you doing https://www.bristolforestsrally.com/ this year? i might go and spectate since a decent number of ETR scca rallycross people will be attending/running i think.
you doing https://www.bristolforestsrally.com/ this year? i might go and spectate since a decent number of ETR scca rallycross people will be attending/running i think.
MrChaos said:you doing https://www.bristolforestsrally.com/ this year? i might go and spectate since a decent number of ETR scca rallycross people will be attending/running i think.
Nah, I'd like to but I'm not doing NASA events. Due to my medical history, NASA license requires me to get some expensive tests to "prove" to their medical director that I'm ok to rally (my nationally-rated cardiologist says I'm 100% good to do anything I want to do and I don't need the tests), - and my insurance won't pay for tests that aren't needed, according to actual doctors. NASA's medical policy is bullE36 M3, so as much as I liked running with them, I'm not dealing with an organization that has no common sense about things. Their medical director is totally clueless and doesn't make exceptions, so that settles it for me. I still "go" to Sandblast and other NASA events to crew or hang out, just no racing.
Luckily, there are plenty of ARA events to do since we only do 1-2 per year so don't mind hauling a bit to get to them. We're doing SOFR this year....small chance we could also do STPR too, but that's less likely.
It's getting hard to find specific info quickly in your thread now josh lol. Anyways, what would you recommend for bushing material for arms, motor, trans, diff, and rear subframe for a rallycross car?
shagles said:It's getting hard to find specific info quickly in your thread now josh lol. Anyways, what would you recommend for bushing material for arms, motor, trans, diff, and rear subframe for a rallycross car?
Short answer:
- stock rubber rear trailing arm bushings. It's best to leave some "give" in the trailing arms in order to keep them from bending as easily.
- I like the Condor bushings in the rear subframe and diff. Very little NVH. Make sure whatever you use for the subframe and diff, they neeed to be the same material so they have the same amount of movement.
- front control arm rear (lollipop). Like the rear, I like rubber here. I have the offset OEM ones for increased caster (I think they're for the M3?)
- motor and trans really depend a lot on whether it's a dedicated competition car or something you daily drive, or whatever. The Condor solid stuff is great for pure competition car. The motor mounts are probably fine for a street driver too. My honest opinion is on the trans mount, there's a good bit of NVH if the car is stripped/uninsulated. Fine for competition (and very good response) but not what I'd do for a street driver.
My answers would be "all Condor stuff" if this was a track car, but for rally I prefer to have mostly rubber bushings because solid bushings tend to make other things get bent and broken. So I mix them up....suspension is almost all rubber. Fixed-mount things are almost all solid.
Everyone has a different tolerance for NVH though, so YMMV.
OK. So did some rallycross today!
Rolled up last night to Hamburg, PA (where??) along with Shawn and Katie. After some drinks at the local (hotel) bar and some sleep, we woke up to 23 degrees outside and some chilly cars...
Headed up to the venue, which is a new one for Blue Mountain Region, and is huge. Looked like the biggest rallycross course I've ever been on.
However, in the morning it was frozen so all of MR switched over to winter tires to try to find some traction on the hilly grass. BMR is heavy on AWD and FWD cars, so most of the MR class was a mix of stage rally cars (me and Nonack), a local PR-classed 350Z, Shawn and Katie in their turbo MR Miata, and Keith Pizeo coming over to the darkside from Subaru to a 5-series BMW (!!!).
In the morning, the course was extremely slippery, and a ton of work for the RWD cars in particular, with much sideways and much tire spin. Unfortunately, Shawn and Katie were having battery issues with the Miata and only got a couple runs in. Shawn jumped into my car and took one run and then went to buy a new battery. Nonack was runing times just a bit behind me but was having a bit too much fun and spun on one of his early runs (as did Keith). The 350 was running times close to mine but picking up a handful of cones.
Chris was also having some battery issues and I had to jump him a couple times (of course, both our cars have trunk batteries...)
I feel like I have this same photo from every Nonack event....people want to see under the hood, or something is being fixed under the hood. In this case, it was the former.
Side note: there was a Tesla there, and he was pushing. I'd have to think he beat most of the Subarus in the class, at least based on how fast the car looked from the outside. Supposedly it used 2% of battery on each run.
In the afternoon it had dried out and packed down so i messed around with tires, putting two cut Federals up front and two new Maxsports in the back (I think I prefer this mixed setup to all-four Maxsports), for....reasons. This turned out to be a good choice, and I managed to put up some seriously fast times, just behind the VERY fast top dogs in the Mod FWD class, who had a traction advantage. Shawn and Katie did not manage to fix the car, so that was disappointing since I wanted to see how I'd do against Shawn. Managed to run away from the rest of the class and took first by almost 40 seconds. All in all, car felt great, the course was a blast, and I haven't forgotten how to drive over the winter, thankfully.
