Something fishy about that. The VQ37HR first came in the 2008 G37 Coupe. 2007 should have been a VQ35HR.

I found an engine! It's from a wrecked 2013 370Z w/ 7AT (so I get the flywheel too) from a local salvage lot. Only 5K miles on the donor car and it's (probably) not damaged from the wreck. Assuming everything goes smoothly (which should be obvious right off the bat and covered by the salvage lot's parts warranty), it's damn near a brand-new engine. Just a hair under $3K after tax and delivered.

The block should get dropped off at Baker sometime Monday, and Jason will be dropping it in and moving over the various bolt-ons next week. Then it will need a quick dyno-tune to make sure my UpRev settings are ok on the new block (not sure where yet), and I'll need to put it on my mini-lift and go over everything carefully to make sure I'm comfy trusting the car, and then hopefully back on track for June 21-22 @ MSR-Houston and June 28-29 @ COTA.

What were you down there for? :) Did you get to see the cage in the car? I don't think you've seen it since then.

Damn that's a good deal! Lucky man! :)

Glad to hear you'll be back up and running soon and for what is relatively very little in terms of cost! Your thread and Megan370s has served as some good inspiration for me to track my 7AT. I just got my car back and the next steps for me are going to be to figure out what I need to do to ruggedize this transmission so i can enjoy quarterly track days without sending it back to the dealer every 12 months.

I'm possibly looking at GTM's torque converter, an upgraded transmission oil cooler, maybe the GTM flex plate and whatever fluids will be best to help this thing soldier on.

The first thing I'd do is make sure you have good cooling on the trans fluid. I'm now running a Setrab 19-row Series-6 width cooler for my trans fluid, and I believe it's enough to keep from cooking the fluid under pretty extreme conditions. Most of the kits from the vendors have smaller cores than that. Somewhere deeper in my journal there's some posts about that (e.g. don't buy Stillen's kit, just buy a completely different set of adapters and hoses anyways, because their lines are too large to clamp onto our trans fluid fittings securely - not sure about GTM's).

Keeping the rest of the car cool (e.g. radiator upgrades, uprev fan settings, large engine oil cooler, maybe vent the hood near the front of the engine block, etc) is critical as well, since all temps on the car are somewhat interrelated.

I haven't ever done any trans-parts upgrades aside from cooling. I passed on the GTM valve body job for now because I couldn't get any reliable information on how it behaved from a road-racing perspective (i.e. whether it makes the upshifts too "shocky" for breaking traction on upshifts during trackout (or downshifts while trailing in) - I imagine some street guys and drag racers might actually like that behavior, but I sure wouldn't). I've never even considered touching the torque convertor or anything like that, although after this incident the HD Flex Plate is a little tempting.

Upping 7AT line pressures just a little bit via UpRev is worth it, but don't go too far. ~10% bumps across the board worked well for me with boltons. I also ended up switching my fluid to Motul Multi-ATF, which is one of the very few aftermarket fluids that's rated for our trans from a reputable company. I think it's at least as good as the stock fluid at handling the stress, anecdotally, and I've had it in for a couple of change intervals now. But if you care about dealership warranty issues, who knows if they might balk about using anything but official Nissan Matic-S. GTM has a couple of different PDFs on 7AT fluid swaps and recommended change intervals based on trans fluid temp. Putting in a trans fluid temp gauge (in the side of the pan) is worth it, especially one with a peak hold to find out your high-temp marks for the day. Check out this one: http://www.gtmotorsports.com/Manuals..._Procedure.pdf

At 4 track days a year, you'll be long done with that car before you've put as much wear on it as I have on mine, so you're probably going to be ok if you're reasonably cautious. I was reviewing my records on this stuff a couple months ago, and me and this car have been through about 38 track days in just a little under 3 years (or ~19x full track weekends if you prefer to count it that way). So that's a rough average of a little better than one weekend every two months for the whole 3-year period, plus another ~40K of street miles from back when this car was dual-purpose. Track miles are hard on any car. Having a major failure by this point is not completely unwarranted :)

Getting a quick oil change and spacers put on the wife's Z.

Jason sent me a pic of my flywheel. Yup, definitely something wrong with the flywheel :p

https://googledrive.com/host/0B9O2uT...MlE/image.jpeg

that's a bit worst than my first one ....




