Sports Car Club of Vermont

I've been seeing this car around in the last couple days. At the Red Roof Inn on Wed. night and I think I saw it making some laps at the road course @ Loudon yesterday. Looks great

stig wrote:I've been seeing this car around in the last couple days. At the Red Roof Inn on Wed. night and I think I saw it making some laps at the road course @ Loudon yesterday. Looks great

Yup, I was at Loudon yesterday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDuP_x3iSvI

My one "interesting" pass of the day - I spent much more time letting other cars go past me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POVHa6v5XS8

I'm undecided on how the suspension worked out. I had to trim back some of the plastic arches on the back because of rubbing. The handling felt good, and I know there was a fair bit of speed left in the car.

I was turning consistent 1:30s and 1:31s. My personal best at NHMS is a 1:29. I was hoping to be faster...

Now that I have all these adjustable things, I feel like I should be adjusting them... too bad I don't have a garage to work in, or even some flat, dry pavement.

I think I'll try to even out the ride height by raising the rear a little. Not only is the rear lower than the front, but I think the right rear was lower than the left rear as I had more wheel arch damage on that side.

After that, I'll need to at least reset the camber in the back, and I should probably check to toe also.

The dampers can probably stand to be stiffer for the track too. There seemed to be 20 settings on the dampers, and I was running 9 back from stiff on the front, and 8 back from stiff on the rear.

And I lost ABS halfway through each session on the track. I doubt there is much I can do to diagnose this myself.

J, you are totally welcome to dial in your suspension ride height in my garage. You can even use the app Clinometer I downloaded to check the camber.

Thanks Thompson. I may take you up on that sometime soon...

I've got an email query out to Greg V to get some setup advice on the MINI.

To fill in the back story from other threads...

A good friend / race car builder Greg designed some new front control arms and the brown MINI is the test car for these parts.

At Tremblant, I blew apart an inner CV joint.

The best guess as to why is that the new control arms were adjusted to have a wider track than the stock ones, and the stock axles were too short.

So, with much help from Russ, a new axle was put in last weekend.

Then, I ruined two tires by not double checking to make sure the front wheels were put on with the spacers in place.

Then, I heard the same clicking sounds from the car when braking to a stop / accelerating from a stop that I heard before the first axle / CV joint failed.

Fast forward to today...

I was back at Russ's place, and we adjusted the control arms to narrow the track back down to stock - or at least as close as we had measurements for. We took about 1/2" - 5/8" in on each side.

Russ also found a loose bolt on the front suspension. And, of course, tightening that bolt required dropping 3/4 of the front subframe. But, that bolt is now tightened.

On the drive home, I heard the braking / accelerating click a few times. It was not as prevalent as it was on the drive to Russ's, but the click was still there.

I'm waiting for advice from Greg, but I think my plan will be to bring the brown MINI to Stowe and see if I can break it again. Because I really want to take it to NHMS July 5-6... if I can't break it at Stowe, I'll feel better about taking it to NHMS. If I do break it at Stowe, well, at least I'll know it's not ready for NHMS and I can save my entry fee money.

Huge thanks to Russ for spending 4+ hours wrenching on my car this evening. It would have been awesome to have a noise free drive home, but it just wasn't in the cards. Like I said - there was less noise, but it was not noise free.

Some updates...

Greg sourced some better monoballs for the control arms - Aurora race stuff - but it's still not good enough. He had one of something else laying around leftover from his race car build. You can't move that monoball by hand. He's trying to find a source for those so he can replace the monoballs in my setup one last time. There's a tiny amount of play in the wheel of the car when it's up on jackstands with the Aurora monoball.

The new setup was dialed in on Sunday at NHMS. Greg, his son, and Paul Mello did all the work. I pulled in a lap early on my sessions so they could take true "hot" tire temps and pressures. They changed the alignment 3 times during the day in the garage at NHMS. When I get pictures of the alignment rig Greg made, I'll post them... it worked really, really well.

Once dialed in, the car handled amazingly well. Extremely predictable, solid, stable, etc. I'll have some video soon of me following various "interesting" cars through some corners.

For now, here's my best lap from yesterday - a 1:29.6 which is better than my personal best at NHMS. And I'm pretty sure the new track setup is slower than the old one. I'm eagerly awaiting some dry lap times from tomorrow's COM event to see if their times are slower than past events.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snid/3699023623/

Glad to hear you happy with the car again, Jason!

No further CV joint issues?

brownMINI wrote:And I'm pretty sure the new track setup is slower than the old one. I'm eagerly awaiting some dry lap times from tomorrow's COM event to see if their times are slower than past events.

Looking at the times from Tuesday, it looks like drivers set new course records in three classes (including ST4). In several other classes the times were close to the old course records. If the new chicane is slower, it looks like it's not by much.

Jason, just in case you hadn't heard about SLMP: the rock and tree have been removed...