clarkspeed

I messaged them, they responded in a few hours. They are made in China.

Definitely an interesting selection of sizes and offsets. Their company description is super cheesy: "Rivet Nuts on a Polished Lip is our style.". They are not flow formed like the Konig's but It says they are JWL rated which should make them ok for street use, but you never know. Personally I don't care where they are made as long as they use correct alloys. I searched around but not much chatter about these. Usually with a lightweight wheel like this the Miata and endurance racing guys will snap them up. It seems this is a relatively new company, so I guess it depends if they want to sell a lot of wheels and then disappear, or they are in it for the long run. The website and dealer network leans toward the former.

The only place I have ever had issues with heat is in the gas pedal area. In think I burned some shoes one time. I just add roughly a 10 x 24 strip starting where the tunnel narrows down. Usually does the trick. I have burned my hands on the shifter before, but since I always have gloves on I never worried about it.

Good question. Especially since my tunnel is 40 thow aluminum sheet. Years ago I bought some insulation off Ebay that was aluminum on 1 side and roughly 1/4 thick adhesive foam on the other. I used it in 2 cars and it worked well, was cheap, and stuck permanently. Even let pipes ride on it. Now I am trying to find more of it. The DEI stuff works well but is expensive and there are others. I intend to handle the heat with panel insulation, but will add pipe insulation if I need more. The ex ITS car I race now had the entire driver area covered in some kind of insulation mat before I bought it. It was too hard to take out so I just painted over the shiny silver surface. The paint has held up well. I suppose the car is cooler, but I cant tell in Florida.

Those look nice. I looked at something very similar with the brackets flipped to raise the pivot points. What size are those inner rod ends?

No big ass bolts. I always wanted to center drill those things to lighten anyway. Yes the cradle is there to prevent fore and aft movement. It's kind of light, I could beef that up a little. Oh this car will be plenty low. I notched the cross bar above the diff to raise it up higher. The exhaust loops over the tranny, down the tunnel on passenger side, then cuts across for a side exit in the rocker panel below the passenger door handle. I'm starting to gather my photos to start a build thread when I realized I didnt have any of the rear suspension work.

Here are a few pics of my redesign of the pick up points on the rear control arms. I thought about this for such a long time before going this direction. This car I am building is going to be dropped a large amount and I really wanted to bring the roll centers back up and also make them adjustable if possible My design goals were to use the modified control arms I built a few years ago and avoid adding any additional weight. Less weight even better. Of course one possibility would be to add a tube to the bottom of the rear upright, but I didn't like adding unsprung weight and no way to make that adjustable. I just didn't like the Arizona Z solution either because that would require a different control arm and more rod ends. Rather than modifying the control arm I decided to keep the 1" diameter shaft and designed my own bearings and bearing holders. The bearing material is Delrin (acetal) that I 3d printed but you could also machine a set of these very easily using bar stock. The bearing holders are 1-1/2" square tubing with a welded flange. This required chopping up the existing bearing holders and adding some more support. This mod raises the inner pivot point up roughly 0.8". I can be brought back down using shims under the bearing holders. In the highest position, the control arm interferes with the floor panels behind the rear seats. So I cut a little bit of that out also. Along with the bearing holders I designed by own forward cross member that holds the bearing plates down and also hard mounts to the differential.

I think this is the first time I went through your entire thread. And I have to say you have done it right. I am more into road race now, but if I were building an FP car today I would follow a similar path. Personally I believe lowering both sprung and unsprung weight is the key. I really like your brake and wheel setup. The only disadvantage you have is not using an early 240 shell to start with. But you have almost compensated for that. I am familiar with the John Thomas car and really his only advantage is the weight, a strong Rebello engine, and most of all, his extraterrestrial driving. He runs like 30 or 40 lbs ballast in passenger floorboard. Keep tuning and improving!

The standard for 30+years is the electromotive stand alone. I believe the megajolt is similar but open source and there are some others out there for use with carbs. All the EFI systems have multiple ignition solutions built in.

You will need to install dedicated sensors and hardware to read them. Like an Innovate or simiar.

Yes, I was looking at this and not a lot of shocks fit into the required form factor. Pretty much needs to fit inside 2" DOM tubing with 0.188 wall which has 1.624 ID. Over 2" OD and you lose ability to run 2-1/2 springs. Kind of rules out most adjustable shocks. Are the 36 Bilstein racer rebuildable? I know their 46 have an abundance of valves, shims. and tools available and plenty of instruction on how to do it yourself.

