Brakes, Fuel, and Bars

Been radio silent for a while, but not for lack of work! We’ve been doing some updates on the Camaro which have taken a little longer than anticipated. Unfortunately the number of events in our region haven’t been scheduled on good weekends either, but expect lots more in the summer timeframe!

Since last year focused on the front of the car, this year we’ve taken a look at the back of the car to see what we can do to reduce some of the knife-edge feel that it has. This means we’re trying softer springs and bigger bars in the hopes that we can get a little more weight transfer under acceleration for better grip and still maintain the roll stiffness we’re looking for.

That means out comes the old rear blade style rear bar and in goes something new. The old bar was really cool with a fancy blade adjustment, but with the desired bar rate change, we had to swap to something new. The old bar is for sale now in our new Garage Sale section of the site!

Since we are mounting the rear bar much lower in the chassis and we’re tired for having to fuel the car in grid during the heat, we also updated our fuel cell. While not the best shape, it will work for our purposes.

A new bar was ordered from Speedway Engineering. They made the front bar on our car which we were very pleased with.

After proving that my adjustment method would work on Tony’s Mustang, we used the same approach here.

New arms had to be drilled, which we did on a mill to keep the holes in a straight line. We really need to get some more tooling for this machine since right now all Todd has for it are drill bits!

New end links of course are required, these will be mounted to tabs on the axle. We’re attempting a quick-adjustment system using a cotter pin instead of a bolt on the arm end. I’m hoping that this will work out for fast adjustments.

While we were in there, a new fuel pump is going in to replace the Holley pumps we’ve had so much trouble with. The fuel system is being converted to a return style system so that we hopefully extend the life of this pump.

Rear rotors got turned for mating to new Carbotech rear brake pads.

The last piece of work has been a set of brake cooling ducts for the front of the car. With the large backspace on our front wheels, we’ve had problems cooking the front brakes at events since the heat never gets out of the wheel.

A set of Coleman ducts and hose worked out pretty well. The duct could be further improved by moving it closer to the center of the rotor and better sealing off the duct to rotor space; however sealing off the space would make our current problem worse!