Just as a reference,
This is my second flex plate after not even 5000 kms and 1 track day and half.

http://www.the370z.com/members/megan...15-000-kms.jpg

Got the car back today. It would've been done much sooner, but we had various minor scheduling and parts issues (not the least of which was figuring out very late in the process that the flywheel on the donor motor was distorted and had to be tossed). I've only done a quick testdrive 1 block down the road from the dealership before I loaded it all back up on the trailer, but everything seems perfect. The guys at Baker Nissan did an exceptional job, pretty happy with them (again). Jason is an awesome mechanic :)

I need to fire it up a few more times here and basically triple-check everything for the usual gotchas like minor leaks, but I don't expect any real problems. That and re-check my alignment, which I was due for anyways. First real abuse test will be at MSR-Houston down in Angleton next weekend (June 21-22). I decided to skip wasting $500+ on a re-tune for now after talking it over with Jason as well. All the bolt-ons are unchanged anyways, and whatever minor variance there might be between blocks, the ECU should be able to adapt to that fine.

Yeah, so someone asked on the "visitor messages" thingy here: Nissan 370Z Forum - Conversation Between 12nismo and wstar about whether the engine failure was pulley-related and whether I moved my crank pulley to my new block. The TL;DR answer to that is: I *think* the failure was unrelated to the pulley, but I also did *not* move the pulley over to the new block.

The long explanation, if the above is important to you and/or confusing:

Personally, I don't think the (Stillen, light/underdrive) pulley was a significant factor. My best guess is the flywheel probably started cracking a long time ago, adding some imbalance/wobble to the crankshaft and beginning to cause excess wear in the crank bearings, and then when the flywheel finally got bad enough (when the last bit cracked on that fateful Saturday), we had some major imbalance/wobble/whatever going on that really tore up the bearings, along with the flywheel striking the crankshaft position sensor, which is what caused the engine to go into limp mode at that point.

Even then I think the bearings were merely damaged at that point, but not seized/spun, initially. They didn't really come apart until test-fires and moving the car around around later, off-track (but that was inevitable at that point, they were shot one way or the other)... which brings us back to the Great Internet Pulley Debate (which rages forever on almost every car forum), where pulley-detractors tell us that lightweight pulleys without dampening rings on them will destroy crankshaft bearings over time.

To recap the basic internal/external balancing stuff, open the spoiler (or you can skip this as a TL;DR reduction if you get this part already):



Our engine is an internally-balanced one, meaning the pulley doesn't play a role in basic rotating-assembly balance issues on this car. It *does*, however, contain a rubber vibration-damping ring on the outer face of it. The core of the real debate here is whether the purpose of that vibration damping ring is purely for aesthetic NVH reduction, or whether it has a real dampening effect that partially reduces some mechanically-important crankshaft vibrations from combustion (and if so, how much longevity are you losing if you eliminate this? It could be 5%, it could be 95%!).

Anecdotally, I don't think it's much of a loss, if any, because the pulley kits from NST and Stillen (and others) have sold tons, and we're not hearing about massive lawsuits or even complaints about destroyed engines. It's most likely that the ring is mostly about NVH. Maybe it also reduces some mechanical vibration that matters, but maybe that's not very significant to begin with. For this sort of reasoning, I'm generally of the opinion that you're not risking any kind of large or short-term damage by properly installing a pulley kit on this engine. That and my engine made it through a considerable number of very abusive track miles on such a pulley (and even then, I don't think it was the cause).

However, I can't in good conscience say that without adding 3 important disclaimers/caveats:

1. My car is a 7AT, not a 6MT. Vibrational issues could be different on the two. I tend to suspect that, if there is any issue, 7AT's would fare better than 6MTs. This is because a 7AT has a torque convertor full of transmission fluid bolted to the flywheel at the rear of the engine. I suspect the torque convertor acts like a giant fluid damper on the rear of the engine (e.g. The Original Fluidampr ), offering far better vibration damping than any silly rubber ring on a pulley ever could.
   
   
2. Regardless of all the logical weaseling above, you can't escape a few basic facts: Vibration hurts engines. All engines vibrate. There's a small rubber ring on the stock pulley that may help with some unknown vibrations to some unknown degree. You're tossing that out for a <1% difference in the engine's performance capabilities at the end of the day. Maybe that's worth it, maybe it isn't. How much stress you're putting on the engine to begin with is a big factor. If I were building a 750rwhp turbo monster, I'd probably go in the *opposite* direction and install a heavier replacement pulley that does some serious damping to increase longevity. On an N/A street engine, I doubt you'll ever know the difference (in performance *or* longevity), making the upgrade pointless.
   
