San Diego National Tour Practice Day

Today was a practice day at the San Diego National Tour. This morning I took part in the Evolution School advantage program, basically you get a ton of seat time in the morning before the practice course opens up for the rest of the entrants for the National Tour. My r-comps were on a truck otw to the tour, so I ran my street tires for the morning session. I also had the car set at full soft (bump/rebound), most definitely not the configuration needed, and my evo instructor Brian let me know.

He knew me (not to be cocky, a lot of autocrossers do because of my involvement with SCCAForums.com and announcing at events throughout the years), but he made the mistake of assuming I knew what I was doing . He assumed I knew about suspension setup, I corrected him, and asked for help! He was very helpful and provided me some guidance to try things out.

In the morning sessions on street tires (Azenis 615s, decent tires) I got down to 30.0*, not bad, but nothing near the 27.* that a SS Z06 was running.

I also had a horrendous knocking coming front the front end of the car, though that wasn’t new, it was happening all week. When I put the new bushings in I failed to apply any grease to them (other than when they went into the control arms).  My father is here in town to watch me run at the tour, so we headed over to autozone to get some white lithium spray grease to try to help with the knocking. I thought, there was no way that it would help, but geez, it’s amazing how much quieter the car is now.

When the tires showed up I got them put on and adjusted the Konis a bit, then went back out and ran a few more practice runs to see how the car felt.

I got faster on each run, finishing with a 28.555. Still not up to snuff against that Z06, but definitely better than I had been doing in the morning.

I ended up going with the following settings on the Konis

Front Double Adjustable Truechoice Coilovers
Rebound: 1 full turn from soft (2.5 turns is full stiff)
Bump: 6 clicks (12 or 13 clicks is full stiff)

Rear Koni Sports (single adjustable)
Rebound: 2.5 clicks (10 clicks available)

I’m still trying to get the time lapse video from drive down to San Diego yesterday together. I can’t get Windows Live Movie Maker working very well on my laptop. I’m hoping it finishes up here soon.