tube80z

There is one point no one has brought up yet about seem welding. And that is if you bend the car it's much easier to pull it back into shape when welded. I think that's why you see it done more often than the stiffness increase. Cary

I would move the plate as far back as you can. To get lots of caster will require that you push the wheel forward and the larger the tire the quicker this gets into the fender. John's 8 degrees is going to take a lot of cutting to make work. Anything you can cheat on the top is going to help with this. And if you plan to race where there's rules regarding wheel base or pickup point movement you should think about that before you start welding. Cary

have you considered media blasting. I've seen good results on soda blasting on a few cars here. Cary

The camber/caster plates seem like a nice idea but as Jon mentioned you don't have much movement. On my GC plates there's only about 1/4 inch that I can get out of the caster adjustment. I don't think that will get you too much. The problem I see with the above design is that it won't be very stiff the way it is built. All the compression is against a thin piece of metal and my guess is you'll lose a lot from this. I think the design could be improved upon but it would need more depth to make up the stiffness. Cary

I seriously doubt it. On board video http://videos.streetfire.net/video/ce45c672-2fb3-4674-bf9c-988500be8efa.htm The car is owned and driven by Kevin Marckrell and the report from http://www.hillclimbracing.com says it is a contender for outright victory on the hills. The car is in Australia and you can find more picks from the above site. Cary

The best advice I could give is not to buy anything until you have the money to really get started. The problem with buying parts is by the time you have enough and the time to do this project you're going to have a lot of old stuff that's not as good as the current hot stuff. In 5 years who knows what the hot suspension and engine combo might be. Why buy a Ford or LS-1 now and get locked into that. You also really need to decide what you want to do and if this is going to be a street car or a race car. Too many compromises lead to a mediocre solution that doesn't do anything well. It's also a lot cheaper to buy someone else's car/project that's spent a lot of the money on pieces you want. Cary

Seals-it is another brand name. Available from pretty much everywhere (Jegs, Summit, etc.) Cary

If I have a known weight why am I measuring it on a scale? Wouldn't I measure deflection of the bar in this case? Cary

I like your louvred hood. Where can I buy one Cary

The pedals cannot be installed in with the foot pads in the stock location. You will have interference with the stock steering column, which I believe was your question. You have a couple of options. You can modify the column or live with the pedals being a little further apart. If you're a left foot braker having the pedals more to the left isn't a bad thing. Cary

So how about a counter point. I'll admit upfront I have no real experience with any of these items but I've seen them on a friends car. 1. The camber plates are a weld-in variety. Nothing wrong with that unless you decide you really don't like them and them you have major surgery to go back to stock. 2. What are the shocks. As far as I can tell these could be really good or they could be crap. The problem is there's no real info out there. I haven't seen a dyno sheet and it's hard to say how well the adjusters really work. Can they be rebuilt, etc. All good questions to know. Can you buy just one of they go bad ... 3. Being able to adjust ride height versus preload is a spurious argument at best. This in my opinion is marketing hype than anything else. 4. These haven't been out there that long. So that may be why a number of people don't have them. Like I said I don't have them but I know someone who does. They seem to work but not any better than Konis. Before I plunked down my hard cash I'd ask some serious questions. And If I get non-answers I'd think about buying something name brand. That unfortunately, is a path I've been down too many times. Cary

This will be an interesting test. My old car had about 200 WHP and used to lift the inside tire similar to the picture you posted John. When I started running with reduced droop and a lot stiffer springs it no longer did this. The video I saw of the COT on a road course was amazing at how high and long it lifted the front wheels. I wonder if the rules for the road course specify spring rates. To me it looks like the car is way too soft. Cary

I seem to remember Mark Ortiz debunking this in a column. I do know the back of a Z has a lot of toe compliance and fixing that may help all this. Cary

I'd be careful with wheel widths if you're planning to run a particular class. Some have class max widths. Adding on to the first point Jon raised above, you need to remember increased scrub leads to increased steering induced weight transfer and higher steering linkage forces. You're going to have a car that has a tendency to follow ruts and is going to be hard to control at the limit with the amount of steering kickback. You may want to consider power steering at some point. With regards to the vette it's a completely different type of suspension and doesn't have these issues as much. So they can run a wider wheel without having to deal with as many issues. Carrol Smith once said not to go over 20% of your wheel/tire width in scrub as a max. I'm pretty close to that running a 10 inch wide wheel. And I can tell you that at times it feels like the car drives me. So be careful. A good combo I think is 10 front, 12 rear. And think about power steering. Cary

Yes, you can get a pressure gauge that screws into the bleeder. Then you have someone press on the brake and you get a reading. Before you go down this path take a look at everything on the right side of the car. It sounds like you have something sticking and when that happens all the pressure goes to the other side. Eliminate the obvious then go from there. I'd guess a sticking caliper or some obstruction of the line. Severe cross weights can cause this but I've never seen or heard of both tires on one side locking first. Have you flushed all the fluid and done a decent bleed? That and inspecting the brakes to make sure they are actually working is probably step one. Cary

