Da Groj

This car was a Franken-car 10 minutes after the first time we jacked it up! But, we're not likely to do an engine swap anytime soon.

It is currently sitting in my driveway with 60 hp and no brakes.

Loren wrote: It is currently sitting in my driveway with 60 hp and no brakes.

Sound like everything is back to normal

I've come to the conclusion that the car is perfectly reliable as long as we don't go near it with tools.

Loren wrote:It is currently sitting in my driveway with 60 hp and no brakes.

The brakes weren't worth a damn to begin with...just take the doors off and drag a foot.

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=fes ... 1423D56553

Why Loren and Ben never allow anyone to follow them carrying a piece of sheet rock. Price of having awesome brakes.

twistedwankel wrote:http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=fes ... 1423D56553

Why Loren and Ben never allow anyone to follow them carrying a piece of sheet rock. Price of having awesome brakes.

The Festy now has brakes and more front spring rate. The car feels much better now, and I'm sure it'll be much faster too.

The awesome has increased by two levels. Gonna do some math and determine what our spring rates are, but it definitely feels better, and the brakes feel incredible.

Measured the front springs today.

Wire Diameter: 13/32" or .406"
Coil OD: 4"
Original Active Coils: 6.5
Active Coils After Cut: 5.0
Current Active Coils: 3.75

My favorite online spring rate calculator says the math works out to approximately:

Original Spring rate: 130 lbs/in (seems reasonble)
What we've been running: 170 lbs/in
What we have now: 170-220 progressive

What we've done:

Originally cut 1 full coil from the top of each spring, then cut an additional 1/4 coil from the top and bottom... total of 1.5 coils cut. That's what we've been autocrossing on, and it was too soft.

Today, we simply inserted a set of cheap rubber donut spring spacers that I had on the shelf. They fit between the coils of the spring and are pretty snug at static ride height, and as the rubber compresses, they effectively take an additional 1.25 coils out of the equation. So, we're 30% stiffer than we were.

The car feels a LOT better. We'll see how it autocrosses. I'm betting we could still use more front spring rate... probably on the order of 250-300.

Details on the brake master cylinder upgrade:

Ben did the research on this, and it worked out great!

The stock Festiva MC is a 3/4" bore. What he found was a stock '99 Escort MC with a 15/16" bore. (RAYBESTOS PN: MC390448) Quite a bit larger diameter, so it moves significantly more fluid per mm of pedal movement.

I'm not up on my brake system math, and we're doing this one by feel, anyway. It feels a lot better. The brakes WORK when you push the pedal, they just sort of hinted at working before. It's possible that we may have gone slightly too large, but this one is a bolt-in replacement... I'm not sure how many other options would be so easy to install. What we have to watch out for is that we may have made it too easy to lock up the brakes. I noticed in testing that there just isn't as much pedal "feedback", and while it may take more pedal force to lock up the brakes... it takes less travel. Hopefully, we'll adapt to that and not flat-spot the left front tire (it seems to lock up first). If that proves to be a problem... we may need to make more changes.

Just updated the first post with lots of info.

Another thing we did today was check tire wear and rotate the tires.

The front are wearing pretty evenly. Could perhaps run more front tire pressure, as the centers are wearing slightly less. But, no major outside tire wear... which means that crazy 3 degrees of negative camber we put in the front is working!

The rears aren't wearing badly, but there is clearly much more wear on the OUTSIDE of the rear tires. I guess they get loaded quite a bit when the car is cornering on 3 wheels. We'll need to think about adding some negative camber to the rear wheels at some point to help with that.

We'll probably reverse-mount the tires after a couple more events to try to maximize their life.

Another update to the first post, still trying to keep it current.

We've now autocrossed the car with the new master cylinder and 220# front springs. The brakes felt great and we didn't have problems with locking them, so we'll call that a success! The front springs helped some, but it wasn't a big difference there.

What we did yesterday:
Went to Loren's "shelf of springs that his wife complains about" and dug out some springs and spacers and stuff and fitted them to the front of the car. None of the coilover sleeves that I had on-hand would fit, so we don't have adjustability, and ended up a good bit lower than we intended. But, we've got 7kg (392#) front springs now! HUGE difference. Definitely seems to have gotten rid of the scary "tilt" that the car did when the rear tire lifted, and eliminated a great deal of the body roll.

I think we may have gone slightly too stiff, and definitely at least a half inch too low. We'll try to address that soon, but we'll probably end up autocrossing it as it is now for two events this coming weekend!

The next spring change will probably be what I ordered last night: a 14" 175# coilover spring that I'm going to cut in half. That will give us two 7" 350# springs. Why go through all of that? Because 14" coilover springs are common in the circle track and off-road world, and available used for CHEAP. I got this spring for $23 shipped! If the 2-5/8 ID springs are compatible with the spacers and tender springs that we've got on the car now, the net should be just a little softer (40#) and right about an inch taller. (if not, we'll have to fab about a 1" spacer or find some sleeves that will work) Still no adjustability... but we can further trim the spring length (and accept the minor change in spring rate) if we want to go lower.

