When you click on links to various merchants on this site and make a purchase, this can result in this site earning a commission. Affiliate programs and affiliations include, but are not limited to, the eBay Partner Network.
Car's looking good Zak! Good to hear your car is in one piece after that episode. I imagine those mountain roads gotta be a little sketchy at times with all the "touge" idiots using the roads as their personal track. With that said, I was young and dumb once too, so I'm not going to chastise them too much. Unfortunately most roads (if you're close to a metro area) are just so damn crowded these days compared to 20+ years ago. Some friends want to go on "fun runs" these days, and honestly it's just not that much fun a lot of the times due to traffic. I echo all your guys' sentiments regarding the track vs street. I appreciate a nice road, but the track is just so much better/safer/more fun.
What's wild to me these days is how FAST the cars are. Growing up as a teenager, 200hp was a lot, and not many cars came with that much (I remember when the new Mustang GT had 225hp out of a v8 lol). Cars also had a lot less tire. The risk is that the limits of these cars are much higher which means if/when things go wrong accidents can be potentially much worse. Track days are not cheap though so I get why kids want to blast around on the street to have fun.. Rich parents may get their kids a nice bimmer, but aren't gonna pay for track days (at least not most).. lol
@Fireindc I will now be telling anyone asking that the motor in my car is in fact a Waz 2.5
@SlowTeg No joke about the horsepower and tire numbers dude. Some of these cars on the road nowadays might as well require a special license to drive. I feel like all of us here are very aware of how much trouble a 200hp, 2,400lb car can get you into. A 600hp, 4,000lb car though… man I would still be apprehensive trying to drive one of those at the limit on a mountain road.
Car is prepped and ready for this weekend! Four new tires (235 NT05s again. The old ones have another track day in them, not sure about two though), swapped the DTC60 pads back in, oil change, brake flush, then I dropped the rear ride height a bit and touched up the alignment.
I’m fully aware that the car’s going to be loose at speed this weekend with the new front aero and no wing. As a precaution, I started setting it up to trade a little low-speed oversteer for high speed stability. After last weekend, I turned up the damping in the front another four clicks. I also checked my ride heights to see how much rake I could remove before the car would be level. I could’ve sworn I set the ride heights the same after swapping in the softer springs, but I now had almost 1/2” of rake instead of the 3/16” I started with. I dropped the rear end to achieve 1/8” of rake and realigned the car accordingly.
The good news is that changing rear ride height didn’t seem to mess with toe at all, just like in the NA/NBs. I read that these cars toe out under compression, but didn’t see that reflected on the alignment machine. Camber in the rear moved up from 2.8* to 3.0* but toe stayed at zero. My front camber was already at 3.1*, so I bumped it up to 3.3* (maxed out at the current ride height), set total front toe to 0.12”, and called it good enough for now. I usually run zero toe all around but wanted to try adding a bit to see if it makes any noticeable difference in stability while braking, since the suspension toes out due to bushing deflection.
Friday will be a fun day at my buddy’s track event. I’ll play around with the suspension settings there if need be. Hopefully I’ll have the setup dialed in (as much as possible) for its second race in TT5 at Chuckwalla on Sunday. Gonna be a hell of a weekend!
Race car stuff, man! Lol. I still gotta get a pyrometer but low-mid 3’s up front and high 2’s in the rear seems to be the go-to camber for full track NC’s on 200TW tires.
First track day of the trip was a success! I don’t think I stopped moving all day. Drove a ton of sessions, gave a bunch of ride alongs, hopped in and instructed two different beginners.
At the end of the final session, two of my buddies and I were the last cars on track. Actually, we were a few of the last cars at the venue at all. We’d been just having fun for most of the session, practicing open passing in corners and trying to gain a little additional experience driving in a tight formation (ok, we were f*cking around. They’re two buddies who I trust driving on track, though). The checkers are about to come out and I decide I’m gonna slide through the last corner before the finish. My buddy Josh, unscripted, makes the same decision himself. He chucks his tail out and we slide through the majority of the last hairpin in tandem. An onlooker who just happened to be taking photos caught the whole sequence. If it weren’t taken on a phone camera, I’d hang this shot on my wall!
Travel/bike ride day tomorrow, then a quick run through on the car once I get to Chuckwalla. Onward!
Too much weekend to write about so I’m just gonna let the pictures do most of the talking. I’ll put up a couple lap vids at some point this week.
