How did it go last weekend?
Sorry for the delay! I want to make a real post but always find myself distracted and doing other BS. Sometimes it's productive and other times it's not so much. Now I should be sleeping but I am doing it!
WARNING, RIDICULOUSLY LONG POST(/story):
FRIDAY's practice session taught us that we overlooked the very basic checking of wigging front wheels around in the air during our race preparations. I went out on an EXTREMELY slick PIR (damp, hadn't been used for a while, "goose poop" on it, maybe?) and looped the car in the chicane on my out lap. I don't loop this car often, it's very forgiving! I was just going to try and bed in the new brake pads a bit and knew that it would be drying out later in the day, so we left the rear swaybar hooked up. Bad idea! I limped it around a few laps but didn't feel like I was getting anywhere and the front just felt really disconnected and sketchy considering the lack of grip.
After that session, we disconnected the rear swaybar and also found that one of the tie rods had a severe amount of play in it. So, Marc drove home to get our spare rod ends only to find out that IPD had supplied us with two lefts for the center link instead of one of each as purchased. I did the second session of the day with the bad tie rod still in the car but it was better with the rear bar disconnected at least. Then I raced over to IPD to get two rights so we could have spares of each and we put that in. Much better!
The rest of practice went well and one of our drivers(Jeff, a non-Volvo guy) who hadn't driven the car since 2016 got some seat time in our much changed car.
SATURDAY morning we had qualifying that Jeff and Marc get some seat time in, but Tony who was also supposed to do a few laps got called back down to Albany for work at 5am or so. Marc had a large lock-up during that session and I think it made that tire lock up that much easier throughout the day.... Tony was supposed to start the race so he drove to Albany, did the work and drove right back up. He arrived at the track maybe 15 minutes before the race was to start? We let him start the race even though in hind sight, we should've let him relax and catch his breath a bit before throwing him straight in the race car for a busy start of a race.
Anyway, the 7hr race's start went ok, our pace was ok, not fast, but not slow, and all seemed well. Until the entire field got called in for driving unsafe around safety and not paying attention to yellow flags. Then when the race restarted, Tony slid off track exiting Turn 12 and put the car into the tire barrier they recently installed protruding out between the drag strip and the exit of 12 (apparently the fast Miata line was through the dirt there). Cold(er) tires, tired driver and lack of attention at the moment maybe? Tony limped it to the pits for us to do some "straightening". Luckily we were within our pit window for his session and we swapped drivers then to only lose 4-5 minutes or so. Before that happened we had been 5th in class of 10(?) and 12th overall of 55 cars.
Jeff went in and made note of the front wheels locking up too easily, but otherwise things seemed to be good and normal. He was doing decently until getting black flagged for passing under yellow. He wasn't the only one as AGAIN the whole field was black flagged for unsafe driving! WHAT THE HECK?! He's a great driver and usually very attentive, so that was a bummer. Lucky Dog FORCED a driver change with that black flag all, and I hopped in the car next. They did NOT allow fueling or any other work on the car, and Jeff had already driven the car an hour and twenty minutes or so. Normally we're required to stop for fuel and a driver change at least once every 2hrs. This opened up the possibility of trying to stretch the fuel over 3 hours! Being that we have a 22G cell in the car and normally use smoewhere around 7g/hr, we thought maybe if I drove it conservatively, we might be able to make it all the way to the last driver stint of the day (maximum 2hr stint). Before the forced driver swap, we had worked from 8th to 6th in class and 29th to 21st overall.
Well, I drove it around, typically short shifting, but also trying to dice it up with faster traffic and seeing faster and faster lap times being possible on the lap timer. My half hearted attempt at conserving fuel was not good enough in the end and I felt the car stumble when accelerating out of 6 towards 7. Once this car stumbles, you're screwed! Somehow I managed to limp the car back to the pits and was able to accelerate from the stop at Pit in enough to coast the car the rest of the way to our pit stall! That was about 15 minutes too early for Marc to hop in and finish the day (2:45 with a 5pm race finish). We had worked from 6th to 4th or 5th in class and 21st to 10th overall in that time period. I set our new best time for PIR at 1:32.506 which put us about a second off of the fastest B class cars, but really right in the hunt. The car definitely had a 1:31 in it with the right conditions/traffic!