   
3. Jason (the mechanic who did the swap, and who I think has a trustworthy opinion about all car things) recommended against moving the pulley over to the new engine when moving all my other stuff over, because he thought it *could* have been a factor, and it's not worth the risk if it was. While, academically, I may believe it to not be a major contributing factor in the failure, I don't believe that strongly enough to tell him "No, put it on anyways", especially given that I could end up destroying this replacement block in a short period of time via something totally unrelated and coming right back to him with it, at which point he'd get to say "I told you so" about the crank pulley whether it was the issue or not, because that's only fair at that point. So he put my stock crank pulley on the new block, and that's what I'll be running for the foreseeable future (until I kill this engine in some new and imaginative way!).

12nismo is cobb in Houston.
He is getting his pulley put on this week so wanted to make sure your engine failure was not related.

Apparently he's already doing it. Unfortunately I don't have any easy answers for him, hence my huge diatribe above! Maybe an appropriate closing statement would be: if I could rewind time and start over, I'd still have put the same pulley on my (7AT-, NA-, track-) car back when I did.

Just got the kit installed and I'm very happy with the results...as long as the motor holds up, lol.

so just curious, what's your preventative don't blow up the engine plan in the future? flywheel replacement every 1 to 2 years?

Well, I'll certainly at least pull the starter and access covers and take a look at it from time to time. I suspect there was a good amount of lead time between the first crack and the bad situation at the end, but "inspect the flywheel" was never really on my track prep checklist before :)

I've got my old block back at home now with an engine stand as well. I plan to get that one rebuilt stronger and then drop it back in the car at a later date. Once I get to see the extent of the damage I'll know how much basic work needs doing and whether the block needs to see an engine rebuild shop first (probably). Once the block is basically sane, I'll probably drop in a bunch of upgraded parts for durability (e.g. Nismo oil pump, GTM HD flex plate, custom water inlet/outlet stuff with good fittings and no stupid heater connections, etc). Depending on time contraints, budget, and craziness, I might go further and build it up into something awesomer (e.g. one or more of 4.0 stroker, lots of forged high quality internal bits, dry sump, custom race ECU, etc). Right now the budget picture is pretty bleak while I recover from replacing the engine in the first place, but that will turn around in a few months.

Also, I took the still-unused 265/645 Wets off of my extra 18x10 wheels and had the 285/645 slicks mounted. The rims *still* aren't well-protected, even though I'm sure 10 inches is a good width for these 285's. Part of the issue is probably that race tires don't have rim-protectors built into the rubber mold, and that these Forgestars have particularly thick rim edges. When stacking these on their sides, the metal of the wheels don't touch each other or the ground, but it's just by a hair's width. Set them down too hard and you can hear them click into each other. I think I just have to live with that for now, because otherwise this setup should work great for trying out these cheap slicks.

Assuming no other major issues get in the way (like my car blowing up and/or dying), I think my general plan at MSR-H this weekend is to spend most of the weekend on my existing RS3's, then maybe switch the slicks on for the 3rd or 4th session Sunday and scrub them in over a whole session slowly coming up to full speed. Then they'll sit for a week for that whole mfg-recommended rebonding process and I'll try them again at COTA the next weekend (with the remaining life on the RS3's as a backup option. I might even start out on the RS3's and then switch to the slicks later in the weekend instead, so that I'm super-comfy with the track/event before adding that new challenge back into the mix. All depends how things feel during the scrub-in session this weekend).

Pics, off the car sitting at 25psi cold pressure (I suspect I might need to start them even lower than that, still researching):

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-B...619_171935.jpg

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-i...619_172114.jpg

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-0...619_172103.jpg

https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-2...619_172028.jpg

You won't want to go back to the RS3s! :)

I shoot for 36 hot on them. Not quite the same grip as the A6s, but still a great tire.

Had a great weekend at MSR-H!

New engine seem to be running great! Only have a couple minor things to look into: oil temps looked a little higher than expected (240-ish but it was a very hot weekend), and upshifts were a little slow and clunky on Saturday (but gradually got better for some reason; could have been me subconsciously adjusting shift timing or lifting throttle. Could also be that the fluid level's a little off?). Car's already back on my mini-lift for basic maintenance. Going to swap out the engine oil (since this was the first fill for that engine since the salvage lot), check trans fluid level, replace front rotor rings (finally, and replace studs+lugs while I'm in there), bleed brake fluid, etc for the coming weekend at COTA.