Ran a 1:27.84 at Streets of Willow Saturday. Respectable overall, but there’s still room for improvement on my part. My buddy Robert was there in his MP62 supercharged NA6 and our cars were basically perfectly matched. Many fun battles. The NC was the most popular car on track by a long shot. The last turn right in front of the stands at SOW had my car wanting to oversteer at the limit, and lots of onlookers saw that and wanted a ride along. It was my buddy’s event and he gave instructors free reign to jump into any run group. I think the car ran seven or eight sessions total. Five of my own and two or three sessions in intermediate giving ride-alongs to people. I should clarify, this was a grassroots event with a pretty young demographic, so the interest in the NC was more understandable. Nobody at the NASA race on Sunday asked me for a ride-along lol.
I was so busy all of Friday that I didn’t end up eating until 2pm, and I didn’t eat enough. Left the track with a headache, drove out to the desert, made dinner and crashed for the night.
Saturday was a sort of travel day. Drove a couple hours towards Palm Springs in the morning, just an hour from Chuckwalla, and met two of my buddies for a nice long mountain bike ride. Following the ride, I gassed up the van and made it to the track just in time for the end-of-year NASA chili cookout. Two of my other buddies were waiting for me. Had a good time hanging for a few hours and knocked out.
Sunday was the final NASA race of the year. There were six cars in my class and I took 4th of 6, missing 3rd by two tenths of a second. Put down a 2:06.04 running Chuckwalla counterclockwise, which I feel is decent with the car’s current spec.
The car ran perfect all weekend. Only casualty was a flat-spotted wheel due to me dropping the left side of the car into the dirt on a corner exit Sunday. I was able to bend most of the flat spot out with a bottle jack and some 2x4s, and went on to set my best time the session after. The car was loose at speed, as expected with the aero combination, but not debilitatingly so. I was able to drive around it and really just had to be smart about not initiating corner entries too aggressively. Today was the car’s seventh track day since I got it and it hasn’t skipped a beat. Very happy with how it’s going (knock on wood).
Hell yeah dude! Great things all around and sounds like a fantastic weekend for you. Keep up the awesome work and I look forward to the videos and the upcoming Waz 2.5. You should trademark that and get some stickers made haha
Only casualty was a flat-spotted wheel due to me dropping the left side of the car into the dirt on a corner exit Sunday. I was able to bend most of the flat spot out with a bottle jack and some 2x4s, and went on to set my best time the session after.
Ummm, replace that wheel asap homes. I'm surprised you went back out on it tbh. I've seen faaaaar to many wheel failures put cars into walls. I would not trust it at speed after it was bent enough to warrant the bottle jack...
Ummm, replace that wheel asap homes. I'm surprised you went back out on it tbh. I've seen faaaaar to many wheel failures put cars into walls. I would not trust it at speed after it was bent enough to warrant the bottle jack...
Oh yeah, new wheel’s already on order. I have no intention of continuing to run it haha. The bend wasn’t as bad as some others I’ve run or had to drive home on (which means either I was safe yesterday or I’ve been close to disaster previously).
Couple shots/vid from the weekend. Not my fastest lap at Chuckwalla, but a fun one. Had a couple cars to chase. I've started editing the insta360 footage on my laptop instead of the phone app and need to dial it in a little more. The angle is a little too wide and I'm not stoked on how loose the stabilization feels.
I'm jealous man! Looks like a blast of a weekend. So much seat time! Something to be said about having a car that'll take the abuse. You're making me think that maybe I need to get a sprinter van now
Thanks fellas! Super solid weekend for sure. I feel totally fine with taking a few weeks off now after all that seat time. Current plan is to slam the new motor in next week now that I've run the car on each of our local tracks.
@SimBa Vanlife is the way. I think most of the Sprinters have decent torque/towing capacity, and obviously the tall roof is a plus. My Transit has the non-turbo motor, which is much less hassle/maintenance in the long run, but is slow as hell with the car and trailer attached. A Ford Econoline with the 5.4 triton motor would be high on my list if I were gonna make a tow rig specifically for track days too. I bought one with 30k miles after graduating high school, drove it to 180k and never had to do any serious repairs on the thing. Just oil, fluids, brakes and tires for over 5 years...
The most realistic path for me would be to sell my Subaru and get something that can tow. Ideally I'd find something with half decent gas mileage that I could still use around town when the Miata is down or doesn't make sense. I know the Uhaul trailers aren't ideal, but at that point I'd at least have the option to trailer if I wanted to. We will see.
That's pretty cool... custom built? I used a HF lift table to install my K24 from the bottom, and it worked pretty well, but that would work better.
Wish I could say it’s custom but it’s just a pneumatic lift table up front and a manual hydraulic pole jack in the rear. I grabbed a buddy and we lowered both as simultaneously as we could. Worked like a charm.
I’ll get a pic of the setup later. Would’ve taken a better one last night if I’d known the lift table was going to be a conversation topic lol.
Last edited by Z_WAAAAAZ; Dec 4, 2024 at 05:41 PM.
0
