My first day at the track is coming up (6 days to go!) so I'm trying to get things more dialed in, make sure I have the basics right and then I'll have a solid foundation to go from.

First thing with swing axle cars is controlling the rear suspension, and making sure that the outer tire doesn't jack during a turn. Jacking can lead to poor handling, or rolling the car! Negative camber helps for sure, and I'm at 3-deg negative in the rear right now. But the travel still needs to be limited. There's a couple ways to do it, and I decided to use limit straps. I took a bunch of measurements of the suspension movement and settled on 12" straps.


Here's the droop without the straps. You can see the camber goes several degrees positive when the spring plate rests on the built in stop. I would NOT want the outer wheel doing that during a fast turn!


Here's one of the straps installed


And the new travel limit with the strap. I've got it limited to about 0-1 degree of positive camber, which still gives pleanty of travel, but should keep things in check.


I like the idea of adjustability on things, so they can be fine tuned. I started playing with a design for adjustable limit strap mounts so I could dial in my suspension travel (more for the street, less for the track, for example). Enter my 3d printer. Rather than buy the hardware I needed, I just printed it so I could check the concept before spending a dime.


Assembled


And fit on the car for checking clearance. The upper mount location of the strap can be adjusted a total of 1" for fine tuning.


As I feared though, the mount would hit the tire as I saw when I reinstalled the wheel and cycled the suspension. At least I hadn't bought anything or wasted time making the L bracket from steel. The printer is so handy for this type of concept testing. I've got an alternative mount in mind that should clear everything no problem. I'll mount up a printed version of it soon to check. Here's the tire hitting the original concept.


My toe plates came in so I've started doing an alignment on the car. Man was it off! I was at about 5/8" toe in on the front, the spec is 1/16" to 1/8". All that toe was just wearing the tires fast and scrubbing speed! The right tierod needed to be shortened, the ends were bottomed out and the overall length was too long. So I cut about 1/2" out of it and ran a tap through it go get more threads. The tap is a 14x1.5.

Tapped it far enough that I could bottom out the tierod end. That's the piece I cut off sitting on it.


With the tierod shortened I was able to set the front toe in to 1/16", just where I wanted it.

I also checked the rear toe, it's got too much toe in as well, but not quite as bad. I'll try to adjust it as well before my track outting.


And finally, last night I finally put on the front sway bar I had bought many years ago for the car. It's made for a 2-3" narrowed beam, and mine is 4" narrow. I had to cut about 1/2" off each end to compensate for the narrower beam. It was a huge PITA to install, those t-bolt clamps really don't want to conform around everything. Many a 4-letter word later and I finally got it on. Swing axle cars have very high rear roll resistance, so the front bar should really balance the car by adding front roll resistance.


Other than possibly setting the rear toe and testing my rear limit strap adjustable mount concept that's probably it before hitting the track with it. I feel like the car should be at a pretty solid starting point with the recent changes I've made.

Beyond that, future plans are for offset link pin bushings so I can get the front camber to about 1-deg negative, it's at 0.5 deg positive now which is where they sit stock. Depending on how the back of the car behaves, it may get a sway bar or a camber compensator (which acts like the opposite of a sway bar, they actually reduce roll resistance).

I am digging the toe plates!! which ones did you end up getting? I will add those to my arsenal for sure.

Hopefully you will have some video footage when you get her out on the track.

Hey Ethan. Toe plates are Longacre LON52-79501, about $65 on Amazon. I'm very happy with them. Amazing how much my alignment was off from just eyeballing it lol.

I plan to have a camera or two in the car when I'm running. First time out for me and the car, I'm expecting it to be pretty bad. Gotta start somewhere though!

I took the car out for a brief drive this evening. Turn in feels more responsive and what little body roll it had seems to be gone. I wasn't pushing too hard though, too much traffic

lol first time out you better have those cameras rolling.

I have always measured but off the tread never really eye balled them unless it was just to get things together. The plates look like they would make things easier, and possibly a one man operation instead of two holding the tape.

Yeah, one person no problem. One of the toe plates has magnets that hold the end of the tape measures in place and the plates stay put leaned up against the tires on their own really well. They are simple but work really well and give accurate measurements.

As for eyeballing it, yeah, that was just lazy on my part. But the car always drove real straight, steering wheel was close to center, etc., so until this track thing came up I always figured it was fine. But for the track, all these little details can matter a lot. And, especially in a swing axle/link pin car, you need all the help you can get!

For measuring camber and caster I use a Craftsman digital level that measures in 0.1-deg increments that seems to work pretty well.

Yeah, I'll make sure I record all 8 runs I do. Hopefully it won't be too embarrassing lol

Do you happen to have a king pin reamer?

Alright, getting close, day after tomorrow! I found a really cool app that can record video, times, location, speed, and g-force, called TrackAddict. Very cool, been playing around with it for a couple weeks now. Speed and location data are from GPS, and it can use GPS on your phone, but phone GPS's only refreshe 1 time per second, which is really too slow for auto racing. So I picked up a Dual SkyPro XGPS160 that refreshes GPS 10 times per second, much more accurate. Along with that, I bought a suction mount for it and one for my cell phone for using the app and having a good view of the track for recording.


Here's where I'm putting the GPS puck and the cell phone. There is not a lot of spare real estate on the windshields of these cars!



I also plan to record an in-car view with my action cam, here's where I put the mount for it. Pretty handy place to have a rollbar tube!


I've also been looking into adding some negative camber on my front end. For link pins, the only way to do it is with offset drilled link pin bushings and a little machining of the carrier's. These bushings are primarily used by the Formula Vee guys, and there's not a whole lot of shops around still providing speciality parts for them. Luckily Quixote Racing in San Diego had them in stock, so I jumped on a pair, along with modified shims to go along with them. It may be a couple months before I get around to putting these on, but I wanted to get them while they're available.




And, last but not least, I picked up a helmet. I'm going to need one every time I take the bug to the track, so I figure it would be a good thing to buy, rather than having to rent one every time.

Very cool and exciting! Have you done any hard testing of the new settings yet?

Nothing too hard. I can't really hoon too much on public streets I pushed the car a little today on a 90-deg turn on the way to work, still able to get on-power oversteer on corner exit, felt neutral going into the turn, but again I wasn't really pushing very hard.

BTW, here's the outfit that puts these track events on: https://www.puretrack.net/?utm_campaign ... e4ded27235

Here's the layout for tomorrow. Looks like a pretty technical layout, not much speed, lots of turns. Should be fun!

Shoot I am getting excited for you!

That was so awesome! I'm hooked lol.
As I figured, I was near, but not at, the bottom as far as my times, but hey, that just means I have plenty of room for improvement lol. In addition to my driving skills, which need a lot of work, the car definitely need new tires. The tires are almost 10 years old and so, even though they are not worn badly, they are hard and traction is pretty bad when pushing them. I'm hoping to do another event in a month, and the only thing I plan to change, other than maybe adjusting the rear toe, is tires. Once the car has good tires, and my driving improves some, I will better be able to tell what the car needs.
Anyway, it was a great day, I met lots of cool people who were totally flipping out over my car lol. It was definitely getting more attention than the $200k Porsches that were out there lol.
I went ahead since it was my first time and paid the photographer to get some shots of my car on the track. They came out pretty cool, glad I sprung for them.












Here's a couple other cars I liked. There were many more that I didnt manage to get pictures of.






And finally, the video I made in RaceRender. This was my 2nd to last lap which was one of my fastest