 I arrived at 6:30a on Saturday because the paddock was mostly filled by a PCA autoX and I wanted to secure a good parking spot for the truck and trailer. In addition, the car required a toe adjustment because I set the camber at home using my homemade camber gauge (pic). Fortunately the toe adjustment only took 2 attempts and was easy due to the trick TCDesign motorsport bumpsteer correcting kit. Why did the car need an alignment on the rear axle you ask? It seems that the alignment shop made a mistake and put -3deg camber on the right rear but only -2 on the left with 3/8" total toe in. I had asked for -2.5 on each and about 1/4" toe-in. Hrm. I decided adding camber would increase grip overall so I upped the left rear camber to -3deg instead of lowering both or just the right. The total toe ended up 1/4"-in as measured by the longacre toe plates. I had also installed the stock rear factory swaybar in an attempt to alleviate the understeer from Thunderhill. At this point the car had the Saner bar on full soft as well. I ended up spinning in the first session as I purposefully gassed her coming out of T7. No damage, just a dirty left front wheel. Session 2 was better but I was still warming up to the new found twitchy-ness. The rear end just didn't seem to be hooking up all that well and I decided to stiffen the front bar. However, climbing under the car I discovered that Saner bar endlinks interfered with the coilover at anything other than full soft. Bummer. So instead I increased the front compression and rebound 1 click. That definitely helped the car feel more connected at both ends in session 3. The vid below is a couple laps of Session 3 and I upped the pace. However, the car felt quite different than at Thunderhill or Buttonwillow. The transition to oversteer felt more abrupt, especially as I fed in the power. The overall balance of the car was very good and several times I exited some faster corners with a bit of 4wd drift. The car felt very direct and alive but required quite a bit of attention and focus to push hard. Without traffic and/or mistakes, a 1'52.x would have been possible. I noticed that the inside rear tire temps were 10-15deg hotter than outside, so it's possible that the combo of rear bar and -3deg camber would have benefitted from slightly less rear camber. Session 3: Over lunch I decided to make a big change: replace the front Saner sway bar with the factory bar and remove the rear bar to bring back the smooth transition to oversteer under power. In Session 4 my plan worked, although I felt like the car also developed just a hint more understeer. Indeed, the car felt slightly less dialed in to the road but also more forgiving of bumps and could absorb more abrupt driver inputs. The ability to transition had also diminished just a touch. To alleviate the slower transition speed, before session 5 I increased the low-speed compression damping at both ends. I also lowered the front tire pressures 1lb (the tire temps showed higher in the center by 5deg F after session 4). Ah-ha! Better again. The car still had a hint of understeer but I preferred that safety margin and it allowed me to push just a bit harder. Shame it was the last session of the day but I dropped my best lap to a 1'53.14. In fact the first hot lap out of the pits I did a 1'53.7 so obviously I was comfortable. A couple laps from Session 5 are below. I'm still leaving a bit on the table through the esses and in T10. I could also shave a few tenths by taking T2 in 3rd instead of 4th and keeping my speed up (over 70mph) through 3a. A shift to third in T4 might help but not much. I'm also running out of revs coming into T6 but the combination of upshifting and then down again would probably hurt as much as it would help. That's really the only spot on the track where I don't like the gearing. Just for fun, here a couple corner speed comparisons from my best laps from my Mitsu Evo time-trial car. Best overall lap was 1'51.7 in May 2009 with 347whp and ~3030lbs and well worn 255/40-17 R888 tires. Unfortunately the camera died for that lap (d'oh!) Instead I compared with my best time (1'52.7) on 100octane with 300whp and almost new 255/40-17 R888s. That's where the apex speeds below come from. T10: S2k: 95mph; Evo: 90 (with huge front splitter) T6: S2k: 69.5, Evo: 63.5 T4: S2k: 47.5, Evo: 44.5 T7: S2k: 45, Evo: 41 The following is the final schedule for the day. Drivers meeting is at 7:50am in the Drivers Lounge
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