I did my Red-group check ride for MSR-H (Driver's Edge does these per-track, so the one at TWS was separate from this) on the first Sunday session and that went great, so I got to spend half my weekend in Red. Kevin was my check-ride instructor; his line advice was amazing, but it will take a while for me to get out of my old habits and pick up speed from what he was saying :)

I did scrub in the Conti GT-O slicks in the final session Sunday. As usual, my fears were all in my head. There was no problem controlling that tire, and it felt amazing. We had about 8 hot laps that session. I spent the first 6 slowly edging my way up on laptime and trying not to put any big slip angle in them, then the final 2 laps I ran at my normal pace for the RS-3's and I could finally start to feel a little slip. You could tell the tires were nowhere near their limit at my RS-3 pace. At places (and speeds) where I'd feel unstable or fighting the car way out at the edge of acceptable traction in the RS-3, the Contis were just rock solid and predictable. There's clearly 2-3 seconds I could take off my laps here if I adjusted my pace up to the tire's limit with slicks like these. (Then again there's also clearly 1-2 seconds I could shave if I made some basic line fixes; who knows how much those two figures overlap).

Also, they look great on the car :)

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/3j...=w1179-h603-no

--
Fastest lap for the weekend was 1:52.21 (second-to-last session of the weekend, still on the RS3's):

I went ahead and encoded the whole session that the fastlap above came from. Spent that whole session chasing down the same red Lotus (well, once he got back in front of me around the end of Lap 4). Lots of data to pick up from it on how and where he was faster than me. Mostly, it seems like he was doing better pushing out of the inner carousel wider and earlier on the throttle, and he was way more gutsy staying in the throttle before, during, and just after The Launch (the little hill):

240 is probably just normal in summer. I saw 230 at road atlanta weekend before last, and Russell from Z1 and Brian Kleemans Pirelli challenge car were around 260-70, but my stillen bumper probably helped me. this weekend at AMP which doesn't have long straight and is shorter, I was in the 230-240 range. It is summer!

Time for hood vents I guess :)

Have just come across this thread and read selective bits from it ....

To add my 2-cents worth to the pulley debate, on a DD that sees a "big" rev every now and then .... probably not significant, BUT in a competition car, an un-damped pulley is an engine killer in my book.

Back in the 80's, when I built the race-car I have come back to (is an historic 70's sports car, Buick 215 V8 engined), I ran without a crank-damper for the first 3 seasons and lost 4 engines (crank main-bearing failure each time), at which time we moved to dry-sump AND a damper.

We've had engine failures since, but never crank main failure - usually down to running the rod-bolts a tad too long (Carillo's are lifed at 80 hours, but we now replace rod-bolts (7/16" now rather than 3/8") every 40 hours as a precaution.

You only have to speak to the guys in the UK (IES - who prepare the GT3 NISMO GTR and also the 370Z GT4 engines for RJN Motorsport who run these cars in the Euro GT3/GT4 and Blancpain championships for NISMO) and they NEVER run an engine without a damper.

In the USA, talk to JWT who build the Grand Am engines for the Nissan 370Z runners, or Unitech Racing who built the Fontana Racing 350Z's - they all have recent experience of VQ race engines and I am quite confident they will specify a quality damper. In Canada, Sasha Anis also has a wealth of information about the VQ engine in competition-spec.

The NISMO engineer in Melbourne who assembles the VK engines for the Nissan Motorsport Altima's in the V8SuperCar series also specifies a motorsport damper and these are 5-litre engines making 650hp.

If it is good enough for those guys, it is certainly good enough for me, BUT as always, make up your own mind and tread your own path.

RB

Your points are well-taken. I have no doubt the math makes sense on a racecar. You lose a little tiny bit of throttle response and power and you gain reliability. It's also a spec engine putting out gobs of power with insane throttle response, so the damper hit is hard to feel in the first place, and no matter what it does to your power you're going to tune the thing right back to your desired spec horsepower or whatever. On a plain stock engine, the throttle response difference is notable (and I suspect, a reason for my perception of felt changes in upshifts on my new block - revs just aren't falling as fast).

Your random data point about 40-80 hours is interesting as well. Using very approximate, rounded-off, numbers, my stock engine had 40K street miles on it before it left the street for good, and ~4K track miles on it (I had mis-estimated this as more like 5K earlier on). Those 4K track miles occurred over the course of approximately 80 hours of track time (The rough figures I'm using for easy approximation is 40x singular days of DE, ~100 miles over 4x 30minute sessions per day).

