Yesterday's event at the Streets of Willow Springs was fun with about fifty cars in three run groups. Some groups got six sessions in of about 25-30 minutes each. This is the second time out with the C32 and I am still messing with tire pressures and suspension set up, but todays event showed an average improvement of over three seconds over the first event. My best time yesterday was a 136.63 at the end of the day with steel belts showing through on both my front tires!

My car has no motor or driveline modifications, or swaybars. Just the Carlsson RS's and the brake upgrade. The C32 is very difficult to drive fast at the track. At the limit, there is no way to keep the power down on the ground. The car proved to be faster with ESP off by about .5 - 1.0 seconds, but required much greater effort in keeping it balanced. At times, I thought I was at a drifting competition! Too much power out of the corners and you are correcting out of the entire corner. Towards the end of the day I started to find the right balance between oversteer and small steering corrections to keep the car from oversteering. Another day of experience with the car should yeild low 136's. With new street tires, maybe even more. The Toyo T1-S's actually hold up pretty well under extreme abuse. Unfortunately, no tire can combat the lack of negative camber with this car. My Toyo's have only a few thousand street miles since installation a few months ago, but after two track event, or nine sessions, I have worn through the outside tread block. With another tire, it would have occured faster, as the Toyo's have a rounded shoulder. Due to the constant sliding around I am also down to the wear bars at some points on the tires. At all four corners I have about 1.6 - 2.4mm of treat left which is about 2/32" of an inch. To drive this car at race speed, expect to replace new street tires after two track days! The rears however, are worn evenly across the entire tread surface which indicates that the rear camber and toe is set up nicely and needs no adjustment.

Is anyone interested in camber plates for the C32? This is a must for acceptable tire life and dramatic handling improvements. With the costs of a prototype, and sales below a dozen, they would probably cost over $500.00 each. Any takers?

I drove the car so hard that I turned by silver BBK calipers gold with Pagid Orange pads, Motul RBF and 355mm two piece rotors!The brakes performed very well with no fade whatsoever, and this track is very hard on brakes.

I definately need to install a race seat for this car. The stock seat just doesn't hold you in place. The lower thigh bolsters are none existant, and caused the area on my jeans at the left knee to become abraded against the speaker grill! The dead pedal offset also caused increased low back fatigue, but I am working on that with my third templet attempt. The new gas pedal worked very well allowing nice heal and toe downshifts to 2nd gear without gear shift detection.

The C32 was represented by two showing, myself and Zeppelin who also ran respectable times and also ran the T1-S's. His more conservative driving style saved the tires and showed little wear. I had an opportunity to drive his car with the H&R springs and stock 8.5" wheels at all four corners with 245/255's. The car handles very nicely at the track and was very smooth, better than stock. On a few sections of track the car would feel a bit floatly, but that is due to the stock shocks. Overall it is a very respectable track upgrade, like the RENNtech spring upgrade. His rear sway bar upgrade also dialed out most of the understeer inherent in the car. By comparison, I had an opportunity to drive student's Sube WRX with a stock suspension. Nice car at the track but the suspension is a bit too soft. The STI has addressed this issue. It had nice power delivery with a chip and exhaust. Very easy to drive fast at the track and very difficult to induce oversteer. Although the driver was the limiting factor, it was fun to see a few EVO's run 1:50+ times! I need to rent one and see if I could run a 1:36 in a stock EVO. I would assume it would be faster. There were a few well modded WRX/STI's that ran some fast times, a Cobb tuned example, a track CRX, an older mustang and V-8 914 that blew away the competition!

How to improve lap times? Camber will be significant and could yield up to 2 seconds. A race seat should net another .5 - 1.0 seconds. Running Pirelli Corsa's may give another 1.5+ seconds. I think you could make this car run 132's in stock motor form at the Streets of Willow. I guess I have to make those mods!

 

Nice write up!. Your analysis is right on.

Camber would be number one priority. We are looking into producing a set of camber plates/adjustable control arms to get more of the front tire on the road.

I think a limited slip diff would also be very helpful. We would smoke passenger side tire through every turn. At one time through half of the straightaway.

 

Very nice write-up!. If you can manage no or very little wheelspin, you should be able to really lower your times, maybe a second or so. I know from my racing days that wheelspin really slow you down, even if it feel the opposite!
Also, did you say Zeppelin uses 245 front and rear? Does that mean he has rear wheels front and rear?

 

I run the C32 stock rear wheels on the front and back of the car. My tire sizes are 245/40/17 front and 255/40/17 rear. You do have to limit your front tire brands to Toyo/Pilot Sport/F1 GS-D3/ or one with a section width of 9.8in or less. This is because of the strut and fender clearance, a larger tire would rub one or both areas.

 

Vadim, I hope you have a limited slip in the design stage or know were one can be built. I agree, spinning one rear tire around 50% of the track is not the fastest way around. My car was flashing the ESP triangle everywhere on that track other than the middle to end of the two straight aways.

An LSD may be my last mod to this car. Then again more front negative camber would be nice too.

 

Yes, limited slip diff is on the way. I will have R&D #10 post very shortly.

 

is that you in the background?!

 

Vadim, sign me up for the camber plates! I will pay in advance now and even throw in some seed money for the development costs. Lets get a list going of those interested.

 

Who's silver W203 is that? What event was that taken at?

 

some guy from this forum posted pics of the same track...

http://forums.offtopic.com/showthrea...ghlight=willow


thought that was your w203

 

That picture could be of smgC32's car. The blue WRX and White prelude look familiar from Fridays events.

One thing I forgot to mention was that the C32 is just too quiet. You can not hear the motor over the squealing tires. I noticed my car was buried near redline for 3 or 4 of the fast sweepers before the "Bowl". Occasionally would see the Tach in the corner of my eye and force the upshift manually.

 

I am not registered to that link to view it, but could be either one of us. That looks like the Sube that I drove that was parked next to the bleachers. I can't zoom the picture, but if it is badged and has 10 spokes, it's me, if it's de-badged with stock wheels, it's Zeppelin.