Our first test drive with the stiffer springs ended up being with about 1/2" of toe out. HOLY CRAP did the car turn in! We may need to think about making that on-site toe adjustment at events to get that extra edge.

Here's what the car looks like with its current "too low in the front" stance:

Looks pretty cool/safer slammed.
You convert those rear windows into air brakes yet?

twistedwankel wrote:Looks pretty cool/safer slammed.
You convert those rear windows into air brakes yet?

You need a mad scientist labcoat... I may have one somewhere on my "Shelf of Labcoats" that my dog avoids like the plague.


FF

"Life is always more fun with a worthy opponent to make faces at."

So, this happened.

Porsche/BMW Challenge Autocross - Nov 22

Pos Time Driver Car Model
1 48.653  Daniel Shields  2002 Porsche Boxster S
2 49.460  Tod Byram  Honda S2000
3 49.959  Brice Tilton  200x Porsche Boxster
4 50.030  Brian West  2002 Porsche 911 C4S
5 50.254  Joe Brannon  2000 BMW M-Roadster
6 50.386  Bob Tamandli  2003 Porsche Boxster S
7 50.953 Cory Corona 2006 Porsche Cayman S
8 51.256  Russ Lowrey  2005 Porsche Carrera S
9 51.447  Mario Knis  2008 Pontiac Solstice
10 51.822  Donald Wright  2006 BMW Z4 3.0Si
11 52.136  Doug Adams  2000 Corvette
12 52.318  Russ Tilton  200x Porsche Boxster
13 52.523  Fulviu Borcan  2011 Porsche 911 Carrera
14 52.608  Sharron Shields  2002 Porsche Boxster S
15 52.884  Ryan Murphy  1989 BMW 325i
16 52.985  Ben Wheaton  1990 Ford Festiva
17 53.009  George Ralph Carr  1979 Porsche 911 Carrera
18 53.025  Loren Williams  1990 Ford Festiva
19 53.045  Michael Paramore  1994 325is
20 53.623  Bill Cassidy  2015 BMW 228i
21 53.672  Jake Engstrom  1989 BMW 325i
22 53.768  Soraya Juarbe-Diaz  2008 Honda Fit
23 53.860  Russell Garvey  1998 BMW 318ti
24 53.931  Andrew Wong  2012 GTI
25 54.190  Christopher Gandees  2016 BMW 340i
26 54.503  Brad Burkett  2011 BMW 335is
27 54.738  Terry Glazar  2006 Honda S2000
28 55.321  Maury Hamill  2013 Porsche Boxster
29 55.599  Mark Lasota  1996 Mazda Miata
30 55.682  Matteo Piazza  2001 BMW M3
31 56.354  Tom Cavanagh  1984 BMW 325e
32 57.360  Terry Worthington  1998 BMW M-Roadster
33 57.544  Barry Miller  74 BMW 2002ti
34 58.065  Max Fallon  2003 Porsche 911
35 59.095  Evan Forte  2002 BMW M5
36 60.042  Brad McGibbney  1997 BMW M3
37 61.000  John Thomas  2001 Porsche Boxster
38 61.383  Paul Borges  2015 BMW 328i
39 61.757  Zac Saubert  2007 Porsche Boxster
40 62.593  Ashley Gandees  2016 BMW 340i
41 65.474  Heather Hamill  2007 Porsche Boxster
42 66.325  Alan Cribb  1974 BMW 2002ti
43  DNF  Reid McGibbney  1997 BMW M3
44  DNF  Dave Barca  2011 BMW Z4

What the quiet guy isn't telling you is that 1/2 of us had one dry first run in the afternoon with the rest being wet.

Still impressive for everyone. Ben was cone happy as couldn't lift his tire high enough most runs early but Loren basically did it in One.

These guys are almost ready for prime time!!

Go Fastiva.

My best wet run time was 54.509 if you want to plug that in.

Clearly, we have the superior automobile. Ford-branded Japanese-engineered Korean-built cars with 60hp and junkyard suspension > German cars.

We'd have done better, but it was a bit of a power course and we didn't have any.

So, we've been lazy and haven't done a damned thing to the car other than put gas in it and break the passenger seatbelt in quite some time. I think we've gotten used to the new suspension setup. It's still a little weird, but it works. Super-fun to drive, and does everything you ask of it as long as you don't ask it to accelerate quickly, stop quickly, or decelerate while turning. It's a momentum car, go figure!

We had Johnny build us a harness bar and seat bracket last week, so now the car has a Kirkey race seat on the driver's side and 4-point harnesses on both sides. We still have to paint the harness bar before it rusts, but it's all together.

Unfortunately, Ben's Spidey Sense for rod knock was correct, and we're going to have to put in a replacement engine this weekend. Hopefully, we'll have that all done and be ready to autocross on Jan 16!