continued from above
What's Next?
So after Day 2 there were some highs and lows, and on the drive home in the truck Amy and I discussed several options for the rest of the year. We were waiting for this National Tour to see where we were and now we know. I felt like I pushed the car to the limits of my driving ability and came up in 3rd place at this event, which to me was another disappointment. But I had lots of people congratulating me for the 3rd place trophy placing, which I guess... was actually an accomplishment? We haven't placed this high in STX
open against Nationally competitive drivers before, so after thinking about it for a week I am a bit more encouraged with this car once again - keep hope alive!
Adding up the numbers, having an 800 pound handicap is pretty ugly on paper. Maybe ESP, with a much wider (315mm) and stickier (A6) tire, and much more similar cars in class (heavy Mustangs and Camaros), is a better place to test suspension parts for this S197 chassis Mustang? On the 3+ hour tow back to Dallas I downloaded a new copy of the 2012 Solo rules to the iPad and we made a list of all of the STX legal and ESP legal mods left to do on the car. Everything we had left that's legal for STX was also be legal in ESP, and that list is still sizable. Lots of little things but most importantly - exploiting every rear suspension allowance that we can. This could unleash some badly needed rear grip. I wish I had a team of engineers and mechanics "back at the factory" that could jump right on that, but we really only work on the Mustang when we aren't swamped with customer service work at Vorshlag. Our 2 month work schedule is on a 6' x 4' whiteboard and its pretty full at the moment, but I am putting the Mustang
on the board for next month!
ESP vs STX Preparation
Some of the things that are legal in both classes are becoming a higher priority. We really need to make a 2-piece lightweight 14" front rotors, to rid the car of the 25# all steel anchors that are on there now. We could lose 10 pounds of un-sprung and rotating weight from the front rotors alone. I was hesitant to delve into this earlier because it seemed the STAC was about to write another
Take-Back ruling and make all brake upgrades have to weigh as much or more than stock, but so far they've held off on this. Our new draftsman has made aluminum brake hats before so we will jump into that project next week and get some hats modeled and machined before they are deemed illegal, as I am not spending $800 on two lightweight front rotors (from Girodisc). I could step down to 13" rotors (as the base GT comes with 13's) and also lighter calipers, but I really like the braking feel and stopping power of the 14" front Brembo 4-pots, on track and in autocrossing, so we'll stick with 14's and the factory Brembo's for now.
The rear suspension bits that have been bouncing around in my skull for over a year have got to be developed and turned into metal, as I am not buying an off-the-shelf Watts link or Torque Arm for this car. The stuff out there for this chassis looks nice, but is either too heavy (bolt-on) and/or made to work with LCA relocation brackets (not STX or ESP legal), so we will make an SCCA-friendly set-up that is lighter and weld-on where needed to save maximum weight.
Some of the ESP legal bits look like FUN, though. Big R compound tires (as big as you want!), 10" tall rear spoiler (rear downforce), and MOAR POWER! The
Boss302 intake manifold is a relatively cheap $430 mod (less than a cold air) that adds more top end power (I've seen dyno plots with power peaking over 7K), beyond where this STX legal set-up falls off (6500 rpm). There's all sorts of other Boss 302 and Leguna Seca-specific bits that SP update/backdate rules makes available, but I refuse to remove the A/C from this car (this is still a daily driven car, this is TEXAS and we see some HEAT).
Wheels and tires are the biggest part of differences for ESP, so maybe we show up at a couple of races on the big 315mm Kumho V710s and see how we do? We have the fastest ESP driver in the country right here in town, so that's a good gauge. If we are even remotely close then maybe we go further? We'll see. Right now I'm focused on getting to the rest of the STX legal mods as well as getting the dang Moton Motorsport Doubles that I bought many months ago onto the car. Just have to make the time.
In the days after we got back, AJ here at Vorshlag pulled off the factory center grill mounted foglights, which is both STX and ESP legal. These fogs are plastic so they don't weigh enough to matter, but pulling the LF foglight
uncovered the factory engine air inlet, which was
stupid of me to keep covered up for all this time.
Free Ram Air! Hehehe... Ryan is making a mesh grill covering / deflector for both foglight openings to keep rocks and tire debris from smashing the evap core and he will see if we can extend the inlet to the "cold air" allowed mod a bit. More soon on that.
As soon as we got the car back and unloaded from the trailer we knew we needed to replace the RF wheel hub. The car only has 11K miles but this hub failed prematurely due to installation error back when the ARP long wheel studs were installed 10-12+ months ago. Its a long story but the tech that pulled the hub failed to torque the nut to 340 ft-lbs, and Costas and I fixed it after our first runs ("WHAT ARE THOSE LOUD NOISES!") at an autocross last spring.
The Ford Motorsport kit shown above was the best bargain for wheel hubs + studs and was a perfect solution to our bad wheel bearing issue. It includes two new Timken wheel hub bearing assemblies with new 3" ARP wheel studs already installed. The $230 price wasn't bad considering that's roughly $90 worth of wheel studs and $150 worth of hubs,
and it saves us the effort of pressing the short studs out and new ones back in. The kit even comes with new wheel hub nuts, which were torqued properly this time. The RF hub had indeed killed the inner race (parts of it shown above), but the other hub looked fine, so it will be kept in the trailer as a spare.
So the 4 days of racing were indeed hectic, but we learned a lot. I learned how much fun it is to track
this car on real R compounds, even with a blown front wheel hub - that probably slowed the car down and possibly contributed to the two RF tire failures. I learned that the car needs some rear aero to balance out the splitter, especially at higher track speeds (I don't have any good, legal options in STX thanks to the aero Take-Backs of 2011). I learned that we still haven't fixed the rear suspension / traction issues and need to keep working on that to do well in STX or ESP. Stay tuned as we keep working on this car for STX and
maybe sneak in a few events in ESP, just with bigger R compound tires and wheels.
More soon,