First AutoX in the 13 Z w/ vids/pics

Rusty

It's all about seat time. Your first time out with a car that has lots of mods that needs fine tuned. The more you run and fine tune it. The fast you will become.

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浪人 - 殺し屋
"The Difficult Anytime, The Impossible By Appointment Only"
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wstar

Props for getting out there and driving, and posting it!

As long as your setup doesn't totally suck, try to focus on the driving more than the car parts (I know it's a hard thing to do, and I mostly failed at it!). It doesn't really matter how your time compares to anyone else's. All that matters is your time keeps getting better as you learn to drive the car. While it's helpful to read books and attend classes and think about all the conscious aspects of driving, I firmly believe at the end of the day the real core skills are sub-conscious, and there's just no better way to build them than to keep building up seat time. Once those are there, the rest is more like high-level strategy and planning.

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7AT Track Car!
Journal thread / Car setup details

synolimit

Well again what I can describe is the cars suspensions very firm (18k/12k with settings set on half way. I think the shocks are 10/15 and reservoirs 7/15 front and rear). Every corner felt like ice. No body roll, just ice as the rear wanted to come around or the whole car just wanted to slide right off into a ditch. I didn't want to touch anything because out of 8 runs all laps were dropping till run 7-8, they were equal. So now that I knew the corse I could mess with compression/rebound etc but the day was over so...

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13 370z-

Read T

c'mon guys, I didn't get this much forum love when I put up AX videos last weeK! Video from AX

Looks like fun though! Where you in SM?

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2011 Nissan 370z Black Cherry Sport Pkg - Daily Driver, , 1960 Morgan +4 fun car, 1986 BMW 325ES, 1998 M3 and 1996 Spec Miata - Race Cars
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Rusty

We still love you.

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浪人 - 殺し屋
"The Difficult Anytime, The Impossible By Appointment Only"
http://www.the370z.com/members-370z-...o-journal.html

ConeKilla

Congrats, now go back. Ask for help from experienced drivers...I know it may sound crazy but ask one of the faster guys to co-drive your car with you after you have done a few events. You will be shocked at how fast your car can actually go and learn a TON!

The most important Mod for the car is you.

nismosis

Lovin the black side skirts!

Attached Images

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cossie1600

Why go to a scca event when you need seat time.

synolimit

Seat time, I get it. But can you polish a turd (Mythbusters not included)? My friend hated the HTR z3 also on a WRX so... So if no one can comment on what I felt vs what i have setup, then I'll just go with what I had in mind. Splitter, tires, roll cage.

What does a scca event have to do with anything? I googled ohio autoX events and went to one. Happened to be a scca event for $40 for 8 runs. Sounded good to me.

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13 370z-

ConeKilla

That's really cheap for a SCCA event. Out local SCCA is $35 for 4 runs. If your a member and you pre-register for the event.

cossie1600

SCCA normally sucks if you need seat time. If you get 8 runs in a SCCA event for $40, more power to you and that would be a great reason to get a SCCA membership and you have a great local SCCA club. Most of the ones I see and have been to are 3-4 runs at <40 sec each. This is after working on course for two hours, screw that. This has nothing against you, I just think it is annoying to autox with 200 people at the bigger clubs. I understand it is one of the big regional event, but for a fun Sunday drive it sucks. It's the same reason why I no longer autocross.

Oh yeah before you even talk about setup, you might want to scoop up a set of R-S3 for cheap and start with that. You will chase your setup forever and not find as much time as a set of tires.

synolimit

O ok, I see your point. Yeah there were a lot of people but I guess we just flowed well to get 4 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. It does suck working for hours straight though. I had to work the last session and was beat and my feet hurt. I guess out west you guys just have more people and get less runs.

I'll be finding tires soon!

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13 370z-

wstar

Yes, seat time, you get it Auto-X is a nice intro, but if you're planning to do road-courses then start getting road-course seat time by the biggest bucket-loads you can.

I wouldn't even bother with aero mods at this point (splitter and/or a big functional wing). I've been doing road courses for 3 years now and I'm running a pretty decent pace and I still haven't added aero to my car. The aero mods aren't going to help you feel the car or learn to drive. They'll reduce lap times for a good driver, but (and I don't mean to be mean) you need to learn to be a good driver first, and then worry about aero.

If anything aero will hold you back in the initial stages. It makes the high-speed corners counter-intuitive because the limits don't change linearly with speeds. Even ignoring the non-linear effects of aero, there's also that it's just going to take time to learn the feel out the tires at the limit. Figuring it out on a mostly-stock Z is already going to be tricky and dangerous. Instructors and safety rules help a lot, but the bottom line is you'll end up spinning and/or going off track a number of times during the process in the long term. Doing that at lower non-aero traction limits is going to be way easier under lower g-forces, and less-violent. That and off-course excursions tend to eat splitters anyways.

Back on the seat-time thing: MSR-Houston was the first track I ever drove at. My first time out was in a very low-traffic open-lapping day with no instructor at all (which, in retrospect, was kinda stupid), and my lap time was about 2:09. Fast forward almost 3 years of gradual learning through an instructor-led process at DEs and I'm hitting 1:48-1:51 (diff tires). That's an 18-21 second reduction. Throughout the process I've done some upgrades on the car, but I've analyzed this stuff over time and at best 1/4 of my laptime reductions came from car upgrades. The rest just came with seat time.

