cary

Those look good to me. In your other post you were asking about raising tire temps. There are a number of things you can do. If you can drive the car before you run accelerating quickly and then standing on the brakes. This will help get the core temp up. For setup if you increase spring rate it will work the tires harder and so will raising the car (if you can raise the RCs on both ends is even better). And you can sipe the tires. That will help them to get to temp a lot quicker but you can overdo it. You can also increase your damping ratio but that would require new or revalved shocks and may not be as easy as the others. Keep up the great work, Cary

Here's some really good info on understanding tire wear patterns and what they mean. http://www.formulastudent.de/academy/pats-corner/advice-details/article/tyres/2/ Hope this helps, Cary

Matt, the head on picture above is a prime example where when the car rolls a large portion comes from the inside jacking up. I'm not sure if you have seen any of the threads on droop limiting but this is what is addresses. Maybe something to think about. Cary

I hope to run it next year. I worked it last year and drove one of the worker trucks. So I have technically driven the road but not in anger. It's one I'm really looking forward to. I'd personally love to run the Dragon. It's lot more open than most of the hills in the PNW. They have a lot of tight corners and switchbacks. The closest we had was the now defunct pioneer mountain hillclimb in Montana. I think the next closest would be Hoopa in Northern California.

Droop limiters are like having much stiffer springs than normal. So when using them you may find the car reacts a lot quicker and generally will have less roll (the inside can't lift up as much). For a strut car I think they are a good tool to help control roll and if you get fancy you can also use to control pitch (lift). It's hard to say if they will make you much faster. They really show up in quick transitions, like on an autox. I forgot to ask but can you do more wing or splitter? More downforce should help find you time. On the front you have canards and s-flaps you could try (rules allowing). And on the rear maybe another element or more gurney (serrated ones can be taller and still don't have as much drag). The toe-link arms will help but if you have urethan on the ARBs I'd look to mount those in a lower friction way. That will make the car work better. For springs you can use a lot more rate and shouldn't really see issues. I'm always surprised at how high a rate I can use before the tires start slipping/skipping. ARB's seem to be more of an issue on this at least on cold tires. And speaking of tires you are losing 1 to 2 seconds a mile on R6 versus A6 tires (assuming they are new or in their prime). Gotta go, wife is not happy

Hope this helps, Cary

I may have missed those comments but generally I wouldn't lower the inner pivots. Either the same or raise them up depending on how low you go or if you want to raise the RC to help turning. What I found after a season of playing that game is it was better to run a lower rear RC and a swaybar. With a raised RC the car had good turn in but lost the ability to put power down. With the RC lower it would put the power down but was lazy on transition. I know a number of people don't like to use a rear bar but I think you'd want to at least try it. Results will vary as they say. Cary

If you have never hillclimbed before you should probably start with autox events where you can learn your car at high force levels and low speed. Then drive about 80 to 90 percent of that for the hillclimbs and that leaves some margin for when things don't quite go to plan. The majority of the people I see crash try and autox a hill and that's generally asking for trouble. For race tires you can always get some used tires in a harder compound that don't grip as well for getting into this. Then step up to the grippy stuff once you're reasonably comfortable. Hope that helps, Cary

Check out pics of the DTM trailing arm setups. They use a trick adjuster for camber and toe and can adjust the RC too. Take a look at this post about three quarters of the way down the page, http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?1536110-Video-from-my-first-race-with-dog-ring-transmission. Nice tranny, I'm using one very similar on my Z. Cary

There's already been a lot of discussion on this but I thought I'd chime in with my take. For hillclimb how fast you can get the tire up to operating temp is critical to help minimize run time. Generally you'd want the smaller wheel for less rotating mass, which helps both acceleration and braking. But many times the larger tires may be better developed by a manufacturer and that trumps the lighter weight. You also really want a plan in place so you don't end up buying things more than once, which has a tendency to get really expensive. For both autox and hillclimb you don't need huge brakes so you can run smaller wheels. But that limits your tire choice and many of the better tires that heat up quickly are in larger wheel sizes. JohnC mentioned the advantage of AWD for hillclimbs. What I've found is that it's better at launch and then only if you have traction limited areas on the course. 2WD is often faster if the launch can be close because you have less weight running up the hill. In the PNW our hills are often very steep with sharp corners and you'd think AWD would be king but there are many fast record holding cars that are only 2WD. George Bowland came out a few years ago and decimated the records at most of the hills with his snowmobile powered AM car. But those records are getting close to being taken down buy a 2WD Locost running LS power. For what it's worth my Z (Braaps old car) is setup to run 13 inch diameter wheels and 10.5 inch brakes. I prefer less rotating mass and the smaller mass of the tires help them to heat up faster. Good luck and be safe. Hillclimbs are some of the most fun you can have but they have a high level of risk you need to manage. Hope this helps, Cary

