Project Update for March 25, 2012: Took me a bit longer to finish this post, sorry for the delay. Went to the
Dallas Auto Show Friday and was at
Cobb Plano's Shop Expansion Party all day Saturday, then watched F1 Malaysia this morning... so this is the soonest I could get back to the shop and finish the Mustang update.
Let's see... we left off with last weekend's "four days of racing" and we were leaving the TX2K12 track day at MSR-Houston. The event had great weather and we had a lot of fun there, even if we did kill two Hoosiers in the process and only managed two full track sessions in the Mustang. We left our hotel Friday morning and stopped by HK Racing Engines in Houston, dropping off an aluminum LS1 block to be built-up for an in-house turn-key E36 LS1 we're building to sell. Then we went to breakfast with Erik and Gary of HK and discussed this engine as well as one for the Alpha E46 LS1, then headed to College Station while towing the race trailer.
SCCA "SunBelt" (Texas) National Tour Autocross
Once we got to the Riverside Annex we set-up our trailer and sponsor table next to the AST/Moton trailer and unloaded the Mustang once more. Already had the Hankooks and 18x9's installed so Amy and I headed to the test-n-tune course. The course was a slalom, a crossover, a 180° corner, back through the crossover, into some offsets and then the finish. I watched some other STX, STU and STS drivers' times and noted that a 30.4 sec run would be fast. Here's some practice runs...
Left: Video of Terry's 30.4 sec practice run (low pressures). Right: Video of Terry's 29.9 practice run (higher pressures)
Sure, I'm pushing the car hard, but that's the only way I have found to get the best times out of the car. The rear tires are the limiting factor to the performance of this car set-up for this class, so I'm always giving the car as much throttle as it can take (or more). As you can see in the videos, bumping up tire pressures 5 psi front and back dropped times
half a second on this 30 second course. See why testing is important? Concrete => more grip => add more pressure. These 8 brief laps of testing barely scratched the surface of what is needed, too. That 29.9 time was quicker than the other STX cars I saw running
at that time of the day, but practice courses don't represent a whole course. I've "won" a lot of Nationals on the practice courses.
Amy put in a respectable 30.1 time on her 4th practice lap as well.
We took the car through tech, slapped on the decals we didn't have, killed some time, and once the Day 1 course was open we walked this 1+ mile monster twice. Oh my feet. The course was set-up by Vivek and it was very busy, with a lot of transitional elements - more than normal? The finish was painfully tight as well. "Technical and challenging" is the term.
Basically there was nowhere for the Mustang to stretch its legs and I felt like I'd be on the back foot on Saturday. I was, unfortunately, correct.
Texas Tour - Day 1
We arrived early Saturday morning to walk once again, then I worked the sound meter (busy - couldn't watch the course much), and Amy ran STX-Ladies in heat #2. She made her three runs all within the same tenth: 69.694, 69.649(+1), and a 69.689. Consistent! She was 2.5 sec ahead of the rest of STX-L (3 cars), but her runs looked a bit timid on video and she felt like she left some time out there. Here's her fastest Day 1 run:
Video of Amy's Day 1 Run 3 with an STX-L winning time of 69.689 sec
She drove smoothly and consistently, but after comparing videos and times of our Day 1 runs, we both felt like she was not giving the car enough throttle on corner exit - that's the only thing the Mustang does better than the lighter cars in STX: Accelerate.
Play to your strengths.
Before my first runs I was comparing the day's STX car weights. From what I can gather we had a 2650 pound RX8, a 2750 pound E36, 2950-ish pound MZ3 and '08 WRX, and a 3200 pound R32. Our 3500 pound Mustang seems a bit piggish in this flyweight field, and all of those cars except the AWD R32 and WRX can run the same 265mm width tire as the Mustang, and all are considerably narrower. Hey, at least the 1900 pound "STC" Civics finally got booted out of STX, so we weren't looking at a 50% weight handicap anymore. An 800 pound deficit doesn't seem so bad now. Still, on paper the Mustang is pretty outgunned for STX class - duh, that's what everyone has said since the beginning of this crazy plan! But do I ever listen?? No.
The one thing the 5.0 Mustang
does have in abundance in STX legal trim is horsepower - about double what the rest of the STX class makes (excluding the turbo cars, which are considerably closer). But we all know that in autocrossing power is the
least important thing... but to me its the
best part of driving - power management.
I don't like driving "momentum" cars as much, which is just a nice way of saying "under powered", but that doesn't mean they are slower.
They aren't. Driving these cars just doesn't do it for me - maybe I'm wired wrong.
Video of Terry's Day 1 Run 3 with a time of 68.743 sec - good enough for 4th
So on Day 1 heat 3 I strapped in, fired up the vidcam, and went out and drove aggressively on Run 1. Too aggressively; I DNF'd at a gate to avoid plowing over a cone and possibly damaging the factory Mustang Leguna Seca splitter, which so far has only taken glancing hits when Amy has hit a cone or two. I have yet to hit a cone with the splitter installed (knock on wood... err... ABS?), so maybe this $700 plastic protrusion hanging 5" off the front of the car is a good thing for my driving? Fear is a great motivator. I drove a bit cleaner and was quicker on Run 2 and you can see my best
Day 1 Run 3 video above, which was a whopping .007 seconds quicker than run #2. WTF? I was driving my ASS off and that's all I could find? Seven lousy thousandths.
...continued below...