jaf wrote:
Do you mind sharing your alignment specs, how it handles, and if you plan on making any changes? Love the color combo.
Keep in mind these are basically first guess settings with MUCH room for improvement. Without delving into the details too deep, here are the bulletted cliffs notes: Keep in mind as always, your mileage may vary. There are literally millions of combinations of geometry, spring rates, tires, suspension settings, etc etc that will affect how a car handles.
- I chose the RE71R street tire for this year’s track shenanigans, as I was worried with my initial shakedown last year on the BFG R1S might be masking handling deficiencies. As it turns out the 200tw street tire is way more fun to drive on and still pretty much beats anything that will show up to a race track.
- I built my car without sway bars and subsequently higher RCs, so I chose to start on the higher side of the static camber range anticipating some camber loss in roll
*as it turns out, with such a low center of gravity the car really doesn’t roll very much without bars
- I’m running approx 400in/lb spring rates once you factor in motion ratios, and it could be stiffer, but it’s close to perfect IMO
- I have about 1/8” of rake right now, could possibly up that slightly
- the car is much harder on rear tires than fronts, which is opposite from any car I’ve ever setup. Possibly a combination of the front-midship layout plus a chubby driver sitting right over the rear tires, plus the engine I chose actually has a decent amount of power (approx 210-220whp?) and with the LSD puts it to very good use through the rear tires!
- 4 degrees of caster, a fast ratio manual rack, a narrow-ish tire, and about as big a steering wheel you can fit in a Locost yields very manageable amounts of steering effort.
- as far as handling goes, it’s really awesome. It feels so alive and easy to slide. Very predictable, no knife-edge limit to worry about, at least to me. It does this beautiful thing under heavy braking where you just think about turning into the corner and the car goes. Much time was spent dialing any bumpsteer out, so that probably has a lot to do with it. It will get loose if you’re hard on the gas coming off the corner, especially long duration bumpy corners, but again it’s very predictable and easy to catch. Almost feels as if it could use more rear tire, like staggering 205’s up front with 225’s out back. Tire wear and temperatures seem to back-up that sentiment. But then I’d lose the ability to rotate tires and that would suck
- as far as changes I’d make, I think I can stand the front tires up a little, possibly match that -2.5ish rear camber value. After the first day on track the outside edge of the front tires had literally no wear on them! I might try slightly stiffer spring rates in the future, especially when I finally buy a second set of wheels with proper racing slicks on them.
I hope this info helps, feel free to ask more specific questions if you’ve got them.
_________________
-Emile
Scratch building an IRS, RX-7 based book chassis @ my
Build Log*Make way for the luckEseven!