The other idea that might be useful would be to hang another muffler to the side between the bumper brackets. A 90 into this muffler would help if you ever run into severe restrictions like 90 dB. I've seen this done on a couple of 911s that were rather loud. Cary

You've already got a lot of good advice. The one thing that would help a lot is if you can find some pictures of the car loaded up in a corner. These can tell you a lot. Is the car rolling too much, how is the camber, how does the front look compared to the rear. One reason you're getting advice to add a lot of camber is two fold. Not only do the tires need it to get the maximum rubber on the ground but with the soft spring rates you're running the car will roll a lot. Typically it does this by compressing the outside spring a little and lifting up on the inside spring a lot. And on a strut car you lose camber at almost the same rate as roll. One thing that's been done on a few chump cars that might be worth trying is to limit some of your droop. This will make the car work like you have stiffer springs and could be something you put on at the track. I would try it first at a lower speed event like an autox before you jump into the deep end on a track at a HPDE. I'd probably try running around 1 to 1.25 inches of front droop and 1.75 to 2 inches in the rear. You can try less and see if that helps. The car will probably change direction a lot quicker that you're used to, which is why I'd try the autox first. This trick will help to limit the amount of roll the car sees by stopping inside lift and making the car push the outside down for any more roll. It might make a good compromise if you want to keep the car softer for the street and not reun higher rate springs. Hope this helps, Cary

If you look at how much room you have between the seats and measure a transaxle you'll probably find they won't fit.

Here's a document from Performance Friction with a lot of good information, http://www.starmazda.com/competitors/2009/resource-cd/PFC%20Brake%20handbook.pdf. One thing we found on the EP car (which is underbraked) is cryo treating the rotors will make them last longer. Before this we sometimes had to change discs every day. Because of class rules the discs are small and you have all kinds of issues you shouldn't have to deal with. As Mike said lots of air will help and Jon's idea of a fluid recirculator would help alot. The EP car has modified backing plates for air into the rotors and a custom scoop to force air into the calipers around the pads.

Matt, We have a simple defroster we install for if there's a chance of a wet race that works very well. It's one inch schedule 40 PVC that was bent to follow the windshield curve and has holes drilled in it to direct the air. One end is capped and in the middle is a tee that goes to a 2.5 inch nascar brake fan. One end fits into a holder and the other is bolted is a single bolt on an adel clamp. Fan mounts to quick release on the passenger seat mount rail and has a weatherpack connector to hook it up. Take less than 5 minutes to put in or remove and keeps the screen clear -- no more squeegee. When it's really wet we go back to a glass windshield and have a single wiper setup that mounts quickly. The defroster is light and works incredibly well and would be a good item to add to the trailer for when you really need it. Cary

Hi Mike, What type of fire system? If you have halon or similar make sure you don't get sprayed directly because even wearing nomex I got a good burn when mine went off in a formula car. It also is very good at displacing oxygen you need to breath. Cary

Most clubs have a test-n-tune event or something similar. If you're doesn't bring it up as an idea as I'm sure you're not the only one who would like the time to work on the car. I've been fortunate to have a club that has a dedicated track and we have a weekend event and Saturday is open practice. It's not uncommon to get 10 to 20 miles of actual autox practice. But if you don't have that option then you need to make the car adjust very quickly and it would help a lot if you can get a co-driver. About the only thing you're going to be able to do is adjust tire pressures, which can help. Other ideas if the class allow would be cockpit adjustable sway bars or have the adjusters somewhere they can be moved quickly if you can't have driver adjustable versions. And on the camber plates if you build a turnbuckle arrangement to move the plate once loosened that might help too. This way you don't have to jack up the car. There's one guy I run with that built strut tops that come off so he can change the springs really quickly. He can do a spring change in about ten minutes per axle. It won't happen in line but it could between sessions if you had a small break. If it were me I'd lobby the club for a test and tune event. Hope this helps, Cary