Keep in mind this block was sealed up at the factory back in late 2008 and never opened or worked on again. That it survived this long was a miracle (and maybe thanks to religious maintenance where I could on things like regular high-quality oil changes, and the baffled oil pan I picked up from AM Performance, and good cooling). I really think the flywheel flopping around is what did in the crank bearings at the end. Had I thought to check that and correct it earlier, the engine might've gone longer. Still, something had to give. I highly doubt I'd have made it to 10K miles no matter what I did (well, short of actually rebuilding the block before it fails).

Which brings me around to the situation I'm facing now: how to adapt to and cope with where I'm at in my ever-evolving hobby. If I keep up with anything like my current schedule of DE events and expect engine failures at about this sort of interval, I'm looking at a dead engine block every 2 years if nothing goes unusually-wrong. It's tempting to say "Yeah but I can't afford the time or labor cost of having the engine rebuilt correctly on regular maintenance intervals", but that's probably not true. If I don't, I'll be doing the same rebuilds but with less predictability and more downtime. Of course there's all the other components to keep track of as well. How long do good-quality spherical bushings last? Shocks? Rear ends? Transmissions?

Figuring all this stuff out from scratch the hard way is a trying experience at best, given I'm a one-man pit crew with no qualifications to speak of and doing this for fun with no sponsorship dollars or any real plan to go after real racing (I'm closing on 40 and started too late in life to ever be good enough for a top-tier race series, and I like my well-paying day job).

While all of the above sounds pretty depressing and daunting, in many ways it's kind of awesome, too. In the same way that track-driving stretches my skills and my brain in painful but ultimately rewarding ways, so does all the rest of this stretch me in other areas. On the days when it doesn't totally defeat you, it feels pretty awesome to still be doing it at all :)

When I was hanging around a few race teams back in the day. What they would do is change the crank and rod bearings every so often. Never pull the engine. Just drop the pan. Remove the caps, mike the journals. Replace with new bearings and bolts. Never seen them have a bottom end problem. We're talking about the old 427 big block chebys used for roadracing. A lot of weight spinning around. Think you could do something like this to keep the engine alive longer. ;)

Sounds plausible. Now I just need to figure out how to reliably do that sort of work myself in my garage. :)

I have two blocks now anyways for better or worse, so I'll probably try to work out a system of rotating the two blocks once a year or so and then working on beefing up the previous block before the next swap. Maybe for the first iteration I'll just fix any obvious damage, replace wear-items, and stick in a Nismo oil pump. Then we'll see if I can go further for the next one once I at least halfway know what I'm doing :)

Random updates: I chunked a front brake pad at CotA. These were the Carbon-Lorraine RC6E. They had plenty of thickness left, but they've been on the car for nearly a year, so I guess their age and the excess heat from hard braking at CotA did them in. While I'm interminably waiting for 2x sets of RC6 fronts from Essex, I ordered some Hawk in DTC-70 front and DTC-60 rear to hold me over since those ship out much faster. Assuming the Hawks still have life left when the RC6 arrive, I'll save the used Hawks as backups for the next time I destroy a pad or two :)

Hawk pads should be here Tuesday. Will be doing my brake pads and some related overdue work in the wheel wells (front brake rotor discs, replacing studs + lugs, etc).

I'm also going to take a stab at venting my hood this next week with a cutoff wheel and some mesh and whatnot, we'll see what happens as that project evolves :)

Revised remaining schedule for the year (assuming I don't miss any of them!):

Aug 2: MSR-Houston - Race 4 Charity
Aug 23-24: TWS - PDS (maybe!)
Sep 6-7: TWS - The Driver's Edge
Sep 20-21: NOLA - NASA
Oct 4-5: MSR-Houston - The Driver's Edge
Oct 11-12: TWS - NASA
Nov 1-2: Eagle's Canyon - NASA
Nov 22-23: TWS - The Driver's Edge

Well I never got around to messing with hood vents this week. The wheel stud thing got more complicated than I expected :p

ARP Wheel Studs:

Pros: ridiculously long - way longer than the Nismo 60mm (I'm sure they'll stick out of any wheel, which makes lugs very easy), well-made, and have nice bullet noses for easy threading.

