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It's that time of year again, another year of TA in the books. Bit of a frustrating year, but you'll have that with this hobby. Let's start with the relatively minor mods over the winter since I was tied up with a couple of cage projects.
ABS!!!! Man I can't say what a massive improvement this was for both the car and me. Lot's of great info on the MK60 thread here helped get it done. I made the mistake of tucking it up under the dash which complicated matters greatly but it was a cleanest spot to put the unit. The entire car got re-plumbed with NiCop lines and I retained the prop valve in case I needed to disable the unit during testing. I ended up using the BMW tone rings front and rear since I have an endless supply of them and they are easier to machine. Results later in the update.
Next up was a long over due upgrade to long tubes from V8R, which of course necessitated reworking the exhaust so I took the opportunity to upsize from dual 2.5" into a single 3" to dual 3" into a single 3.5" with a v band to swap between a NCM legal muffler and a freedom pipe that will wake the dead. These changes needed 15% fuel added up top, didn't get back on the dyno but the power bump was very noticeable on the street.
Of course the factory rear subframe brace needed remade to make more room, so I whipped one up out of 1" tube and moved it much closer to the control arms.
I had been seeing pretty high oil temps last season pushing 305-310 on warm days so it was time to ditch the bumper corner mounted oil cooler and move to a massive afco unit mounted in front of the radiator. I took the time to build a box on the front of the heat exchanger to build up a high pressure zone inside of the box feeding the radiator.
NCM......man what a massive track. Seems like the corners are endless and the run off is non existent. I gotta admit this track is intimidating and hard to go fast on. I didn't have high hopes of going fast here and really wanted to vet out the changes over the winter in preparation for Mid West Fest at Gingerman and Mid Ohio later in the summer. Luckily Binge had a practice day on Friday so I was able to learn the track not during competition or my times would have been even worse. Finished up the weekend with a 2:14.9 and a top 15 overall and 6th in class. Can't be upset by that at all for my first time there.
ABS........I call it the German hand of god, it's pretty amazing what this system will do. It saved my butt multiple times while learning this track, which has several braking zones while cornering. The yaw control is especially impressive.
Another benefit to the ABS install is that I got all 4 wheel speeds into the megasquirt via an I/O expander microsquirt. Having all 4 wheels speeds made the TC very effective and even turning both left and right. I leaned on the nannies hard this weekend and they took care of me.
Oil cooler did it's job, dropped oil temps down to 255-265 which also raised the hot oil pressure 5-10 psi. The extra power from the headers was impressive too.
NCM didn't let me go empty handed, those nasty car saws they call curbs there smashed my flex pipes.
After a 7 hour tow with our 3/4 ton gas truck getting 8mpg I made a change and sold the daily BMW 335 and picked up a 2010 Touareg TDI. It was going to be maxed out on towing capacity with my 20' box trailer but I had high hopes. I wasn't disappointed, it towed like a camp getting 12-13 mpg. It did have some german car issues on its maiden voyage to Gingerman but I was able to repair them roadside and keep on track.
I had some time to fabricate a second lower splitter to expirment with at Gingerman, I also wanted to test out a different brake cooling method using deflectors rather than conventional ducts. Vorshlage does this a lot on their builds so we'll see how that fairs.
Man if you've never been to Midwest Fest at Gingerman, Gridlife puts on a show. Over 30k people in attendance with music, drifting with the likes of Adam LZ and Vaugn Gitten,, Ryan Tureck in the Judd v10 supra, heck even Rob Dahm brought out the 4 rotor......but wouldn't run a transponder . No practice sessions for this track but luckily Gingerbread is an easy track to learn. The car started the weekend strong and I clicked off a 1:37.4 on Saturday. I kept pushing the car harder throughout the weekend carrying more speed in the corners but the times just wouldn't drop. The weekend festivities may have clouded my judgement a bit because I had a lot going on with the car and just couldn't wrap my head around what was wrong. More on that later.
The aftermath......I only finished 11'th in class. I went sub 40, which is awesome but after looking at the data from the weekend and connecting some dots, the motor was hurt. I was having to empty my catch can between every session and by the end of the weekend I was filling the can. Not a good sign. Looking at peak speeds form early in the weekend to later it was obvious I was way down on power. A leak down check confirmed I had 3 cylinders with 60% leak down.....****.
I also had all kinds of brake rotor issues, brakes felt good but I cracked both front rotors in just a few sessions, that confirms that the deflectors area bad idea and must only work with vehicles with larger wheels and a splitter that feeds them.
