Homestead TTE record lap onboard video

Thunderhill

Oh My God. I love Thunderhill. I mean, deep spiritual connection with a kindred spirit. Whomever is responsible for it's layout, I want to buy you a beer. Now I see what everyone rave about. Some say Infineon is better but I think driving wise they're equally challenging, Thunderhill with more gut-check high speed turns and is leagues safer than Infineon. So in my book, no comparison. Thunderhill is the best overall driver's track in California.

So anyway, you all want to read about the car and update have been scant. Well I've been missing a lot of sleep, driving way too much, working to many hours and still really don't have time to make an entry, but I feel guilty so here's the latest..

Rattle canned the cage in flat black after install. First time at the track and it works! No reflections on the windshield whatsoever. Great video too. The Momo seats while being quite snug, also keep me from splaying my gangly legs apart to clear the steering column. So my knees were hitting the key among other things. Stripped everything down to the bare column, dug the little plastic ignition switch out from behind the heavy die cast key cylinder and zip tied it to the dash bar. The key was now useless so I fashioned a "key" out of a little stamped steel chrome flat wrench, ground it down and used some fine stainless cable to hold it in the socket. Works like a charm and shaved about 4 lbs. Bets of all I have plenty of knee room and was able to move the wheel towards teh windshield with my adjustable steering hub spacer. The company that makes my forged lugs also makes these things. Looks like a coilover adjuster. Very handy.

Gauges don't work, except the fuel gauge which does work. Something in the harness I no doubt screwed up when removing the dash. have to get in there with a VOM when I get a chance. Be nice to have a tach.

The Tubular subframe was a piece of cake to put in. I'm in love with it. So much room to work around and really easy to attach things to like undertrays, oil cooler hoses, remote reservoirs for the dampers, what have you. Bunches easier to do trans/clutch swaps now too.

Which brings me to the 7.25" twin plate clutch we're developing. The engineers gave me a set of organic discs to test and the experimental bonding adhesive didn't work. So out it came and the sintered ceramic-metallic discs went it. The ceramic discs weigh about 1.1lbs more the pair than the organics. Boo. Anyway, the clutch is just fantastic. Despite having no mass and be able to speed shift it now, I can still creep it up into the enclosed trailer at a snails pace. Magic. The organics for the briefe period I had them in were even easier to modulate. In teh video's attached, you can hear how quickly it revs now. Like some kind of built race motor and it's just a junkyard bottom end with a little (very little) head work.

When we took it to Laguna Seca for the Miata 20th anniversary celebration, I didn't get the suspension assembled right so I wasn't able to run. I did do about 10 laps kinda limping around while trying to diagnose the problem and manage about a 1:43 anyway though.

Next outing for the new build was Streets Of Willow (CW) on Friday, April 10th. First time I realy got a chance to beat on the car for a full session and see how the new XIDA's handle the bumps at SOW. It's probably the best track for suspension testing beside Buttonwillow because its so bumpy. The short version of the verdict: smooth! Iwas expecting a harder, choppier ride but it was a bunch smoother than the revalved Flex's and Mono Flex's I'm used to. Kind of undramatic actually. No fuss, no extra motion, just rocketing over stuff that would have any other Miata I've ever driven bouncing, skittereing or needing steering corrections. I played around with damper settings but it felt good no matter what I did. I tried to make it pump upest the car by cranking in way too much compression damping but it was still fast, just harder to drive smoothly. Turn the comp adjusters back a few clicks and it was faster, and easier to drive. On smoother track like Thunderhill and Laguna Seca, one could definitely take advantage of that stiffer range without penalty.

Next on the list of thinsg to evaluate was the OS Giken differential. I wsih I could say that I could tell it was working but much like the XIDA's, it was really transparent. No sudden locking, no noise, no jerkiness no nothing. You turn in off throttle and the car rotates just like Torsen. Trail brake and you get much less, or no inside rear locking. Stomp the throttle on a slow, bumpy or off camber turn and you get no wheel spin. That's not a little wheel spin. No wheelspin. Anywhere. The main thing I noticed is that I could get on the power way, way earlier than I copuld with the Torsen I ran for most of last year or the 140in/lb preloaded FC RX7 diff I ran for the last 8 months. It's almost like having a lot less power. I mean, you can jump on the throttle in places that would have just spat you sideways with the torsen or RX7 diff. Now it's just feed power in , the rear squats down without changing the attitude of the car and it just rails around the turn.

Pulled the 15/16?" FM front bar I had been using and fitted a 1.125" Racing Beat (94-97 thinwall). With that and teh giant APR GT-II twin element wing, I had a turn in push all day. A bit tight coming off but managaeable. Anyway, set the new absolute SOW CW lap record for Miatas, 1:24.128

Left SOW early. Just as I was pulling out, a 997 pulled into the pits with coolant steam pourig out of the engine bay. Little did I know that about 20 seconds later 4 separate cars went off the chicane at high speed after hitting the coolant spill. One fellow totaling his beautiful S2000 and banging himself up pretty bad. No one was seriously injured, thank goodness.