Marc got in the car next and Tony was informed that he would need to climb into the car to finish off the last 15 minutes of the race. Well, Marc went out there for about 15 minutes, got down to a 1:33.229 and there was a full course yellow! If we were going to have our best chance at winning, an advantage in the pits will help! We had stayed 6th in class and went from 12th to 11th overall during that time period.
We gathered Tony up and had him get ready to jump in the car. We were just doing a driver swap, so it would be really quick. He wasn't expecting to jump in the car right away, so we probably lost a lap with our timing of getting held behind the pace truck as opposed to making it back out on track just in front of it. In any case, Tony went out and did pretty great but was confused as to why he still had over an hour of driving to do when he had definitely already done more than 15 minutes of driving.
He was tired, and understandably so!! Sadly, he he ALSO passed a car under yellow flag. After serving that penalty, he finished off the race strong. Fastest lap for him was a 1:32.708 and we finished the day 4th in class and 8th overall! We were just over 3 laps down from 3rd place in class and 4 laps down from 2nd in class. If we had run a clean race, we likely would've had 2nd in class! Oh well.
It's good the race didn't go on much longer though, as we were well into the chords on the right front tire where the flat spot was after multiple lock-ups throughout the day! We tidied up some things that evening, swapped out the front wheels for some spares we had that sat out about half an inch further and adjusted the toe settings. It seemed to be toe'd out about half an inch which was surprising considering how well it drove.
Sunday was an 8hr race so we were going to have to stick with close to 2hr stints all day as an optimal strategy.
I'll have to finish this story later as I definitely need to go to bed! Sorry.
Spoiler: we ended up 4th in class again but 6th overall with two black flags for passing under yellow again (WTH, dudes?!?!) and the car understeered like a pig but Marc still managed a new best for the car of 1:32.466. Another 2nd or 3rd in class eluded us because of driver error.
This car is awesome.. You guys are doing amazingly well for the limited amount of power that you have..
-Sam
Thanks Sam!
Can you share some more details on your Wilwood brake upgrade. I priced out the difference between ST-43 pads on Girlings vs Wilwood Forged Dynalite and it was $260 vs $85.
Which calipers did you go with and what size rotor? Did you make a mounting adapter yourself? What size are your wheels?
We used a kit from Sam Moore that he developed for his sprint racing 142. I think getting something from the STS Machining twins and Robert would be better, but we're hopefully going to have things worked out soon.
The calipers are the Forged Dynalight 1.75"(piston)/1.25"(rotor width) 120-6814 calipers but the piston size is likely too large. I think the rotors are 11.75" tall? We're running some 15x7 ARE wheels, ran some 15x8" steel wheels and are currently running some 15x8" Revolution wheels with 5" of backspacing and a minimum of 1/4" spacers. Up front there are actually 1" spacers if I remember correctly to make the rotor hats work in our application. It's not as ideal of a setup as the twins and Robert made, though.
We're currently running into front lock-up issues, even though Sam says on his setup he has major rear lock-up issues. The Wilwood calipers probably should have smaller diameter pistons in them. We pulled the factory rear proportioning valves out and had an adjustable bias valve inside the car, but at the last two races we had it at the maximum rear brake setting and were left wanting for more. We even destroyed some tires at this last race, although luckily they both held together to finish off the days.
We started with ST45 pads up front and ST43s in the rear girling calipers(D44 pad size which can be bought off the shelf in this compound for $90 or so, along with the proper pads for the Wilwoods
).
We were set to start second in our class and ended up starting last in class. 
