Sam's build thread

[metalhead]

Yeh, I got the email. Not really a big deal for me, but sucks for everyone who's been there before and was shooting for PB's and/or records. Pretty frustrating that they didn't fix it after the first day too, and as you say, it would be nice to know approximately what the delta between recorded and actual times was.

I hadn't realised just how conservative I was being with the car until I pulled off some of my incar footage last night. Walls must have worried me more than I had realised! Not to worry, had a great weekend and brought it home in one piece, can always push it a bit harder next time. There's heaps more in it. I was still running fairly close to a lot of the guys with semis while on my street tyres, so not too bad for my first time there I guess.

[Sydneykid]

argh got your message too late Gary - think I was close anyway. On the Esses I was starting front 29 back 30 and was ending up at 30/1/2psi all round (inc a tyre warm) and in mountain straight I was starting at 28 front 29 rear and was finishing just under 31psi all round.

So Gary super happy with the suspension. I definitely see that 3 degrees front neg whilst enough for the esses could have gone out to 3.5 for mountain straight. Now that the cars front:rear roll distribution is working the rears more equitably it was interesting to actually see consistent wear on all 4 tyres rather than seeing chundered fronts and no pressure rise in the rears. I was running 3mm toe out on the front and to be honest it didn't worry me at all and the zero toe at the back gave no surprises so I'm pretty happy to go to 2mm rear toe and take the rear camber out to 2 degrees neg now for sure. I didn't go up on the bars for mountain straight or even the dampers. The car felt very consistent and all the time was going to be in me just growing a pair really so I left it alone and just concentrated on not repeating mistakes and on resisting the urge to back out of it.

Confidence is everything, especially when you get so few runs, on cold tyres and lots of concrete around.

Before I forget, your camber gauge arrived this morning, I'll send you an email tonight when I get home to arrange a catch up.

Perfectly OK to sneak up on the rear toe out, especially with shim adjustment that's hard to adjust on the day. After you do the toe/camber it would be good to get a track day in before the next hillclimb. That way you you have some knowledge and confidence in what is going on.

I figured you would need more camber for the Mt Straight, more G = more roll.


Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

Thanks mate. How'd you disable the ESP for left foot brake? The only way I know is to remove the plug on the brake pedal switch. That'll let you left foot brake, disable the ESP and have no traction control with throttle cut. ABS still works though somehow. Be mindful that if you did it that way your brake lights wont work so if your on track with other competitors don't brake check them!!
No didn't do stub axle spacers because the calaiper mounts are on the beam itself - independent of the stub. If you space the stub then the caliper needs the same width and angle spacer too. So ive only shimmed the calipers to follow what I did with the eibach toe/camber shims which was only a washer width but to get my rear track out to get it close to the fronts I use 20mm sparco spacers for ET40 7in rims. Front uses 15mm spacers on same rims. The ball joint mod widened front track too so my F:R track (tyre centre to tyre centre) was 1476mm:1451mm on the weekend.

[sambb]

You did the right thing Andrew. Footage always looks slower than what you remember. Afterall seeing Wayne's car on the way out would have helped you realise that its better to be conservative. Rattled me knowing it was him that went off and you went up just after they cleared him yeah? Liam was protecting only a 2/10ths lead and even he didn't want to go up after that.

Thanks Gary yep i'll get in contact. Plan is to re shim it before VW Nats so that I get some seat time before some of the state hillclimb rounds that I'm more competitive in. I never expected to come away from Panorama with a haul of points so maybe I will do the whole championship this year where rear toe out is defo the go. Problem then is, that I will need another set of softs which will be a stretch.

[metalhead]

You did the right thing Andrew. Footage always looks slower than what you remember. Afterall seeing Wayne's car on the way out would have helped you realise that its better to be conservative. Rattled me knowing it was him that went off and you went up just after they cleared him yeah? Liam was protecting only a 2/10ths lead and even he didn't want to go up after that.

Yeh, definitely. I was a couple of cars before Wayne, and I came straight off the track and loaded up onto the trailer (I actually tossed the PS belt before turning into Griffins, so I had a slower run). I didn't even realise anything had happened until it took so long for you to come back up. Sorry for bailing so quickly yesterday, we had a reasonable trip but it was still after 10:30 by the time we arrived home. Thanks heaps to you and Pete for your help and company over the weekend, I was sorry he wasn't around to thank when we were leaving. I'd actually been wishing that I'd just driven the car down, as trailering is such a hassle, but reflecting on the issues that Wayne and Pete had helped me decide it was the right choice. If Pete isn't coming to all the rounds then I should be able to help you out with a trailer if you need it.

[sambb]

No all good. Everyone just gets straight into the pack up the moment the last run has finished and wave on the way out really. Thats why I love the two day events like Bathurst when you camp because you get to have a beer with every one. Pete is obsessed with Grahams record and will go back every year till he dies to beats it, so any year you're welcome to join us again. We were thinking we might actually go up thursday-monday next time. You need the same amount of gear for 1 day or 3 so better to just stay longer yeah? Your drive would have been turd after that long day for sure. When you sit back and digest it all afterwards its a pretty good feeling (for grass roots people like us) that you pushed I around there and got home in one piece. Like you said it sucks that the timing was glitched but when you know that for that day that you probably went as fast as you could have its pretty cool. You did good for sure. Next time on semi's, knowing the lines, less nervous and with timing that works you'll be astonished how much quicker you'll go.

