Lupa's first win

This past week we were threatened to get hit dead on by hurricane Joaquin but somehow the storm system moved far off shore and so I seized upon the opportunity to take Lupa out to the Meadowlands to do more testing instead of just sitting home to watch Netflix and chill.

MotorsportsNE Autocross - 10-4-2015

The major problem we had today was the cold. Temperatures in the morning hovered in the 50s and the strong winds at the Meadowlands coupled with overcast would make it difficult to keep heat in the tires. Luckily, there was very low turnout today and with Hez and I codriving, we were able to get almost back to back runs, keeping the temps right in the sweet spot. The course was nice and long and had both fast and tight elements. It lacked a bit of flow in the 2nd half of the course making it not the best course possible but it was good practice and more importantly ideal conditions for testing car setup.

The first thing I noticed on my initial baseline runs was that transition speed had improved a lot with the increased bar settings front and rear but she was still a bit too stable and on the pushy side. I reverted the rebound changes I made to the front shocks at Nassau Coliseum and put them up 2 clicks again. This helped keep the weight up front after braking to get better turn in. We then fiddled with the tire pressures, running a bit higher pressures in the rear. Our times kept improving and Hez laid down a nice class-winning run on this setup (Go Bumble Jockey!).

Although Lupa was working, I didn't like the higher rear pressure setup since I prefer equal or lower pressures in the rear so I wanted to do a bar change but the quick driver changeovers made this very difficult. I also felt that a bar change was warranted as she was still not rotating in the tight corners under power the way I wanted. We got a short break in the action due to a minor incident and we were able to quickly adjust the rear bar up to 4/7 and then brought the tire pressures equal all around. Unfortunately, the downtime had cooled the tires and the pressures had dropped to 28psi in the front. We didn't have time to add more air so we set the pressures to 28psi all around. This new setup worked great, she was rotating better around the tight stuff but introduced a bit of instability in the high speed transitions. To get the rear to settle, I lowered the rear pressures to have a 1psi split front to rear and achieved what I felt was a good balance. Personally I feel a good test for car balance is when even small pressure changes in the tire pressures can change the balance of the car very easily.

It's hard to gauge Lupa's true pace when we're not at an SCCA event with other fully prepped STR car so it's very easy to dismiss a win as an artifact of just having low turnout but thankfully Evan was there in his BS National event winning Corvette to use a reference point and Hez was only off by 0.2 in PAX against his fast time which isn't bad at all considering we actually ran in the earlier heat when the course was still not very clean and the sun hadn't come out yet so that's very encouraging.

Lupa taking her first win
MSNE Autocross - 10/4/2015

In short, she's feeling pretty awesome. She transitions really well and does so in a very stable, confidence inspiring way. You can get very aggressive with the the throttle early, and power out of sweepers. In the tight stuff, she can tuck in nicely with just enough rotation to let you dance around under power. The direction so far is great and I'm very pleased that we're slowly approaching the similar balance characteristics to Bumblestook (minus the added power and insane grip of Hoosiers). For the next event, we'll be running higher pressures but with the same 1psi different front to rear since both Hez and I felt a bit less responsiveness in the tire at these lower pressures.

On a personal driver note, I pretty much hit a cone every run. This is oddly very encouraging as over the years I've found myself driving less and less and as a result I've been getting further from the cones. Hitting cones means I'm actually trying hard enough to get close and I can go faster. I'll have to clean up my driving though if I want to actually do well in real competition. Right now I'm just too focused making sure the car feels and behaves exactly the way I want.

Some things to think about over the winter:

• My front shocks are already at full soft compression. Even though they're working well with this setting, maybe I should revalve them and remove some of the gas pressure so the dial is more in the middle
• I need to raise the car about 0.25". The springs have settled to a very low ride height that I don't like. She needs more height to let the suspension work.
• We need to shift the front subframe so we can get a proper alignment and squeeze out another 0.1-0.2 degrees of front camber.
• Ugh, I wish we had the faster AP1 steering rack (can't do anything about this)
• After checking out Skaria's 18" Advans at the last event at Nassau Coliseum, I think I may go with an 18x9 and run a 255/35/18 to get an even more crisp steering repsonse. 

The season's almost over but I'm glad I was able to get even this limited amount of testing done to Lupa before the winter. She's very close to what I envisioned in my head and she'll only get faster from here.