I woked through the night the Thursday before SOW to prep the car so I was operating on virtually no sleep. Rolled out about 2:00and headed north on the long ass drive to Thunderhill. It's like, in another country, I swear. Had to stop for three power naps. Got in a midnight. Blessed sleep. Going to bed thinking, "this track better be good".

So Sonny, Andrew, Nick and myself all had a blast tearing around Thunderhill on Saturday. I knew I needed to free up the car to get it to go fast in the high speed stuff so I put the smaler FM front sway bar back on. In my haste to get it back together and on the track, I forgot to reset the toe after adding some 3/16"rack shims (bumpsteer). So I had like 3/4" toe out or something horrific. Came in after one session scratching my head "why is the steering so rubbery, why are the insides of both front tires so freakin hot and why is it still pushing like mad?". So I'm standing there in the pits staring at it when I notice the right front is steering of towards Nevada while the steering wheel and left front are headed to Hawaii. This might be the problem. doh.

Fixed that, removed the second element of the wing, went back out and magic. It rotates! Pretty much left it like that for the rest of the day, just fine tuning pressures and compression settings on the dampers. Late in the day while I was stepping up to proper entry speed for T9, I locked up the rears and went off. No harm done, rolled back to the hot pit, took one full turn of rear brake out of the proportioning valve and that did the trick.

Well, that's it for now. It's 12:17 am. Dammit. Worked past midnight again..

OGK gets caged

First off, apologies for taking so damn long to add an update.

Last installment was from Buttonwillow where we broke a throttle shaft. I fitted another but toook the precaution of brazing the plate to the shaft. What I didn't do was braze both sides. That, as it turns out, was a mistake. So an few events later and I'm at Calif, excuse me, AAA Speedway in Fontucky, blazing down the front straight at about 120 when the throttle once again sticks open as I shift into 6th. Instantly shut it down and coast in. I already know what's wrong with it. Turns out you can still break the shaft even when it's brazed on one side. Upon tear down I realized that once again the screw had broken in half with head stuck to the brazing but the threaded portion sucked into the engine. Crossing my fingers I pulled the top of the BP4W manifold (two piece) and very gingerly dropped a magnet wand into each runner. #3 had a tiny little camper, the 2.5m shank of the throttle plate screw. My engine was safe, or so I thought.

So I get yet another TB but this time JB weld both sides in an attempt to keep any detritus from going astray. I install, fire it up and notice some wristpin noise. Lota wristpin noise. Dammit. Maybe running 7400 down the half mile front straight at AAA all day wasn't such a hot idea. So I went back to Buttonwillow a few weeks later to finish it off, which I did at the end of the last session of the day. Seized up tight just as I wound out 5th leaving the esses. :(

Ryal Greenwood at British Car Service in Tucson has made a custom TB for he calls Throttle Zilla. He pulls the OEM 9mm shaft out, bores the TB and installs a very nicely machined 14mm shaft in there, mills one face so it has .5mm less cross section and voila! I'm testing it for him as I know now that shafts only last about two events in my motors. We're also investigating the feasibility of a single barrel type throttle body that will bolt to the stock manifold and the manifold we're working on.

So the OGK now needs a motor. I have a fresh VVT head and 01-05 bottom end in the shop I can mate for a replacement. Good time to work on adapting the VVT head and control systems into the NA6 harness. I'll be using a proprietary ECU with a custom harness. If I can come up with a reasonably priced harness that I can serial produce, I'll offer that as a kit to the public.

While the motor is out, I'll get the Miatacage installed by Drew Staveley
Yes, the same Drew Stavely from Setup. Turns out he can weld and drive, my kinda guy.

Seats going in are Momo Daytonas. 20.3 lbs, Halo, $600 ea on closeout and FIA approved. Oh and they fit. So when everything is in it should finally look something like a race car inside and be about 1000% safer.

Along way we'll be adding the Energy Suspension bushings, OS Giken limited slip and finally, the V8 Roadsters subframe. We added a dual plane APR aluminum wing for Buttonwillow and wow did it make a difference. Going 90 through Riverside in the rain was not something I would have thought possible. The event before that we added an ISC Racing front airdam and as expected the car was a tad loose with it. Adding the wing made the car tight, totally overpowering the front downforce provided by the air dam. What's crazy is even at zero angle of attack, I could feel the wing making the car stick better as low as 60mph. Amazing.

The wing is made up of parts from three different models and the minimum rake was like 10°. So I drilled new holes for the stanchions, put some nutserts in and moved the stanchions wider while I was at it. It's mounted to the body outside of the trunk. No way the flimsy FRP trunklid would withstand the pressure without a bulky support structure underneath. Not being a fan of redundant structure, I elected to mount it directly to the body to save the weight. It's now rock solid and easily supports me bouncing up and down with my entire body weight in the middle of the wing and I have zero added support structure. Perfect. The downside is I can only open the trunk about 10". Oh well, it is a racecar.

