Stage 4: track car now!
End track-hours: ~90
End Laguna Seca time: <didn't go these few months>
End parts/specs:
TC Design roll bar
Schroth Enduro 6-point harnesses
Seats: OMP HTE-R (driver), Sparco QRT-R (passenger)
Aim Solo 2 DL lap timer
-3.2 camber F, 0 toe F, -2.2 camber R
Bimmerworld race studs
At this point, I was getting a bit tired of being flung around in the stock seats. I'd use my left foot to kinda brace myself against the dead pedal, and would also death grip the steering wheel for support. Neither was too much fun. Plus, I was already spending a lot of time on track and proper safety was probably a bit overdue. Of course, race seats and 3-point belts don't match, so it was time for harnesses and a roll bar to attach them to.
Spending a bit more time at the track, you start noticing which of the local shops are there frequently and which ones are mostly in the business of slapping on downpipes (but have "race" in the name somewhere). So I went to Tony and Joe at TC Design for all the safety bits. I'd gotten rid of the rear seat a while back (a whopping ~40 lbs) and used the space to lug my tools and a full set of wheels to the track. I wanted to still be able to do that, so we settled on a rollbar design that doesn't block the opening from the trunk to the cabin. (This idea mostly worked out -- I could still load wheels through the trunk, but lost a couple of inches because of the main hoop and could only fit 3 wheels in the back. I'd just end up putting the 4th on the passenger seat.)
Nothing particularly special about the seats -- just went to the local racing store and tried a few that seemed to match my body shape -- I'm on the smaller / shorter side, so the biggest issue was the holes for the belt being a little too high above my shoulders. Same for the belts -- seems like the racing crowd was migrating to 2" 6-point, so I went with that.
I tracked this config for quite a while without any other changes (except for alignment/setup and loooots of consumables). At this point I was already capturing telemetry and didn't see a big difference from any weight savings -- they were probably minial anyway, the seats shaved off a fair bit, but the rollbar added a lot too. There was a massive difference in my feel of what the car was doing though! Getting rid of the cushy stock seats, my butt could actually feel the rear giving away much earlier and I started catching slides way better.
Of course, nothing comes for free -- driving to the track and back became way less comfortable. For one, some of the "local" tracks are ~300 mi away and that same butt really didn't appreciate the trip in a bucket seat, especially after hard running workouts. Visibility wasn't great too. Most people seem to have visibility trouble with seat headbolsters, which was actually fine for me. My bigger issue was the lower seating position. But oh well, I'd already chosen to optimize this car for the track, so no point in dwelling more.
At this point, I was getting very comfortable with the car. I could toss it around a lot and really appreciated the predictability, no more sudden snapping. With enough trailbraking, I could get the front to rotate pretty well too. Sudden changes of direction were quite good too -- the T3-T4 right-left sequence at Thunderhill is a great test for that. The only major problem was brakes.
Once I'd learned how to drive a bit closer to the limit, it was very obvious how massively underprovisioned the brakes were for my use. The Pagid enduro pads I was using would overheat signficiantly. There was barely a day without some sort of brake overheating drama, and that was even without going to Laguna Seca, which is way harder on the brakes than the other local tracks. I tried some Hawks too, but all they did was transfer the extra heat to the fluid instead and boiled it in the span of a few laps.
Annoyingly, our chassis has some brake ducting, but it's pretty much usesless, especially so once you put wider tires than the stock 225s. The duct just ends up blowing directly into the tire surface, not anywhere near the rotor. And because of the really narrow wheel wells, you can't easily run a hose from the stock ducts to the rotors. I started mocking up
some ducting, but would end up scraping it because things escalated a bit.
I'd mentioned having a couple of studs snap while changing wheels a few months back. I replaced all 4 corners with a fresh set of Apex studs after that. Then one day, at Big Willow, I had all 5 on my FL snap on track, while going 90mph through T9 (
post). I was actually pretty lucky that the wheel detached after most of the rotation was done and the car didn't flip or anything drastic like that -- just dragged along a bit. I got away with damaging a couple of wheels (the one that detached, plus the spare I used to hobble 300 mi back on a bent hub), the wheel hub, and ball joints. The tie rods and control arms looked straight, but I still replaced them out of caution.
Oh, and more importantly, the FL fender lip was roughed up from that accident. I'd actually roughed up the FR lip as well a couple of months earlier (still unclear how exactly, but some debris got stuck in the little space between the tire and the lip and ended up bending it), so both sides looked like they had a very ghetto roll done.
The bulk of the fenders were completely fine, and the messed up bits were exactly what you'd cut out putting on fender flares. I'd talked about doing a widebody on this car with my friends for a while now, but it was mostly just joking around that I'd turn a 3700 lbs boat into Project Momentum, nothing really serious. But now I actually started thinking seriously about it -- it was a choice between replacing & repainting fenders just to end up with a config that still had a big brake problem, or "doing things right" and escalating things to make sure there's both enough tires and brakes for the car's hefty weight. Needless to say, in racecar math, the second option was clearly the way to go.