I know we are getting off the original topic, but I have another crazy idea. I was reading some old posts and saw one by JohnC that described converting a monotube shock to an inverted strut. So I started thinking about this. I don't see why you could not replace the strut tube with something of appropriate diameter and use some Delrin for the shock body to slide against. Sounds easy but of course alignment and tolerances would be critical and possibly some polishing. You could probably even add a seal to keep the bearings clean. I googled around and could not find any references to doing this. But you can find plenty of cut-a-way drawings of inverted strut designs.

I always keep a few shims in the tool box to correct brake run out. It has always worked for me, but I use the stock hubs also.

I still enjoy bench racing on this forum also. So many things have been covered but technology changes with time and there is a real hardcore group here. I have a bunch of FB pages I comment on but it is just not the same as this forum.

Very true, but when I said very very fast I meant it. AutoX and Runoffs National Champions. I don't think Greg Ira will mind I dropped his name here. That is hard to argue against. And at roughly $400 each, they are a bargain. On the other hand, I know Greg's program well, and I don't think shocks are a big contributer to his many podiums. I don't know anyone racing the 8610 single adjustable. There were some posts on here a few years ago on the valving, but even that is probably outdated.

For what it worth, I happen to know some very very fast Z cars run the plain old 8611 Koni double adjustable. And they dont have any problems with premature failure. I think the lower settings fall right into the window you are looking for. The adjustment steps are kind of coarse, but at some point you are splitting hairs.

After Cary brought this up, I was thinking about the same thing. Really the only problem is having enough room and solid mounting for the shock. I don't see any reason you could not hook it to the sway bar mount preferrably in line with the end link. Yes you would need a solid end link, but 1/2 would probably work, hopefully not a 5/8, but I would need to think about the forces involved. I don't think shock travel has any influence. When selecting shocks, you can see there are a lot of travel lengths available. The shorter shock usually has shorter travel so it kind of works out. So if you have a non-binding place to mount it, you can probably find a shock to for the application. The tricky part is the shock will have a different motion ratio than the struts had. So if it is at a greater angle than the struts, the travel will be less than the struts and the damping greater. Essentially, the valving will be higher than what you had with the struts. The Z has a motion ratio of like .9 or something. If you mounted shocks at 60 or 70 degrees, you would need a much higher shock damping due to the motion ratio. If you use adjustable dampers, then you just adjust. Probably end up more in the middle range of the shock adjustments. So maybe your 100/100 ends up at 300/300. It all depends on the angle you mount and how far the lower mounting point is away from the struts centerline. Springs and roll bars should not be affected by this at all. Springs control the weight, and shocks control the velocity. The downside is weight. I am obsessed with it on the car I am building. Can't avoid some extra sprung and unsprung weight. But if you could do it right, that could be minimized.

This is also what I was told in a suspension setup class from a few years ago. The correct thing to do in the rain is change spring rates and roll bar rates to increase grip. But depending on the situation, that is usually not practical. So most go for a shock adjustment because it is better than nothing.

I have thought about doing this also. Do you have any pictures of this type of setup?

I ended with the same full circle you did about 4 years ago. I was, and I guess still convinced a race shock that is rebuild able by the user would be the best low cost option. I'm sure with a few trials I could get real close to the optimum damping. But paying $450 a rebuild adds up quickly when you just want to experiment. That low speed damping is just so critical for driver feel and different drivers like different feels. For me it is most detectable under braking, I go to full brakes fast and hard. It is like a timer, as you provide input through steering wheel or brakes, the harder the shock is, the longer it takes for the car to absorb the input and reach a steady state. Too hard a shock and you never reach steady state before the next input is given. Too soft, and it overshoots the input bounces back. Luckily there is a lot of margin in between and close is probably good enough My current car has a very old set of non-adjustable Tokikos on front and Konis on back. No complaints. But I want something much more sophisticated on the tube car I am building. I will need to extract all the grip I can to meet my goals. I plan to go at least 2 way adjustable and have suspension position sensors ready to go for data collection.