Cons: the ones made in our normal thread size (that e.g. Z1 sells) actually don't have the correct knurl pattern for our hubs. They *will* go in, but it requires a ton of force because you're basically destroying the knurl pattern on the hubs or the bolts or both.

I thought it was going to be a quick job like my last stud replacement: press them out with a ball joint separator thingy, and then press them back in with lug nuts and a stack of washers (and/or an appropriate socket as a spacer). However, because of the force required to press them in, you end up partially damaging the threads if you apply enough torque to seat them. So the only reasonable way to install them is to use a hydraulic press, which means taking the hubs off the car to carry them over to the press, adding a ton of labor and finagling to the process.

Because of that, I only did my front studs today. I didn't have the necessary socket + puller handy to pull the rear hubs off the car. The studs are pretty awesome once installed, but grrrrr at having to pull off the hubs to install them.

Pads:
Other than that, replaced front rotor rings and swapped all my pads out to Hawk DTC-70 front + DTC-60 rear as a temporary setup for now. I'd rather still be on Carbon-Lorraine, but Essex still hasn't even gotten back in touch with me about a shipping estimate for my front pads (it's been a month since the order, and I've emailed them about the order twice and gotten no response :shakes head:). Could be 6 months out for all I can tell at this point. I absolutely *love* the CL pads, but if I just can't reasonably source them, I may have to try something else. I've heard Cobalt Friction is similar and made in the states, but I'm not sure they yet carry the shapes I need.

Charity Race Tomorrow
So I'm basically as ready as I'm gonna be for the Charity Race tomorrow: new studs in front, old studs in rear, some super-hardcore Hawk pad compound I've never tried before all around, and oh yeah unlike the CL's they need proper bedding, and I have no idea if I'll be able to bed them right during the first practice session in the morning or not. Sometimes you have to learn to embrace the unknown and wing it I guess :)

Did you not read my thread on installing the ARP studs? LMAO.

http://www.the370z.com/diy-section-d...eel-studs.html

I've used the CL pads on my race bike years ago. Loved them. Thinking about trying them on the Z.

Good luck on the race. :tup:

Nope, I missed it somehow. Still, I probably would've read it and then said "Yeah but why'd he take the hubs off at all?" (well, bolt length, but even that you can maybe manage on-car). The root of my problems is that with the correctly-knurled Nismo studs, I was able to get away with cheating and just sucking them back into the hub holes with an impact gun, lug nut, and some kind of spacer setup. Can't do that with these. If I had been pressing them in correctly all along I might not have noticed that my cheat stopped working :P

Used to install studs with a bunch of washers, lug nut, and an impact. No longer doing that because it will pull too hard on the threads. Ended up with gulled threads on some studs. :mad: Found out it's just better to remove the spindle/bearing/axle and either press them in or beat them in.

The Race 4 Charity event at MSR Houston was awesome! We had a bunch of guys from the Houston Z's crew show to participate and/or hang out, so there were lots of Z's in the parking lot :)

The TT

Big thanks to MSR Houston for putting on such a fun event. I ran in what they labeled the "Australian Pursuit Time Trail" group. Now that I understand it a little better: it's basically the road-course version of a bracket race for cars/drivers with wildly varying lap times, with all the cars out together. You set a qualifying time, then they release everyone slowest cars first, spaced out such that they would theoretically all meet at the finish line at the end of the last lap. The winner is basically the guy who finishes first-ish, but what that really boils down to is maintaining as close to your qualifying time as you can in spite of traffic. If you have any laps under your qualifying time, you get penalized for those.

I didn't even bother trying to game the lap-time system; I just went out there and hauled and tried to pass everyone I could safely pass :driving:. I think most of the rest of the drivers were having fun with it too; they said in the first of our two race sessions, all but 3 cars broke under their qualifying time :p

Hawk DTC-70/60 pads

I bedded these pads on-track during our morning practice session, using my Hankook RS-3's and progressively bringing up my braking force over a few laps. Then I ran a couple more hot laps before bringing it in, which was probably less than ideal. Still, they seemed to bed well and leave a consistent transfer layer, and worked great for the following two sessions. They were pretty good at modulation, had a nice high torque, and the initial bite was in a nice reasonable range where it's easy to control but still grabs the car.