The one thing that's really important for our cars is to make sure you are either in the car or have driver weight in the car when getting an alignment done at a shop. If this isn't done then you may not be getting the numbers you are asking for. Our cars are very sensitive to roll angle and sitting in the car puts a slight angle on the car that needs to be compensated for. Once you know that info then you could do the alignment without being in the car. Corner weights, ride heights, camber/caster are all in this boat. For camber I bought a fancy digital tool (smart camber) and it can also be used for caster too. Or if I had thought about it I could have used some trig and a carpenters square to get the same info. The latter is very useful at the track when you want to quickly check something. For toe you can build a string system that aligns with the car centerline and it makes things pretty simple. You can also setup a long piece of angle or square steel at hub height and do the same thing. And as Jon mentioned you can use floor tiles, carpet squares and even magazine pages to help level the floor. If you're at a shop or at home doing this it's good to also learn what a flat or a full turn does to the alignment. If you keep good notes you can always make a change this way at the track and not worry so much about all the alignment equipment. But I would recommend checking it later to make sure it was what you wanted. For camber you can use a tape measure with your camber plates to get similar info. For taking tire temps as a one man show there are a couple of options. If you don't have memory tire pyrometer I would recommend a handheld recorder. I quickly get out of the car and start with left front (inside, middle, outer), then left rear (same order), right rear, right front, and then left front again. Then drive the car back to the pits. Once there you can play back the temps and right them down. If you can get a buddy to help or offer to do this for someone else and they help you it works even better but you don't always have that luxury. Why do I do the same tire again? That's to see how they are cooling and figure that into my temps as I came off the track. And from the temps you can get fancy with averages to determine what end is working harder, diagonal, etc. And make adjustments and go faster. Okay, that's a lot to think about. Feel free to ask questions. There's a lot of knowledge on this forum and there may be far better ways to do this than I just offered up. Cary

The one thing to keep in mind besides the weight of the car is the unsprung weight on the corner. If this is the same between the S30 and S13 then the frequency of the suspension should be the same and the damping should work. But the difference between wheels and tires is a lot larger than most people would think and this can throw the frequency and the damping way off. I believe John is referring to the quality of the shocks and the damping curves above rather than the coil springs. You can have a car that's stiff (2.5 to 3 Hz) that is damped in the 65 to 70 percent critical range that doesn't ride too bad. Up that number and the ride is likely to become a lot harsher, which could be bouncy. For a street car where ride is important there are typically setup with what's called flat ride. This takes into account how bumps are encountered and how the car would feel to occupants. Generally this is a setup that has the rear slightly stiffer (higher frequency) than the front. For a race car they are often setup the opposite to help support the chassis and put power down. And these often feel much rougher when riding in them. There are a lot of kits out there that claim they are "valved" for a certain car. I'm sure they were but unless you have a setup really close to the car used for development then you may not get very good results. It really doesn't cost all that much extra to have this done for your car but it does take a lot of work to get all the measurements. You can find more information in the shocks/springs/suspension sticky. Cary

That will surely work but it's a little overkill. I drilled a hole in the front of the strut tower for the top of my limiter mount. This is the one you really want to make easily adjustable of you intend to try and tune with them. On the rear just keeping light tension on the spring will be good enough. On the front you can try some compression but I would recommend not trying zero droop. The car will instantly turn but is very bouncy. Perhaps if you had a huge splitter making downforce it might work. Keep up the good work. Cary

I just notices these. Very nice and thanks for posting. The bar from the passenger corner to the middle of the front cross bar is very effective at increasing the torsional strength of the car. I have a few grape models I made I need to post showing some of these small changes and the difference they made. Also adding the boxes in the front behind the wheel is helpful but I think the tube that Jon adding in his cage going from the bottom of the rocker to the top of the front strut rail is much more effective. Cary

And if you have a cage you can tie the pedal box into the front cross bar. If you do this then you will really notice a difference. It's always good to have someone push really hard on the brakes while you watch the pedal box/masters. Many times you'll be surprised at how much all this moves around. Removing that will help with brake feel. And then you just keep going down the line. best, Cary