Not on track yet...

The Ides of March came and went without my actually getting the car on track. I was scheduled to have a practice that day, but AJ recommended against. We have put on a new paint job, and the paint had not cured yet. Since the painting was not cheap, we didn't want to get it chipped up because the paint was too soft. So - the right thing to do was to postpone the practice.
So - that leaves me with going to the Formula Race Car Club's driving school and my first race on the same weekend, April 10th, at Pocono International Raceway.
Not much else to tell right now.
Stay tuned - I hope to have video to put up after that weekend.

Car Setup

After a couple of attempts to get out to Summit Point were aborted due to weather, I finally made it out there last week to work on car setup.  When I got there I met up with AJ (the builder) and he introduced me to Chris who will be my mechanic for the season.  Chris has never been a race driver but has been a flagger at SP for quite a few years.  Since he’s going to be setting up the car, doing the maintenance and repair, helping with race-day adjustments and record-keeping, it was really good to get to know him a little.  Over the course of the summer I expect him to become one of my new best friends.

The point of the meeting was to get the car set up.  This was a bit more than moving the seat and adjusting the mirrors.  I thought setup day was going to be mostly about getting cockpit controls adjusted to my comfort.  We did that, but it was kind of secondary.  The first thing that happened was to put me in the car and then to roll it up four little ramps onto four bathroom scales (yes, plain old bathroom scales), one under each wheel.  The car, with me aboard, weighs about 1,100 pounds, and what we wanted to do was to make sure that the car’s weight was distributed equally side to side, and for 60% of the weight to be on the rear wheels and 40% on the front wheels.  A little bit of this can be done by positioning of me in the cockpit, but the cockpit is pretty tight so there is not a whole lot of flexibility there.  So, how do you do it?

The car has independent suspension with an adjustable coil spring on each wheel.  The way we balanced things was to loosen a set screw and either tighten or loosen the spring on one corner or another, then sorta bounce the car up and down and take a scale measurement (a good, practical lessen on spring constants, force, and mass).  This took quite a while.  There was no “close enough.”  The builder and his mechanic spent about an hour making these adjustments and the car is now balanced to within about a pound on each wheel.

With balance dialed in the next thing was to focus on cockpit controls.  Pedals are individually adjustable so we made sure that I could fully depress the accelerator, completely floor the clutch, and that the relationships between pedals were correct.  The left foot dead-man and the clutch need to be set at the same level so that I only have to pivot my left foot to move from the dead-man to the clutch.  The dead-man also has to be in a position where it is relatively comfortable to brace on when experiencing violent G-load changes as the car goes through turns, accelerations, decelerations, and bumps.  For the right foot the brake pedal and accelerator have to be set up so that I can efficiently do heel-and-toe braking maneuvers.  This is the technique for down-shifting in a racing car. 

Many – and I used to be among them – thought that the purpose of downshifting was to use the drag of the engine and the engine’s compression to slow the car.  Not true.  It once was true, before brakes were as reliable and long lasting as they are today.  Today downshifting is mainly for the purpose of matching engine RPM to road speed so you are prepared to accelerate smoothly away from the corner.  Here’s how it works:  You’re cruising along at speed and approaching a corner.  You need to slow the car to get through the turn, and at the slower speed you want to be in a lower gear in order to accelerate away from the corner.  So, first you move the toe of your right foot to the brake and almost immediately you depress the clutch.  As the car slows you shift to the lower gear (4^th to 3^rd, for example), you use the heel of your right foot (or more likely, the side of your right foot) to “blip” the throttle – rev the engine so that when you let out the clutch you neither decelerate nor accelerate.  Any “upset” in the torque on the driven wheels may well throw the car into a slide.

So – the gas and the brake pedals had to be set in such a way that I can press hard on the brake with the toe of my right foot while simultaneously punching the gas pedal.  After fiddling with a little higher or a little lower on each of the pedals, I settled on a position.  Next we moved the steering wheel in and out a little, and finally moved the gearshift lever backwards by about ½ inch.  That completed the cockpit setup.

Then we took a look at positioning the gages on the dash, and also the readout for a lap-timer.

Last thing we did was talk about a new paint scheme for the car.  I’m not going to try to describe the paint job – we did some sketching and modifying and came up with a scheme I liked.  I think we’re going to have the new scheme on the car within a couple of weeks.  I go out to the track for a practice day on March 15^th and if the paint-job is done I’ll take pictures and post them.

So – that’s about it for now.  I’ve ordered a video camera and I hope it will be installed by the practice day.  If so, I may be able to (if I can figure out how), post some clips of actual on-track running.

Things are starting to get interesting...