Project Update for April 12, 2011: This is the autocross recap from Sunday April 10ths SCCA event at Lone Star Park.
The LSP site with an asphalt parking lot surface and lots of weird hills and valleys, and the surface comes apart badly if you even look at it funny. Not my favorite place to race but that's where the competition was this week. The Texas Region event workers work diligently to clean the racing line before the runs begin but it doesn't matter much - it starts dirty and ends VERY dirty, with bad marbles evident offline after just a handful of runs.
Still we had lots of parts and set-up changes to test, and this event would have good STX class competition in the form of Chris Ledbetter and his co-driver Brian in the white E36 328is below (VTPP Tester, AST 4200s, car has placed at Nationals) as well as the debut of Brad Maxcy's black E36 328is (AST 5220s, also very fast driver), among others. Costas and I were to drive in STX and Amy in the PAX-factored "W" women's class. We had been placing pretty far behind both Brad and Chris (both driving in Chris' STX Bimmer) so far at the 3 autocross events we've done in the Mustang, and Amy had yet to place well in "W" in the car either. With all of the changes to the Mustang from the last 2 weeks we wanted to see where we now stood.
STX ran in the first heat so we lined up first in the 2 driver lane. Costas was one of the first cars on course, but with cold tires we knew that run wouldn't be his best. Even still, he was hopeful and our times were on par with the class. But he mentioned a loud BANGING that was evident in transitions. Hmm, that was worrisome. I made a run and noticed the same banging up front.
Spooky loud. I pulled back around and we ran to the trailer for tools. Asked for a "mechanical" and we pulled the front wheels off. Costas noted a loose wheel bearing nut - very loose. The wheel would rock in-out by 1/4". WTH? That hub hasn't been off in many months (when we installed the long wheel studs).
We managed to get the 36mm wheel bearing nut sort of tighter (with all the wrong tools) and figured "that had to be the noise". Costas made his run #2, then so did I. Noise still there and VERY loud. We asked for a 2nd mechanical, pulled the front wheels back off, and checked more things hurriedly. Nothing evident. Costas took half of a 3rd run and aborted it from the sounds and a touch of ABS ice mode into one turn (only happened once all day and only in the worst of the gravel). I took a tentative 3rd and felt just as uneasy. We decided it was wise if skipped our 4th runs and avoided any potential damage. Drove the car back to the trailer and began a thorough tear down, hopefully getting the car repaired before the 3rd heat when Amy was to make her runs.
Impressions: My driving had lots of mistakes I can see on the videos, but I felt like the
car was handling better than ever before. The brakes finally WORKED again, even on this gravel covered lot. The Toyo R1R tires seemed to like the new, higher tire pressures we were running (42F, 38R) and we ran the shock adjustments much higher per Brian at AST-USA's suggestion. That made the various transitions feel faster (but WOW the noise it was making) and front brake dive (and rear rise) was also down dramatically. The rear of the car was squatting well under acceleration (softer rear springs) and it was putting power down much better, but driving the car still involved varying degrees of wheel spin. Fun, and to be expected of ~400 whp on 265mm street tires. The new Steeda cold air made the engine sounds much nicer and finally audible to the driver, and the higher redline (7400) from the SCT Tuner was a welcome addition - all 3 drivers touched the higher rev limit just a tick on course, so we would have been shifting to 3rd with the original 6800 rpm limit.
Costas and I both noted some understeer at the two 180° turn-arounds, but Amy said it was a LOT better for her, so maybe the swaybar repairs we did fixed that. She said the car pivoted beautifully, which was not what we felt, as we were both resorting to "driving into corners on the brakes" to get it to understeer less at low speeds. At higher speeds the car was very neutral for us, though. All 3 drivers sprayed the tires with water after every run except the very first - we saw ambient temps of 88°F in the afternoon. That seemed to work fine, which was surprising given the weight of the car and the heat.
So before our run heat was even over Costas drove us in his B4C Camaro into glorious down town Grand Prairie (sarcasm) to find an AutoZone. We located a 36mm socket (needed to properly tighten the wheel bearing nut), and a few others we were missing. This allowed us to tighten every nut and bolt on the front suspension, and that's when Costas found the swaybar chassis mounts painfully loose. The brackets were shifting up and down under load, which explained the loud clunking in the slaloms. Wasn't really hurting anything but it wasn't allowing the swaybar to do its job properly, either. I had a talk with our tech here about the importance of tightening nuts and bolts properly on Monday morning, of course.
After we had everything tight and double checked half an hour later we went for a test drive to see that we did indeed fix the glitch. We had maybe 10 minutes of down time when we ate so by the 3rd run heat the car was prepped and ready for Amy. She worked course in heat 2 and we were assigned to course in heat 3, so as I passed her during a worker change and told her "Its fixed - drive hard, go fast, and let us know how it goes!"
She did just that, and put a solid second on the both of us in her last run. The car looked even better in the turn-arounds and she said it pivoted around them perfectly. Damn, wish we could have driven it like that. Oh well, she showed finally us that the Mustang has potential in STX. She won the "W" class and her raw time in her last run (where she ran over the base of a cone) would have placed her 2nd in STX, .3 sec back. She said she was pushing the car harder each run and was amazed at how well it handled transitions and the tight stuff, as well as the brakes finally being right again.
Click these two pics above for in-car video and Runs 1 & 2 result analysis
Since we were working course in heat 3 we didn't get a single picture of Amy driving, and she never turned on the video camera (doh!). Costas and I got a couple of our runs on video, and the quickest is
linked above. We were within a few tenths of each other, but Costas only took 2 full runs, and all of our drives were before we fixed the clanging and banging swaybar. As you can see in the "results analysis" (
linked here) we were still in the hunt after 2 runs, but the rest of STX class got quicker in runs 3 and 4, as we fumbled in the pits trying to find the source of the banging. Ledbetter had a 47.9 (+1) and his co-driver Brian had a 48.0. Brad Maxcy had a 48.5 and Amy had a 48.3 (+1) and a 49.0 (clean). She didn't have any noises or issues to deal with and all of her runs were quick, but she felt like there was more left.
So we feel like, even as bad as we did in STX class, with the bolts and nuts all tight the car has potential. Amy proved that for us on her runs. Costas and I will autocross the car at an event (and maybe two) this coming weekend and report back again. This time I'll make sure every bolt that has touched on the car is tight, and we'll use Costas' DL-1 to data log the runs.
More soon,