My only complaint is that in the final session of the day (Race 2), I had what I think were some heavy ABS ice-mode issues. It was a little surprising because I didn't have it all day before that, but I think it was just the heat buildup throughout the day finally got the brakes up to a critical temperature where the front DTC-70's torque fell off just enough that the rear DTC-60 were grabbing better, which then triggers the ABS system to shoot itself in the head. I was able to pump the brake pedal to reset the ABS, at which point the pads themselves stopped the car fine, but the inherent delays in the process of reacting to and dealing with ice-mode would inevitably send me a good bit deeper into the corner than I intended. After about 4 of those incidents within 2-3 laps I went ahead and pitted in early - didn't want to risk hitting that ice mode in close traffic and taking out someone else's car.

I still need to tear down the car this week and make sure nothing's physically wrong with any of the pads that could have contributed, but barring that I'm assuming it's our ABS controller's fault and not the pads. Probably for this car with Hawk DTC, you need a bigger gap in front/rear pad torque to avoid it.

Tires

I ran 3 full-on hot sessions on the Conti GT-O slicks (that I did a light scrub-in session on a few weeks ago). I love these tires, but coming from street tires I'm sure I'd love any decent slick. Strangely, just looking at wear pattern on the tire, they seem to want slightly less rear camber than my RS3's do (could also mean I'm just not pushing the rears as much as they're capable of, relative to how I was doing on the RS3?). I set my cold pressure before the first session at 20 in the rear and 21 in the front, and they felt great and the wear pattern looked ok, so I just left it alone the rest of the day. I'll micromanage temps and pressures some other time, for now I'm just enjoying them and getting used to them :)

My best lap times from the first session (practice) on RS3 to the second session (qualifying) on the Slicks dropped about 3 seconds (~1:51.xx -> ~1:48.xx).

Video
I'm planning to upload the full session video for both of the Race sessions later, but they're huge and take forever to process and upload, so it might be a day or two. For now I just uploaded lap excerpts for my best times on both tires:

RS3 @ 1:51.34 in Practice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJRhNQng4y4
Slicks @ 1:48.24 in Qualifying - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hedmaplytNI

Got the 2x Race session videos uploaded and edited, and put some commentary chat-bubbles in places. It sucks that my rear camera was facing the pavement all weekend, would've been nice to review some of those passes.

TT Race1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo6lxgJqiBw
TT Race2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwBauST02I4 (this is the one I ended early due to braking issues)

great job man!!!

Thanks!

Hey the next two PDS @ TWS are Aug 23-24 and Sept 27-28. I think I can make either one, depending a little on my availability of functional tires and brake pads on any given week :)

The Situation (not as in Jersey Shore!)

So I've been returning to pondering the long-term fate of my growing road-racing hobby, and I think I'm slowly coming around to some decisions here. I like getting lots of track time, and I think this is a hobby that will stick with me a while. I also think I'm going to want to do something competitive (not pro-racing-career competitive, I mean hobby-level competitive) because it makes it even more fun.

I love driving this 370 because it's what I started learning to drive (well, really drive) on, and I've put a lot of blood, sweat, and dollars into this car. However, if I want to do something competitive with it, I'm not sure I'm up for that.

It would mean some NASA/SCCA sports-car class that it fits in (e.g. NASA TT3/ST3 in roughly its current condition + a few extra safety mods to pass inspection). The thing is, if I look hard at the costs on that, they're pretty high over the long term, and they start getting even higher the further you get up the ranks in being really competitive for the top, as there's a lot of custom engineering and fabrication and exotic parts and constant refreshes of slightly-worn parts, etc involved if you want to really compete. And even at these relatively mild hp:weight ratios, the car takes a fair amount of abuse even without incidents. Any incident (contacts, flying into walls, blowing an engine/trans, etc) will be a huge surprise chunk of change that I'd have to be ready to absorb quickly to stay in the game, or could just put me out for a good long while.

So I've been digging on the net and looking at various other class options. Mostly I've been looking at the various lower-cost spec-based series, because the idea of having a relatively fixed spec is appealing (far less engineering and dollars and rules-bending involved in placing well - focus is on driving). While my income-level is pretty good, I do have a full time job to contend with and my hobby resources are far less than infinite :)

SM vs SRF

Really, the top contenders from everything I've looked at boil down to Spec Miata and Spec Racer Ford. I briefly entertained some of the really-low end open-wheel formulas like Formula 500 as well, but for all practical purposes those amount to running an oversized go-kart with bigger wheels and a snowmobile engine on a road-course, and I decided that wasn't appealing.