Yes, I got the jacking thing backwards. Too much rebound causes it and that is not your problem. I went back and looked at some of my shock tuning info and your setup with 100/100 was not a bad idea at all. That should feel very responsive in transitions which would be beneficial for AutoX. I think the devil is in the details for shocks though. The shock dyno shows what is happening, but without adjustments, how do you know more or less will help or hurt? I did think the Bilsteins could be tuned anyway you want. I just assumed they use the same valves as all their other race shocks which are interchangeable. Linear valving is usually too harsh at higher shock speeds. Obviously if you lower the force to be compliant on the high speed stuff, you will have very low forces in the 0-1in/sec low speed range and that might be your problem? Normally you are trying to get the shock to respond in the 0-1 in/sec range with pitch and roll characteristics that "feel" good to the driver and compliant at higher speeds as not to skip over bumps. That usually equals a digressive shock but not always. If you have the $$, take a look at Motion Control. I talked to one of their reps last year and he thought he could hook me up. And I notice they have a cartridge listed now for the 1st gen Rabbit, which is what the P30's were. If I can gather the funds, they will go on my next car.

OK then. Yes a school that puts the coach in the passenger seat or even better, let a national champ drive your car with you riding. I friend of mine who was a very respected driver let John Thomas drive his car one time and was blown away at the techniques he used. The one area where sim racing = real racing is thinking out of the box. That is what separates the good drivers from the mediocre. Being able to try something new and learn from it immediately. Guys like me are doing that to gain seconds, the pros do it to gain tenths. And no substitute for more seat time. Anyway, from my race experience, anyone less than professional level drivers can usually gain the most time by driver improvement. And for both racing and Autox, easy to drive, comfortable, confidence in the car makes you faster. Sounds like you are way ahead of me on sim racing. I run the Thrustmaster stuff on iRacing and don't know any difference. Personally i think AutoX and lapping are just too different to make a direct comparison. An unfamiliar 60s blast averaging 40mph through cones with slaloms is not like lapping a big track. Personally I suck at Autox for that reason. I am still not exactly sure my sim racing will directly affect my actual track racing. Time will tell. A SCCA Runoffs driver I worked with ran sims for a couple of months, then hired a local driver coach for feedback during practice, then hired me to analyze his data for a new track he went to. That covered all the bases and his driving was near perfect and he got a podium. There are also many differences between the sim cars and an actual race car. The sim cars seem kind of sterile compared to the real thing. There are so many variables they hold constant. Long story short, IMHO, online coaching in a sim racing format would not equal faster AutoX times. Learning a new track? Probably. Being a better sim driver, definitely. Like most things, the question is not if you can get from point A to point B in skill, of course you can with practice. But can you get there faster with coaching? Personally data analysis is my thing, I am very good at it, but I have yet to look at a single lap from my sim runs. I am usually about 2-3 sec behind the fastest person and I am confident I could find another second if I had more seat time (time to experiment). If I ever I feel like I have hit a wall and can't find anymore speed, I will dive in. Finding speed myself and learning race craft still seems like the fastest way up in sim for me, which is not the case at all when I am racing a real car. So tires are a "no brainer". They usually are. Shocks sound like a good investment also. I had the Bilsteins on my last car. I called them and gave them my sprung and unsprung weights and motion ratios. They send me back valving equivalent to 300/100. Which looked like the 100 compression was linear and the 300 rebound was digressive on the dyno chart. I raced those for a number of years and they felt pretty good. If you are 100/100 you are probably jacking down during a run. Anyway, a revalve can make the car feel much different if the low speed valving changes. Low speed shock valving is probably the secret sauce to a good Autox run due to all the quick transitions. Clark

Just switch to flat top pistons to up your CR.

You are mostly autox'n correct? That is a special category. If HPDE or time trials let me know, it will be a different answer. First of all, for a beginner, DA is easiest applied to driver analysis. Next concern is analyzing a 60s run you can only look for major issues or make a comparison between run 1 and run 2. If you tried a slalom 2 different ways, you could definitely determine the best choice, but analyzing a single run is doubtful you would see something you dont already know. I am interested in your online coaching statement. I assume you are racing online. I also run iRacing quite a bit. I personally wouldnt invest more in sim driver analysis unless I wanted to improve my sim racing. I couldn't imagine sim coaching would make me better in a real car. I am not going to list the reasons now. Based on your post, I would say there are 3 definite ways to get faster (WIN). A real school, either autox or track. Lowest cost way to improve the driver. Shocks if you really need them, but that is another $$ catagory.. Tires, always make you faster for the next race, and fiberglass??? I say do that in addition to whatever else you decide. I just started down my fiberglass learning curve and it is fun, and not that expensive. You can definitely master it quickly.

I only use those things to answer the question "what's going on under there"? I run a full data acquisition system and add forward and rear facing cameras when in a race. I got real heavy in the data side of things a few years ago and now do analysis for others too. If you want to dip your toes in data, the phone apps are getting pretty good. Also the Aim Solo. And I think some of the new action cameras collect data.