So now it needs more front downforce. We'll add a 3" splitter thats sorta squared off on the outside corners. On those corners we'll add dive plane (canards) to help keep air off the front tires. Hopefully that'll balance the car out.

That's it for now. Dinner is waiting...

First track event for project car

Worked straight through Thursday night getting it ready. Well, as ready as I could. I was concerned about the aero lift and cooling issues I would have with no body work so I put the marker lights and factory r package lip spoiler on. Didn't have time to make brackets for the huge ISC Racing air dam/splitter or APR dual element wing. No rear bodywork or race seats. I need harnesses so I cut holes in the stock seats for my 6 pt Team Tech's sub belts to pass through.
Ghetto but it's better than the 4pts Willans I had. Anyway, got it done about 5:30 am, went home for a much needed shower, loaded up and left for Buttonwillow.

As expected, I was falling asleep at the wheel so I pulled over for a half hour for some mini-nappage. Got to the track around noon. Running 13CW on Friday. Unloaded and rolled out for a recon lap at about 60% pace. Back in a lap later, few little tweaks here and there, then out again. Brought it up top about 90% and the car felt really good. Power from the mix and match engine was sensational, better than expected. A little too much starting pressure had me up to about 37 hot, too much for a sub 2000# Miata. Gordon's 2100# intercooled, water injected, Megasquirted, MP62 hotside was just barely pulling me. William's 99 with stock engine, race exhaust and coldside air intake making probably 125whp was not even close.

All in all a great day at the track. Afterwards, Aaron and a few of us instructors retired to the pool at the Red Roof for some liquid nutritional supplements. 24oz Fosters in my case. Well the sleep deprivation and 100* heat finally got to me. I started slurring my speech, and speaking incoherently. More than usual that is. Stumbled (literally) back to the room and slept for 12 hrs.

Today we're running a variation on 18CW. Aaron decided he hates brake pads and has us running the drag strip into StarMazda. You read that right. Riding with a first timer in a C6 Z06 touching 150mph in that pup was, ah, invigorating.

I have XP10 Carbotech's on the front but didn't have time to get the brake ducts made. Hopefully, I've got enough. I think I'll run XP12's in front for the next event. XP10's are fine a Spec Miata on 205's but the project beastie is much faster.

I'm also going to log my laps with William's Traqmate. Curious to see the lateral in Riverside. It feel like the slight baking there overcomes any aero lift I may be getting so it turns harder there that anywhere else on the track.

Forgot one of the adapters for my laptop so I'm borrowing William's for the blog and to do some datalogging. Hoping to lean out the top end of the map a bit, free up maybe 5-10hp.

We're running 13CW again tomorrow. The plan is to go out when it's relatively cool and aim for a 2:02. With the 2:04.3 yesterday, I'm guessing I have the normally aspirated Miata lap record on 13CW. I'm sure an EP car would be faster but I've never seen on on 13 CW, the Cal Club uses different configs.

OK, time to drive...

First blog post..

I'm going to try to post some sorta record of all the little projects I'm doing, reports from the track, progress on the track car and hopefully not to many boring personal details.

At the moment, I just got back from Church's dyno, it's 9:00pm and I haven't had lunch yet. A typical day. The very light experimental clutch combination I tried didn't hold. Slipping at 70kpa so we never got the MegaSquirt PnP map completed. It's on the 91 Miata trackday project car. Just swapped in a 1.8 motor that is a stock 02 bottom end with a mild ported, polished, .015 shaved BP4W head. Even at like 40% throttle it was making 115lbs/ft so that's encouraging.

Anyway, the plan is to pack up and roll out Thursday evening for Sppedventures at Buttonwillow Fri-Sun. Can't do that with a slipping clutch so I called clutchnet while at the dyno in Wilmington at about 4pm. They made me a clutch on the spot and I dragged the trailer all the way to South El Monte to get it. I would like to say now that I am damned glad I don't have to drive in that poo every day. What's the Mercedes ad? "Around here, you have to love what you drive". Yah, otherwise you would become depressed I guess. I saw many of them wearing bleak expressions behind the wheel today. None of them driving Mercedes though so maybe there is something to that. I was towing a racecar so I was toting my anti-depression medicine within arms reach. After running the gauntlet safely, arriving in the splendid somewhat smoggy squalor that is So El Monte, I grabbed the clutch. Clutched the disc? Mission accomplished, sun going down, nearly finished race car on the trailer sitting with an expression that said " I know you really don;t want to go back to shop and install that disc tonight but I tell you what, start me up right now and I'll make a couple of really glorius trips into the sweet spot on my engine's VE for you. Right now, you don't even have to take it off the trailer". I obliged, and so did the little red car.

GPS located the nearest Starbucks for some octane booster. Sign read "Sorry but we are closing this location September 28th". Wow, I almost care. Uncharateristically, the coffee was fresh and blooming with nuance and flavor. I had the strangest that its was like last hurrah for that little store. OK, so I think too much.

So I'm going to fuel up at El Pollo and attempt to get the disc in tonight. Sleep is over rated.