continued from above
Every win feels like this - even an autocross!
I definitely felt the Torsen T-2R differential's added benefit in this tight, autocross environment. This diff hooks up on road courses, it works in uber-tight autocrosses (2nd time I've got to carve cones with this thing), it is silent and doesn't overheat like the clutch style unit. The tires worked great, for old heat cycled scrubs, and once I got some heat into the brakes, they stopped well enough. Might have run more AoA on the rear wing, but the car felt hooked up in the high speed left hander. There was a serious push (understeer) condition all day, which is evident from my videos. We didn't have time between runs to adjust swaybar settings, or I would have set the rear bar
much firmer.
There was so much bodyroll the front struts were running out of droop!
It looks like we are still seeing some major bodyroll, even with the stiffer 600#/in front and 250 #/in rears we went to after the 2012 Solo Nats (450F/175R before), on these 315mm A6 tires. For a serious autox car on these or even bigger gumball tires I could see the need for 800-1000# front springs and
much stiffer rear rates (to get the pig to rotate), but yea, it would ride like a
dump truck at those rates.
Strangely, my best run (with a passenger) ended up as the 5th fastest run of the overall event, and 10th out of 135 in PAX using the SMod PAX. The faster cars were EVOs in ASP and FP, and one of the SS Corvettes in the X-pro class just edged me out. Just for grins I ran the numbers using the ESP PAX, a class the car is much closer prepared to... and it would have placed 1st in overall PAX. Oh well, I can "calculate" myself into an F1 Championship, if I try hard enough, heh! Felt good to pull out this squeaker of a win in SMod, in any case. And it was a lot of fun for only thirty bucks - autocrossing entry fees are so cheap!
Five Star Ford of Plano Auto Show, May 18, 2013
The car show was actually the day before the autocross (for another double-header, busy weekend). This was hosted by Five Star Ford of Plano, Texas. Corey White, the dealer we buy our Fords from and send others to get theirs, sets up cars shows and track days, so we try to go out and support his events. The proceeds from this car show went to a local charity they support, too. We were so buried that day and never broke out the Nikon, so all of the pictures taken at this event were using my camera phone (Galaxy S4 set to 5 MP).
Photo Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Car-Show...d-Show-051813/
Corey said we could bring out our race trailer, a bunch of demo parts, and our TT3 Mustang if we were a sponsor. The guys at the shop washed the car and loaded up for the car show and autocross, and away we went. Got to the dealership at about 7:15 am, set-up our trailer and then unloaded. With a nice donation to the charity we were now official event sponsors and an entrant into the "pro street" car show class as well.
Amy and I have shown cars at shows in the past, and brought out samples of our parts, but never really had a lot of people stop by. I don't know why, but the folks at
this car show responded very well and we had 100+ people come by and look at the car and the shiny suspension bits we showed off.
I spent about an hour detailing the car after we unloaded it. Like most cars that see a lot of track use, our Mustang was covered from front to back with "rubber". Rolled up bits of "klag" litter most race tracks and when a car in front drives over this stuff it kicks back onto the car behind, which leaves a big blob of rubber transfer on the paint. Our car also kicks up plenty of klag on its own, which gets deposited along the sides behind all 4 wheels, too. The white vinyl stripes were covered in this stuff and the XPEL clear paint protection film was covered, too. You can use some aggressive hydrocarbon based cleaners and get the stuff off of the paint, but these chemicals almost always damage clear PPF or cut vinyl graphics (leaving them discolored, yellowed, or worse). So we just wash the car and live with the black marks.
This time I tried a new product, "Goof Off 2" or "
Goof Off Heavy Duty". This stuff is finally safe for automotive finishes, vinyl, clothes, etc. As opposed to "
Goof Off Professional Strength", which is a good bit harsher and
not safe on films and vinyls. We have used the latter for years on really stubborn tar and grease stains on paint, but always followed it up with fresh coat of wax. The new "safer" stuff still works great and doesn't damage or yellow PPF; the rubber marks just wiped right off. I spent a solid 30-45 minutes making the car cleaner than it has been in years, and followed that up with a quick spray and wipe down with
Meguiars Quick Detail - a spray detail & wax product I've used for years.
Once the outside was clean, I opened the hood and it was also dirty. It wasn't really "dirty", just not as clean as I like my cars' engine bays to be. I normally use a whole bag of tricks and tools to detail engines, none of which I had with me, so I just spent 30 minutes and used just a bunch of Armor All and elbow grease. Hand detailed every surface, and it came out pretty well, as you can see above.
The other cars were arriving by the time I got the car cleaned up, and Amy had set-up our display table with all sorts of goodies. We had S197 Mustang shocks from Bilstein, AST and MCS. Vorshlag camber plates, Whiteline LCA relocation brackets and a Watts Link kit, fluids, brake parts, COBRA seats, and more. The pull out shade on the trailer was popular, so we set up about 8 chairs and rolled out our cooler full of drinks, and it became a regular party. I think we stayed busy talking to folks for about 7 or 8 straight hours, stopping only briefly to grab some of the free burgers and dogs that the Ford folks cooked up.
Towards the end of the day I broke away for a bit to look at the other cars at the show, most of which were S197 Mustangs. There was some vintage muscle car iron there, like the yellow 1969 Mustang Boss 302 shown above. This was a 1 owner car who's son was parked next to him with his yellow 2013 Boss 302. Pretty cool. Lots of folks we see at track events were there, like Jerry and Brian with their Boss 302s (who both help organize and run some ECR track events), and the Meher family (husband, wife and 2 daughters all track their cars, including two S197s and a 5th gen Camaro), among others. Even my neighbors the Stewarts, who own
five beautiful S197 Mustangs, were there. It was a good sized show and at the end of the day were pleasantly surprised to see that the car
won its car show class? I guess all that cleaning didn't go to waste, heh.
The dealership a real S197 Cobra Jet out on display, as well as a number of Roush Mustangs and Raptors. Met a lot of really nice folks, and twisted a few arms to get hopefully a few of the car-show-only folks to come out to the June 29th ECR track event, put on by this same dealership. It made for a long day but we got to talk to a lot of people and show off some cool new suspension options for the S197 chassis. Speaking of that...
Vorshlag is now an MCS Shock Dealer
Vorshlag is already a dealer for AST, Moton, Bilstein and Bilstein Motorsports shocks. Several months ago we became a stocking dealer for Motion Control Suspensions, a maker of high end monotube racing dampers. The principles of this company were the same folks who ran Moton for 15 years, with links back to JRZ and earlier companies, so they are no strangers to monotubes. They make double and triple adjustable, remote reservoir racing shocks (RR2 and RR3) like other high end brands, but now they have introduced two models that might appeal to the dual-use driver: non-remote reservoir coilover monotube racing shocks with single (TT1) or double adjustments (TT2).
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