So, remember how the car didn't work, and I had plans to do a bunch of stuff to try to fix it?
Yeah, those tasks worked.
I spent the week daily driving the car to run the gas down, and managed to get an alignment from jeff on thursday.
The first thing done was to attack the ride heights. One corner was off, and it was that right rear corner. I decided it looked like the fronts were in the right place, and that i wanted to replicate the factory stagger of 3/4" front to rear. Turns out, height wise that only puts the car about an inch lower all around than stock. In the future, I'll probably take another inch out of it, but i wanted to get a baseline that worked.
Next, being as tall as it was, i took some more camber out of the rear. I'm now down to -2 in the back, and toe is in factory specs, with room to toe out much more than it's set to currently. Again, in the future, I'll probably dial some more toe out into the rear end both in favor of saving tires and loosening things up a bit, just more evenly.
lastly, we ran with corner weighting. With 160 lbs of ballast in the driver's seat, the numbers were almost spot on. I don't have the numbers of exactly right now, but they were good enough we skipped chasing any further adjustment.
And I'm not going to lie, but the car looks a touch goofy right now after all this work, and this rake, and those small tires.
But you know what? I don't really care. The car works.
The previous issue with the right rear wheel is gone, and it sticks much, much better.
I took the car out to CVSCC's event in Eau Claire, WI as their site is fantastic, if not a bit... lumpy. I've run sites that were off-camber on a few corners, but this is safely the only site that I can accurately describe as "downhill". It has a crest.
So, I spun it over the crest once.. Whoops. Every once in a while I have to give myself the ol' slap on the wrist and remind myself that this isn't AWD and it won't self rectify like the WRX will when you lean back on the gas. Coming around will happen.
After I got that out of my system, and a few more runs (we got 8 all day) I finally felt confident enough in the car to really start hammering on it more and dropping times. The results finally started to be apparent. I managed a run that was 1 tenth slower than the leader.
As a bit of a change, i also had an experienced autocrosser drive it too. Steve Garnjobst had a discussion with a deer on the way over that morning that left his car in a less than favorable situation. Steve has a bit of a history with some higher power RWD vehicles, so I did what any autocrosser would do, and threw him the keys.
He beat me. Well, sucks for him. Guess he won't get to drive the final product :)
But he did put up this nice quote on the forums a few days later:
"I co-drove the 350Z at the CVSCC event last weekend (thanks Shane!).
The car was a lot of fun to drive. Very well balanced, a lot of power, plenty of grip.
Ergonomics of the 350Z's are excellent. The driving position was perfect and visibility for autocross is great. (note- the rear visibility is likely pretty bad for street driving)
Even though Shane still has the cheap coilovers on the car, it felt pretty darned good.
Th primary weakness of the car in its current stage of development is power delivery. The car REALLY needs two upgrades:
1. a limited slip differential. With that much power, the lack of a LSD is really limiting the car's potential.
2. a louder exhaust. Combined with item #1, it's really difficult to modulate the throttle to maximize acceleration.
Should be a beast when fully developed!
-Steve"
The car was one-wheel-wondering all over the course, and Steve was right.. it was very hard to know where the car was spinning the tires by ear.
So, a few days later i looked at the budget numbers.. said "fuck it" and started ordering parts. Right off the bat I stumbled upon a y-pipe back single exit exhaust from the now defunct Momentum Motorsports that was almost half off. it's damn near a straight pipe with two gentle radius bends. Perfect. It feels pretty light too, but i won't know for sure until i start weighing parts. Next up, i needed a y-pipe. After a few minutes of searching for a higher end used one.. i said "fuck it" again and ordered one directly from Stillen. It's a cheap unit, but i like that it doesn't have any flex pipes and merges down into a nice 3" collector, which will mate up perfectly with the new y-pipe back exhaust i have obtained. Plus, it's cheap enough in the y-pipe market that i won't be too upset when i have to start cutting into it for later catalytic converter plans.
I got both of these on order, and that was going to be the temporary fix.. until I called Nismo, and started pricing diffs. Okay... that WaveTrac... hmm.. well.. yeah.. that is a good price... and hung up, and started digging back into the functionality of the WaveTrac units. It looks like it's a torsen that can lock. Sounds like a plan. Again "Fuck it", and called Nismo back to order the diff and the necessary parts for install (bolts, bearings).
All these parts should be arriving this week, and if i had a tracking number to know exactly when that diff would show up, I'd probably start that project and jam through getting it installed for this weekend. Sadly, I don't so I'll just have to start ripping into things come Monday after the next MOWOG event.
Now if someone would just take a picture of the damn thing on course...
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