Then we all packed up and headed out
About halfway home on the highway, going about 75......I feel a slight "tug" as if a brake grabbed on the truck or trailer. But it kind of went away, and I thought maybe it was just something in the road or whatever. A few minutes later, feel it again and pull over. Everything seems fine (thought maybe it was a flat on the trailer), but one side of my braked axle felt a bit warm. Messed around with my controller settings, all seemed ok, so pulled back into traffic. A couple minutes later a truck behind me flashes me, and then some dudes in a van roll up next to me to get my attention and point back at the trailer. Meanwhile my brake controller pops up with a code that I wasn't familiar with. I pull off at the next exit (no shoulder available) and sure enough, my right rear hub area is literally smoking. The drum is too hot to touch. I look up the code on my phone, and it's a short-circuit code. Crap. Well, since only one side was hot, it didn't take too long to find out that the wires going into the back of the drum....the grommet was gone and the metal edge had worn out the insulation on the wire. So the short was basically activating the brake on that side as it sat against metal. Due to the super-hot drum and the area where the wire was touching, no real way to fix it on the side of the road. Sunday night, I need to get home so don't want to take the hub/brake apart in t aparking lot. So....I just snipped the wires to the right side brake (yeah, I know...) and ran it home on just the left brakes, reducing my speed quite a bit and making sure to stay WAY back from traffic. The Sequioa with Hawk HPSs has more than enough brake to stop the trailer even with no brakes.....but not so sure in a hard panic stop. So, bascially I just drove really carefully and will fix the wiring before next use.
In reply to irish44j :
That's perfect. Thank you.
So coming home yesterday from rallyx, about halfway home on the highway I start to feel an occasional "tug" coming from the trailer. Pulled off to check things thinking I might have a flat. No flat, and nothing visibly wrong. The right rear braked axle hub was a bit warm, but nothing too bad. I had been braking on the highway, so figured maybe I had the controller sensitivity up too high, so turned it down to a lower setting and set off again. Didn't notice any additional tugging, but it was windy so was more worried abour traffic and stuff.
About 10 minutes later, trucking along around 70 and a truck flashes me. Wasn't sure what was up, nothing felt amiss. Then a minute or two later a van comes up next to me and the passenger was wildly pointing back at the trailer, so I pulled off at first opportunity (another mile or so) after slowing down quite a bit, and could definitely see some smoke from that side of the trailer in my rearview. Jumped out and clearly smoking and my controller was suddenly showing a error code for "short circuit," which it hadn't initially been doing. Looking at the back of the drum, the grommet going through it appeared to be melted and the wire had rubbed to bare, grounding on the metal (causing the error code). Unable to get to the wire easily and not too far from home (20 miles), I cut the wires and proceeded (cautiously) the rest of the way home with only my left-side brakes. Sunday evening so not much traffic. Occasionally i kept hearing some odd metallic noise from back there (since I turned the music down to listen), but my trailer fenders make a lot of noise on bumpy roads so didn't think much of it. Managed to get home, trailer felt fine other than being more careful slowing down wiht the brakes turned down. Figured I'd have to fix the wiring and put some new shoes on the brakes.
So today I jacked up the trailer and....damn, the entire hub assembly was VERY looose. Wheel still bolted up tight but the entire hub was moving around as if it had no bearings (again, bearings repacked maybe 2k miles ago). Unbolted the wheel and saw this....
drum literally cracked in half all the way around! Looking in, I could see the shoes were just bare metal, no pad material. These shoes are only a couple years old (and the ones on the other side look fine).
Took off the hub nut (still torqued correctly with the cotter pin in) and literally everything inside is trashed other than the outer bearing, which seemed to be in fine shape and was probably the only thing holding the hub remotely in place.
So looks like time for a new axle.....
Anyhow, not sure what order things happened....
1) the wire shorted, activating the single wheel brake but without enough electricity to give it full lockup power (no evidence the tires were ever locked up, they still look great), overheated everything massively as I continued to drive, and the heat eventually killed the shoes and caused the drum to crack. This is odd though, since the "short" warning on my controlller did not come on until the very end - and the controller is very visible when driving and I would have noticed since it's bright and it was night-time.
2) The drum itself cracked independently just from material flaw, too old, or whatever. Once that happened, things got out of alignment inside, causing heat, causing the grommet to melt and the wire insulation, causing the short, which THEN caused the error code.
3) something internal in the drum brack mechanism broke (retainer spring or something), causing the shoes to jam lightly against the drum lining, not enough to lock them but enough to overheat the friction material and wear it to nothing, and eventually the metal on metal caused the smoke and heat and etc.
4) the inner bearing seized and caused extreme heat, leating to the wire shorting, leading to the brake activating enough to do all the wear damage. I suspect this might be the case since the inner bearing was totally gone when I took it apart, so I suspect it caused the rest of the issues in a chain reaction.
So, IDK. Not that it matters at this point. I've towed many thousands of miles with this trailer and never had any issues (other than a couple flats), repack the bearings annually, etc. So this is mostly just a lesson that "just because everything seems marginally ok," doesn't mean it is. What is crazy is that once I cut the brake wire, I drove another 20+ miles at (actualy) highway speed limit, being cautious, and everything felt totally fine back there, even though it was totally NOT fine. Pretty crazy.
