tube80z

I'm going on record as that's not a part that I worked on. I've already been blamed for a number of other things Still a top ten is a pretty good achievement. I feel for Greg as it looked like he had that one in the bag. Cary

Where's the link to the photos? thanks, C

Wondering the same thing myself. Bruce, get on the horn we need answers :-) C

Live timing and scoring. EP is up in 15 minutes (2 CT) http://www.livetiming.net/SCCA/Runoffs/LiveTiming.asp?width=1024&Class= C

Hey Bruce please keep us in the loop. Sitting here waiting for results is killing me. And this week not much is going to happen. Cary

Force@lowspeed = Force@highspeed x (lowspeed^2 / highspeed ^2) So for 55 MPH I get ~32 lbs. So Tom's measurement is pretty close. That said I can measure this on a stopwatch and so can a number of CSP miatas I run against (Jim Daniels/Ron Bauer). Cary

I'm assuming you've seen some of the discussion going on over at HybridZ. Take a look at some of the low friction swaybar mounts and modified rear control arms. Locally those have made enough of a difference people can feel it. In back to back testing we found the rear spoiler was worth .5 of a second on a 47/48 second reference course we use. The speeds may be a little higher than some autox events and that may skew the results some. But there is some time to be found in aero for these cars even at autox speeds. Great to see you guys doing so well in the Zs. Cary

We have similar series in the US. In the northwest we have the NHA (northwest hillclimb association) and I believe they have a similar organization in the northeast and possibly southeast. In the NHA Datsun Z cars have taken king of the hill honors at a number of events. Cary

Start pulling the head. Being out if time is a good indicator that something happenned with the chain. On my car all 6 intakes were bent, a couple of exhausts, and about three broken guides. Take the time to inspect the timing chaing bolts as they may have been damaged in all this. I'm not sure how it happened on my car but the pin on the cam was sheared off. Cause or effect is unknown. Cary

A lot of the GT cars are allowed to run a window in the bulkhead but it appears as Tom mentions this is not okay for prepared. In reality I don't see where this is really any help. Just use a couple of those convex mirrors hooked to the cage down tubes by the windshield. You'll see enough to back up and you don't need to worry about course workers unless they are in front of you Cary

In GT you can taxi cab the car, which is easier to do. I don't know if that's legal in prepared but something to look up. Cary

Hey, since when did I become the fun police :-) In XP can't you set the motor back to the firewall as long as you don't cut any metal? I'd at least do that. Cary

For autox any weight you can remove off the nose and towards the back will help the car rotate quicker. I'd move the alternator to the back if you're going to run one. Cary

HI Gtzilla, do you still have the trailer on the web site? Cary

I'll see if Steve can give me what switch they use. I think it was a standard pressure switch. Steve uses dash 16 and this was recommended by Rebello for his motor. One thing to consider is with the pan up a bit you have a lot more room for under engine bracing. And if you're going to build a new crossmember we should chat. I think there's a bunch you can do here. Cary

Hi Phil, it sounds like you're getting pretty serious here. Will you be lowering the engine when you drysump it? For the pump mount make it out of aluminum and very thick. A friend of mine found that this worked much better on his GT-4 car running a 4 cylinder L-series. He mentioned that they did the same thing on their Z. From his description it sounded like this dampened harmonics that caused problems on the belt drive. They also ran a pressure switch (30 PSI I think) wired to the ignition. If a belt dropped it killed the motor. I have a few pics but none directly of this I could send you. They ran the pump on the same side as you're looking at. I don't know if this would help or not. Cary

Are you intending to race or run the $2006 challenge? If you're intending to race you really need to get quality springs so you can do a proper setup. If you want to do things on the cheap you'll need to be able to make a lot of parts. You can come up with some cheap coilover solutions if you want to. I personally wouldn't run JY springs on a car I intended to race. You may end up chasing the setup for $50 in springs. At the end of the day racing costs. Just driving around the track will use up tires. Building a proper suspension and developing it can actually pay you back in reduced tire costs. That's the biggest part of my yearly budget. Cary

I think I like this look better. Seems to follow the lines of the Z more. Cary

We used to have a guy that hillclimbed with us that had a falcon that looked very similar to this car. Cary

I tried the same thing too :-) All I can tell from the pic is that is has wide 5 hubs front and rear. So it's probably double a-arm front and live axle rear. Would like to see more. Cary

I'm not an expert on this by any means. It's just when you start trying to build a car from scratch your forced to learn a lot of things, which has been good fun for me. The multiplier for spring rates was something I learned three years ago. I took a race engineering class from ICP and they shared this. They recommended a rate of 1 to 1.3 for cars running on bias ply slicks. It was a considerable leap of faith for me to jump to a rate of 1. I've since gone all the way to 1.5 trying to find different setups that work. The biggest issue is finding a set of shocks that can deal with this, which is how I ended up going with the AD ground control stuff. Another really useful thing I learned in this class was the concept of magic numbers. You can measure a number of things on your car and use these to find different spring/bar combos that are equivalent. It's pretty freaky to actually see this work in real life. One things I forgot to mention on the above post was to make jumps in 20 percent increments. This will quickly tell you if the change was good or bad. Then you can go half way again to hone in on the rate you want. Cary

There are a couple of ways to get in the ballpark with springs. One is to use a multiplier of corner weight. For DOT R tires the multiplier is usually .5 to .7. On hybridZ I gave more detail on how to do this. Or you can do a frequency analysis and pick springs that way. In this method you need to know the speed your travelling in a corner, wheelbase, etc. The rates are picked so that you don't have a harmonic that upsets the other end, which could explain how a west coast versus east coast setup could be made to work. Katman had a point that is starting to become more well know. The concept is called the roll gradient. Basically you pick bars and springs so that it minimizes the amount of torsional twist the car is asked to absorb (where it becomes an undamped spring). My autox car runs a soft setup of 425 front 400 rear. A friend found with his goodyear radial slicks that 550 at all four corners works great. Let the car tell you what it needs. There's no need to fight it. Cary

If you want to capture the action in the photo you can switch your camera to shutter priority mode (Tv). Try playing in the 1/125 to 1/325 range (try to stay above 1/focal length for the shutter speed). This will add some blur to the background the wheels will look like they are spinning. You'll need to pan and practice, practice, practice. It looks like you've got some nice equipment and good subjects. Cary

Here's where I play. We race on Sunday and have open practice on Friday night and all day Saturday. The front striaight is 400 feet long to put it in perspective. My Z will routinely get touch 85 MPH. http://www.ssccmedford.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=44 When I moved I learned that autox involved cones. Who woulda thunk it. Cary

Maybe this will help. This is from a world challenge BMW if I remember correctly. Cary