50 is a Magic Number

Nationals is approaching faster than we need so it’s time to get serious! There’s a 2-day practice at A&M on July 6th and 7th so I made my way up to College Station to get in a day of work on the car to get it ready to test.

We had 4 goals for the day: add in some negative camber, final mount the nose, brace the passenger door, and ballast the car to meet minimum weight.

No nose on the car (which is ~90 lbs). Got a fair bit of ballast needed to get us up to the class minimum of 2750 lbs. Click through to see more!

Weight on the back tires. Class maximum is 51%. We used to be at 47% weight on the rear, so this was a huge improvement towards the goal!

We mounted up the nose and got to work placing ballast where we wanted it. You don’t want to hang the weight behind the rear axle otherwise it can make it difficult to control the rear end since the weight makes the tail swing harder. We ended up with one lead brick under each rear seat pan and another inside the car right above the passenger side weight to partially offset the driver’s weight.

Final weight with about 5 gallons of gas in the car. We don’t want to be razor thin on the weight otherwise it causes us to have to fuel the car before our last runs, stress that you don’t need in the heat of competition.