Lot's to do to get ready for Mid Ohio, more to come.
So.......out comes the check book and I snagged one of the only available LS3 crate motors in the nation. Then immediately voided the warranty. When I first put this motor together it was an LS3 bottom end but I used cathedral 243 heads because it's what I had. Well now I was committed to ITB's I couldn't cheaply keep the LS3 heads so off they came, I got $800 out of the heads and $1800 out of my old 6.2 short block leaving me with a $2600 brand new short block to stab in and make mid ohio.
While the motor was out I took the opportunity to reinforce the V8R subframe. There have been a half dozen cases of them cracking near the rear control arm mount and V8R won't do anything but shrug their shoulders.....so I fixed it myself.
Remember those brake deflectors? Yeah that didn't work. Back to ducts and I used some intercooler piping to make sure the 11" wheels would't chew on them.
My trusty 3D printed wing has served me well but was starting to show signs of it's age with some warping on the trailing edge. I've been slowly working on a new design and I wanted to carbon wrap this one for strength. This is my first attempt at carbon and went a bit overboard with 3 layers of 12k cloth. Little heavier than it needed to be but much much stiffer. Wet layup with lots of post cure sanding to make it presentable but I'm super happy with it. Only have $200 in materials in the whole wing.
I've also had some nagging fuel starvation issues I can't track down. New oem sock didn't fix it, tank has the baffles, no idea what's up so I threw in some e85 safe fuel cell foam.
I had high hopes for Mid O, I have a bunch of experience at this track and the car loves the layout. Another frustrating weekend, and couldn't get out of my own head to figure out what was going on. I was able to wiggle my way back down to my old best time of 1:33.3, but I had better aero, more power, ABS.......what......why!!!!!!! In my frustration I was convinced it was my driving, and kept pushing harder and harder and the car did seem to go faster as the session went on. Unfortunately this resulted in a trip to china beach and some coverage on the live stream while beached, stick around for the blooper reel at the end of the video. It was still a fun weekend with friends and got some of the best photos ever of my car too.
After I got home and poured over the data, I was able to figure out that I just didn't have the min speeds I used to have. Also the tires were wearing very quickly and in odd ways. As I sat there looking at my pile of junk playing with my tire gauge it hit my like a pile of bricks........then I hit it with a pile of bricks. Mother #$&$%^%$%$. I give up.
Trust nothing, verify everything.........gah what a frustrating lesson served in a massive humble pie.
The weekend was a blast, the brake ducts performed flawlessly. The new motor was a beast. I got some good airtime on the live stream. it wasn't a complete bust, but yet another weekend at less than peak potential.
Ohh and I lost 5th and 6th again on the last session angry shifting. This makes the 3rd 5/6 shift fork I've broken.
After mid O it was announced that Gridlife would be going to Pitt Race in October so I quickly sold my last gold pass ticket and got registered for this event in my back yard (3hr tow). I didn't have much to do other than add 5 psi to the tires and fix the trans. I decided not to touch the car otherwise, let's go see what it can do since I have a bunch of laps at Pitt with a personal best of 1:53.5 and the current Miata lap record there. Well low and behold and shattered that and dropped to a 1:51 flat. I could tell those abused AR1's were starting to go later in the weekend and couldn't quite get down to a 1:50 but hot damn it's nice to see an improvement from all that work. Looking at the data the peak grip was off 10-15% from what the AR1 could deliver which is to be expected on their 3rd weekend in competition. I firmly believe a sub 50 time is possible. Evidently the wearing tires, cool air and the motor breaking had combined to make this thing a rocket ship. I was fighting for traction until 100 mph, you can see the small red box at the bottom of the center stack light up when I got into the second stage of TC and it starts cutting whole cylinders to rein in the wheel spin.
This was a pretty low key event, not a lot of pictures taken but there were a few of my usual competitors there and using them as benchmarks I was able to close the gap to them by over 5 seconds from Mid O and Gingerman......man what could have been.
12-25-2022, 03:53 PM
2
. No practice sessions for this track but luckily Gingerbread is an easy track to learn. The car started the weekend strong and I clicked off a 1:37.4 on Saturday. I kept pushing the car harder throughout the weekend carrying more speed in the corners but the times just wouldn't drop. The weekend festivities may have clouded my judgement a bit because I had a lot going on with the car and just couldn't wrap my head around what was wrong. More on that later.