Or here's another data point: DR_, another 370 driver here on the forums who's a much better and more-experienced driver than I am, still beats me by about 4 full seconds in best lap times posted at a different local track (TWS-CCW). What makes that hilarious is his car still has a full stock interior, no rollcage, and missing a bunch of the other extensive modifications and weight reductions my car has.

Like cossie1600 said, invest in some decent tires. It's hard to beat the RS3 as a good streetable tire choice. If you're really worried that something specific in your car setup is bad enough that it will inhibit learning, have an instructor drive a session in your car (in an advanced group if possible) with you in the passenger seat and then get their opinion on any necessary changes. It's hard to beat the input of an experienced driver actually driving the car. Also - it's a good chance to see what kind of times they run in your car. Even though it's a foreign car/setup to them, it will take you a long time to get close to their times...

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Journal thread / Car setup details

synolimit

I'm afraid I didn't make my history that known. None of this is new to me. I've raced wheel to wheel before. That's why I said "first autoX in the 13 Z." Not a first time for me. I just got the car a year ago and added a butt load of items which I'm not fully setup on yet. I've normally had others in the past dial in all suspension, rebound, compression, corner weights etc etc. I've moved from where I used to live so I'm on my own now, plus this platform is a little different as a lot of what people do with tires, sway bars etc is not what other platforms do. I'm just looking for feedback on stuff.

I get your comments about aero but look at my setup again. You say DR for example is faster than you. Well his car is better than mine I assure you. My rear end is 7% lighter than his. You can be a fast driver but I don't think drifters are as fast as road racers. Right now I have a drifting king with these tires and super light rear end. I know no one will believe when I say I hit my max in this car but I pretty much did. If I can't touch the throttle without spinning out I don't see how anyone else could. Tires, a role cage adding weight and a wing pushing down on the tail can only help at this point. I'm not ready to remove the front windshield, AC, dash etc. to get weight back to neutral.

I'll go with some tires here soon. Still not 100% what I want. The RS-3 will force me into a 285/35/18 square. I just want more. I can fit maybe a 295 front and as high as a 315 rear. Still weighing my options though. I know people say square for rotation etc, but money aside, what would you run if you could?

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13 370z-

wstar

I still don't think aero is the answer to an over/under-steer imbalance problem at this point. You don't want a setup where the suspension is setup is out of whack without aero and only becomes balanced under aero loading, because again the aero effect is non-linear and is basically non-existent at the low speeds you'll be hitting while rotating through tight corners (at which point the car will still be skating around like however it is now).

I've driven my car in the past in the kind of state you're talking about, where I had the rear half of the interior completely gutted but it was mostly stock from the seatbacks forward, and no cage. Mine was like that for several months at one point. It made suspension tuning a little trickier to keep the car from oversteering too much, but even when it felt wrong to me it was still totally drivable and controllable, and spins/offs were rare and totally my fault. At the time I ran 275 front tires on 10's and 295 rears on 11's and that was enough stagger to compensate (and using the soft setting of the Hotchkis rear bar). The fact that you have these huge spring rates as a starting point could be coming into play as well; you may just have to buy some weaker rear springs for now until you finish the rest of the car's setup.

When you say things like "I can't touch the throttle without spinning out", it's hard to interpret what that really means. Does that mean you're entering corners too hot (under-braking) and thus not leaving enough speed on the table to apply throttle at track-out to stabilize the suspension? It's hard to imagine, even in its current state, that the car is so oversteer-crazy that you can't use the throttle on track-out at all. I didn't miss somewhere that you put forced induction on the car, right? Even if the car is a bit too over-steer happy, you should be able to still use light throttle and correct with steering angle and adjust your reference points, etc and get the car to drive.

Earlier on in the first post, you mentioned that situationally sometimes you got massive oversteer, and other times the car simply drifted straight sideways. That sideways drift is what should happen in a reasonably-balanced car as you throttle up at track-out. Going a little "loose" and over-steery intentionally you still have that sort of behavior, it's just the angle of the slide changes and the rear slips out a little faster than the front does at the limit, but both ends should be slipping to some degree. It's a small degree, though, not a drifter-type slide. Maximum traction on most tires you'd ever use on a track occurs around the ballpark of 5-10% slip angle. The traction of the tire builds progressively as you add more lateral g's up until it begins to slip, then keeps building for those first few percent of slip. After you cross over that peak and keep slipping at harder angles though, the traction on most tires falls off a cliff pretty dramatically, which is where you start losing control of the car. Generally speaking the grippier the tire, the more spiky the traction peak is (meaning you have a much smaller optimum window to play in before you hit that dramatic dropoff in traction).

There's no such thing as money aside in this hobby, unless you're a billionaire or have one sponsoring you But still, I really like the square setup, and I totally think that with the right damper/spring/bar setup you could run square even with a weight-distribution problem in the rear. Going back to something I mentioned above: if the car really is way too oversteery, the most likely fix is reducing rear spring rate to get more weight transfer into your lighter rear-half. Try completely removing the rear sway and see if that helps as a test.

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7AT Track Car!
Journal thread / Car setup details