[sambb]

oh yeah re the trailer - I hope I never need it!!

[sambb]

when I watch my footage back it just looks so lame compared to this: YouTube

[simon k]

Thanks mate. How'd you disable the ESP for left foot brake? The only way I know is to remove the plug on the brake pedal switch. That'll let you left foot brake, disable the ESP and have no traction control with throttle cut. ABS still works though somehow. Be mindful that if you did it that way your brake lights wont work so if your on track with other competitors don't brake check them!!

no no no, nothing dodgy like that! it took me a while to get a USB-OBD cable that worked, but I've edited the ECU using the software they talk about on nefarious motorsports (tunerpro in my case). There is a value that sets the minimum RPM for the throttle cut, by default it's ~1200rpm, set it to 7000 and it'll never turn on. Took me a while to get my head around it, but once there the change took 5 minutes. The stuff they do to the ECUs is amazing...

No didn't do stub axle spacers because the calaiper mounts are on the beam itself - independent of the stub. If you space the stub then the caliper needs the same width and angle spacer too. So ive only shimmed the calipers to follow what I did with the eibach toe/camber shims which was only a washer width but to get my rear track out to get it close to the fronts I use 20mm sparco spacers for ET40 7in rims. Front uses 15mm spacers on same rims. The ball joint mod widened front track too so my F:R track (tyre centre to tyre centre) was 1476mm:1451mm on the weekend.

gotcha - I haven't had a good look at it, but there are people selling stub axle spacers online hence the question. The engineer next door to my mate's workshop just got a laser cutter he needs help with, I'm very helpful

[simon k]

when I watch my footage back it just looks so lame compared to this: YouTube

dad and I were there that year, I ran to get an umbrella and missed the action in the rain just dumb...

[sambb]

Re spectating that race, that's awesome. I remember my Uncle taking us down to the bottom of Conrod to watch qualy through the fence the year that the edenberger Sierras, Klaus Neidwietz etc turned up and dominated. I think seeing that black sierra going past turned me into a 4 cylinder fan for life in that moment - didn't want to be Alan Jones's Williams on the Scalextric track after that!

Re the coding out of the traction control, is it just the throttle cut that you moved the threshold on. Does the brake modulation part of the TC below 40km/h still work?

[sambb]

hey does anyone out there who's watching have a forge wastegate actuator and maybe have some spare springs. My turbosmart was weak with the 7psi spring and too hard with the 10psi spring. There's no middle increment but I think forge do an 8psi spring? If anyone has one, do you reckon you could tell me the spring dimensions eg coil diameter and height. Might be able to fit one to my actuator to get it sorted. It was pulling a bit of timing above 5000rpm which was preventing me from getting enough timing into it in the midrange so a compromise spring should do it.

[sambb]

Here are the youtube vids of what I think were the quickest runs of each day. Cant be certain because the timing chucked a wobbly but they felt like it:

day1 'The Esses': YouTube

day2 'Mountain Straight': YouTube

The second one starts a bit further on. They'd just cleared a big accident, said they were "pretty sure" there were no fluids on the track and then sent up the guy in front of me. The light normally goes green 10 sec after you stage but I just sat there pretty certain he'd crashed too. That's why I'm stuffing around wondering what's going on and didn't realise the light had gone green.
There's lots of driver mistakes in there but remember this is cold tyres not a circuit where you've had 30 looks at each corner before you put in a quickie and there had been a bit of carnage to get the nerves up, so be gentle.

[Sydneykid]

Looks planted Sam, very confidence inspiring, and responds to driver inputs nicely. I don't really have any big suggestions, maybe turn in a little later on the first turn, both tracks, straighten the exit a bit more. Easy to say, hard to do, as we are always expecting cold tyre understeer. On the burn out maybe try a little bit of handbrake, not so much that it sits their smokin', just enough to slow the forward motion down a bit.

Would have liked to get there for the weekend, even one day, but it was my daughter's engagement party Saturday night, so no early start Sunday. In the afternoon, after the hang over subsided, my son and I fitted the 19" Gold R wheels to his GTi and then fitted the APR carbon fibre cold air intake. Bit tricky to fit, took a couple of hours, but looks cool.

Nostalgia, do they still use the hockey stick under the rear tyres for timing start?

Cheers
Gary

[sambb]

That's exactly what I thought Gary. On the esses I wanted to get on the power earlier to try to get better speed up the 'straight' so took a wider line into forests elbow than last year but I still think I could have done better there. On mountain straight I actually got into Griffins later than I wanted cos I went deeper before I lifted on that run. I'll try later again next year. Its just so narrow looking when you turn in and despite the fact that it opens up the further you get through the corner, its always a phsych job to go in hard there for me because as you know the walls come at you bloody fast there. It was pushing a bit on that run through Griffins, probably because I lost all my tyre pressure/temp waiting down the bottom after the accident and had only 27psi in the fronts when I got into the car for that final run and they were out of the sun on the left side of the car.
They use a steel tube thats beaten into an oval shape welded to a handle for the chock. I struggle with the burnouts because my little turbo spools so fast that its nearly impossible to sit at one rpm while you do it. My start off the line uses handbrake and clutch but its so steep at the top of Conrod there that I loose a lot of time off the line with the weight transfer. I'm glad I ran front softs, mediums wouldn't have worked even in 215 width. It was the right way to go so I will need at least a front pair of 205/50/15 softs to go with my 195/55/15 rears to see out the season.