SM and SRF both have a few key basic things I really like: they're Spec series, they're relatively-low cost, the cars are probably fun to drive, they *can* be driven in mixed-car-type groups at random events/DEs/etc. Both have a really active community of friendly people, and have race groups with lots of cars in the field all around the country, etc.

At this point in the process, I'm leaning heavily towards SRF as my option. The key points in SRF's favor (vs SM and vs all other options in general):

1. Fairly low entry cost. $12-18K will buy you a used SRF machine that's ready-to-race with a few spares on hand if you shop around a while. SM is even cheaper of course, so this is really a point in SM's favor between the two. Still, it's not a bad entry cost.
2. Really really spec. Unlike SM where at competitive levels there's all sorts of rules-bending and ways to spend gobs of money to get an edge in some grey area and a wild variety of suppliers of parts of various repute... the SRF spec is very tightly controlled. Single source for major parts, and they're sealed at the factory and can't be modded (e.g. engine, trans, shocks, etc). There's no room for deviations in anything really, except tuning your own suspension settings. The sealed engines are tuned to +/- 3HP at the factory and never get touched again. This is both nice for fairness of competition, and it's nice because it completely takes the option off the table for me wasting a ton of time and money modding/upgrading those parts.
3. The maintenance costs are pretty damn cheap, although it's debatable whether it's cheaper than SM. E.g. 1-3 sets of tires last a season at $600/set. Brake rotors + pads last a whole season. Really all that's left after that is fluids and such for a very small engine/car.
4. Damage is *way* cheaper than even Spec Miata. Being a custom-designed, extremely simple tube-frame car with fiberglass body panels (just 3 of them: front, mid, rear), and absolutely no excess mechanical/electrical stuff anywhere, repairs are easy. A serious wreck in a production-based Miata may take thousands to fix and the same incident in an SRF might take only hundreds.
5. Value - a relatively minor point, but SRF cars seem to retain value and re-sell well. The series has been around for 20 years now and had a handful of rare updates to the spec, but even the oldest cars (that have been updated) are still running competitively and selling between SRF racers at good values.
6. There's an SRF shop at one of my local tracks (MSR Houston), so I'd have some local support for repairs and parts and whatnot.

The road from here

I think the first thing I need to do is take a couple test drives sometime in the next few months on various options, especially SM and SRF cars, so that I'll know whether the class feels good to drive (to me) and how they compare from a driver perspective. If I pull the trigger on this, it will probably be at least a year out from now, so I'm just planning well in advance.

All in all I'm still likely to keep my 370Z around as well. It's nice to have 2x options to bring out to a random DE-type event, especially if one might be out of service at any given time. The Z is fun and has two seats so I can give rides and get on-board advice. The major directional change in plans that starts taking effect now, though, is that I don't really ever intend to race the Z competitively in a real class. It's just going to be a fun track car and nothing else.

Since SRF is more of an SCCA thing than a NASA thing, that also means as I look to pick up a comp license I'm more likely to look at SCCA than NASA now so that things are simpler when I pick up the SRF, and I may not bother trying to hump my Z out to far-flung NASA events in the near future like I was intending. Actually, the NOLA trip that was coming up soon is almost certainly off the table. I'm still a NASA member though and will likely hit their upcoming event at TWS with the Z for HPDE4 and talk about maybe doing TT3 not-very-competitively with it just for the fun times.

Oh and for reference on what Spec Racer Ford is: Hagerman RacEngineering - SCCA Spec Racer Ford is a decent link.

Also, a couple great videos from an SRF driver I follow on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEyTW4D8vRg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9gq4H1lRng

One downside to the open wheel type cars is that it limits your options for DE groups somewhat. It may be difficult to find a group in your area that will allow a small car like that since they can be so hard to see from inside a big car. We usually stick them in the advanced/open passing group because of that.

I think I've said it before... It is so nice to have a cheaper car in case of accidents. I hit some trees in my Z33 in June but I was thankfully able to make Mid-Ohio in the 370 the next month while I was still looking for parts.

I'm not sure which part of my rambling speculations you're referring to really (e.g. the F-500 part?), but the SRF isn't an open-wheel car. It's small-ish and open-cockpit, but closed-wheel, and it can get along in a regular group and do normal passing signals, etc. Size-wise it's comparable to a topless Miata. And yeah I'm running in the advanced group with my Z anyways.

Assuming this link works correctly, this should jump to 7:00 into this video, where I'm following (and eventually passing) an SRF and Miata: makes the size comparison obvious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo6lxgJqiBw#t=420