Oversteer Garage

Got some extensive practice time @ Royal Purple Raceway this last weekend with the Houston SCCA.  This was our trial run on our revalved ASTs (took out low speed compression).  Big difference!  Most of our turn-in problems are gone and car is 100% better than before.  We’re still struggling with lifting the inside rear tire though in hard corners and in high-g steady state.  Got some more investigative work to do…

Also played around with a couple of data loggers.  Last year for my birthday, my wife had hooked me up with a QStar GPS to go with my Trackmaster app on my phone.  If you aren’t familiar with it, visit the website for more info.  I’d struggled with the “start @ first split marker” mode at previous events, so this time around using an Otterbox case for my phone I velcroed it in a position where I could access the phone to change it to “start at movement”.  This worked way better.  When I got home I noted why the problem was so bad, the split markers barely lined up with the course!  This was frustrating considering the phone never left the car and was always connected via bluetooth to the QStar.  In the future I’ll do the splits at home in Google Earth, but that kind of defeats the purpose of run-to-run comparisons…

Anyways, here’s some of the data collected, pretty interesting.  Not the best run I did, but reasonable enough to show what you get.

The data above isn’t that useful without the App or Google Earth files, but you can crank out Sector Times (based on split markers you place in the app or Google Earth) and lateral/longitudinal accelerations coupled with speed for any data point collected.  It’s helpful, but not nearly as useful as a DL-1 by Race Technologies…

We borrowed one for a few runs and once again, I need to add this to my wishlist!

The below screenshot shows barely a tenth of the data available.  My best run in the afternoon in red and Todd’s in black.  This is amazingly useful and also humbling.

All for now, more updates to follow.  Camaro is getting a paint job before the National Tour!

Ever since we put the new AST shocks on the Camaro we’ve had a hell of a time trying to get it dialed back in.  While can’t blame our entire poor performance at Nationals last year on the shocks, I can blame it somewhat on our ignorance when it comes to tuning them!

After doing a little research ran across some information attributed to Neil Roberts (Aggie autocrosser, now involved in CART).  This excerpt from an article by him looks to be a helpful guide to those of us less…  educated…  when it comes to shocks.

Anyways, to provide a little bit of a helpful guide that I could access on the fly, I put together a quick website I could pull from my phone at the racetrack.

Have not used these tuning tips yet, so can’t comment on their accuracy!

Bit of a disaster at the Houston SCCA event yesterday.  Had trouble with the ignition system due to the rain and never switched to rain tires.  Meant cones for me!  Todd took a run in Tony’s car and smoked his best time in the Camaro.  Clear that we still got a lot of work to do…