I bet they didn't test siping the tires at 4/32 to see how much of that "loss" could be gotten back. Cary

I think an additional set of jam nuts but Dave will know for sure. Once this was fixed he's seemed pretty happy with them. That's about all I know. Cary

PM viperredls1, he's been running these for over a year on his track/autox/street car. He had some initial problems with the tubes loosening but that's all solved now. His car is in the install pictures on the AZcar website. Cary

Why can't you just measure the strut tube angle directly? Everything is in line. Cary

My car is very neutral. I can set it up too neutral (note not loose) but I prefer to drive off the front end. It is really setup to change direction extremely quickly and this along with being able to put power down under cornering is why it was as fast as it was. This setup does require experience and commitment. You've got to be very careful when the back steps out. I'd almost say you need to learn to simply drive through it because if you try and steer into the slide the car will often over correct and pitch you off. Basic info. class SCCA FP using GT-2 allowance (engine setback) weight 200 pounds under class minimum with no ballast (ballasted to 2% rear heavy and almost perfect corner weights) approximately 200 WHP ride height at class rule minium track at class rule max tires: Formula atlantic front and rear (13 inch) 1.4 to 1.5 lateral Gs 1.1 to 1.2 under braking Approximately 2.5 seconds faster than a ZO-6 vette on a 49 second course (Fall enduro in Medford) Hope that helps, Cary

The setup is arrived at a completely different way really. What I now do is weigh the car ready to go to get the wheel loads and the front and rear percentages. Then I plug this into a spreadsheet that has the all the basic parameters to compute weight transfer (CG, RC, track width, camber, etc.) and use this to solve for front and rear roll angles as well as the percent of weight transfer at the front, which is referred to as a magic number. I pick equal roll angles because I'm trying to keep from loading the chassis in torsion as much as possible, which is a trick you can use when you don't have a stiff car. Then I set the front load transfer (note the terminology change -- what I'm saying is the percent of load dealt with by the springs, bars, RC) to be around 3.8 percent of the total weight transfer. What this means is I've used a systematic way to split the front rear balance of load transfer I control on the car. It will transfer weight based on the CG height and track width and there's nothing you can do to change this. All you can control is the split front to rear. You're probably wondering what's up with that number. It's biased towards understeer and the recommendation for a racing car is 3 to 5 percent front bias (understeer). If you try and setup a car with a negative front percent (oversteer) you'll quickly learn the car is impossible to drive. Even when we say we like a car loose we really have them setup front stiff to a certain degree. A car setup to oversteer will not put power down at all. The magic number is driver, track, and car dependent. But once you have it will let you play with springs, bars, track width, etc. and Keep the car balanced. If you set the car up this way it will always respond as expected to setup changes. If you have weird setups you may get into positions where you have to do the opposite of what you expect. With regards to the wider rear tires they are setup so that I can get max cornering and still get forward drive. This came from reading a number of Ortiz articles and a really long corner we have out our track. To maintain your speed on a constant arc you need forward drive. But if you've loaded the tire 100% laterally then you can't give it any drive or it will slide. In this scenario I really setup the rear tires to corner and have extra capacity for forward drive, which is the key to going faster. This works even on a 200 HP car (my old one) as well as the more powerful monsters. Cary

Wider rears will help a lot when you have as much torque as you do. The info on springs was just to show the different ranges and what stiff really is. My guess is your stiff ride has more to do with shocks than anything else. The wider rears will allow you to use more throttle while the car is turning without the car trying to step out on you. This will make a huge dent in your run times. Cary

For cars that are not generating downforce spring rates can run in the 2 to 4 hertz range. And by this I would say your setup is really on the soft end. Taking an example of a car that has a total weight of 2500 pounds (driver, fuel, etc.), 100 pounds of unsprung weight per corner, and a 50/50 front to rear distribution we get the following. 2 Hz is a wheel rate of ~215 lb/in 2.5 Hz is a wheel rate of ~335 lb/in 3 Hz is a wheel rate of ~480 lb/in 3.5 Hz is a wheel rate of ~650 lb/in 4 Hz is a wheel rate of ~850 lb/in My car is normally in the 3.2 to 3.5 Hz range. And over time I've discovered that having more rear tire is a faster setup for a autox Z. For your V8 car I think you'll find that this helps a lot with the oversteer your getting when trying to put down power in a corner. Cary

You don't need a working suspension on these cars. Just modify a gland nut and use all thread that comes up through a camber plate. Use a speed wrench on top to do a number of turns to set the ride height. I don't know if this would require changing the straps or not but you shouldn't need to move the car. Cary

Normally the suspension will be compressed under breaking (or trail braking) so this shouldn't be an issue. I guess you could have a problem if the track dropped away from you but you'd have the same issue with a front anti-roll bar holding the wheel up. So to answer your question I didn't have anymore lockup than usual when pushing it very hard. Generally the cars I see picking up wheels all the time are the guys running a lot less spring. That would be one concern I'd have about your proposed setup. The soft rear may allow it to compress enough to lift your front tire off the ground. I had a car that was setup that way a long time ago and that's what it did. Cary