Oh and here are some results from MR at the rallycross. I'd love to say that I actually dominated everyone by such a huge margin, but a few things to read into this that are more relevant than the actual results.
1. My 4th run was actually in Nonack's XR4Ti, so a bit slower in his car but it was surprisingly not terrible to drive. I think with another run I could have improved significantly. All in all, I drove well all day, with no significant mistakes and no cones. If I can be this consistent in DC events, that will be good. I also used snow tires (like everyone else) in the AM session and in the PM switched to cut gravels up front and maxsports in the rear, which seems to be my go-to setup for dry/loose conditions.
2. Chris took his 4th run in my car, and basically laid down the exact same time as I had run in it previously. As usual, other people are just as fast in my car as I am. :/
3. Pizio was there for his first RWD rallycross, in an M54-powered 5-series. He clearly had a good time and he's a very good driver, so no suprising that his later times are actually pretty good, especially on a course well-suited to larger/more powerful cars than many rallycrosses.
4. Shawn and Katie brought the turbo Miata (not their usual MR car) and had issues from the start. I'm not sure which runs where which. Shawn took one run in my car (perhaps the first one) and didn't seem to much enjoy it (must feel like a Lincoln Town Car compared to a Miata). They got in a few later runs with both of them pretty fast, at the end of the run group. Not sure if/how much conditions played into the times there. It's not a shock that Shawn is fast. I wish he could have run that car in the afternoon when it was dry and we all really opened it up. I wanted to see how the M50 vs. M54 vs. VQ35 vs. Turbo Miata vs. Turbo 2.3 Merkur would have matched up on a power course like this.
5. The 350Z was fast, but it was their first rallycross in a RWD car. They hit 56 (56!!) cones. But even taking those cones away they were still about 40 seconds behind me in the end. But if they figure out how to drive, that car could be a future threat in the area.
56 cones!
I am imagining Super Mario 3 turtle stomping noises, followed by 1up noises after the ninth or tenth one
Using an older version of axware that only has a single penalty column so some of those "cones" may be off course calls. I was not working timing that heat so I can't say for sure.
yes my first run was your car. Second run was right after I got a battery in my car when I was trying to see if I had any grip. Third run would have been a few cars before your 4th run.
Knurled. said:56 cones!
I am imagining Super Mario 3 turtle stomping noises, followed by 1up noises after the ninth or tenth one
And it was NOT a cone-heavy course, especially compared to DC. There were only a few cones I even came remotely close to hitting all day, and they were always the same 2 or 3. I'm not even sure how hitting 5+ cones per run would have been possible with this course and the wide-open turns.
Whew!
Made it!!! Fantastic thread, Irish!
also, I'm now low key looking at BMWs and rallycross....
My favorite part of this whole thread is without a doubt, all the metal stickers on top of the car...
Recon1342 said:Whew!
Made it!!! Fantastic thread, Irish!
also, I'm now low key looking at BMWs and rallycross....My favorite part of this whole thread is without a doubt, all the metal stickers on top of the car...
do it! :)
yeah, the stickers definitely get some conversation, especailly at stage events in parc expose :)
I always appreciate people saying they read the thread, makes me feel less like I wasted endless hours making it lol
Got a new axle and brakes in today from etrailer. Always appreciate how fast they ship (and free shipping on this stuff, which must have cost like half of what I paid for it).
Anyhow, got the axle in position, got the brakes set up, bearings greased, etc. Didn't attach it yet since I'm waiting on some new bolts and bushings for the leaf springs while I'm in there. Also installed a couple of the bearing-buddy sets I got for Christmas on the other axle (this one will get them as well).
In reply to irish44j :
I don't have a huge car/project budget (too many kids), so I really enjoy the long threads and watching a car evolve. It's fun seeing how people solve things. A prime example is your approach to rally versus Chris's (Nonack) approach to rally.
Josh- "We'll make the car nimble and handle well, that way we can dodge the rocks!"
Chris- "In capitalist America, car crush rock!"
plus, y'know, Porsche shenanigans and stuff.
In reply to Recon1342 :
It's also fun thinking about the number of vehicles we've each gone through in pursuit of the rally thing.
Me- MR2, MR2, bunch of borrowed cars, Celica, Mustang, motorbike, RX7, XR4Ti
Josh- e30. That's it, the whole time.
In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :
I mean, I have at least had three different engines!
irish44j said:In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :
I mean, I have at least had three different engines!
psh. that's just getting warmed up in the e30 swap game. 
Nice day today so did oil changes on all the vehicles (even the wife's). The hauled all the waste oil to the dump, in the Porsche. Which got some funny looks rolling in with 50 pickup trucks and other crap.
In any case, while oil changes are very exciting, it gave me a chance with the skidplate off to clean under the e30. And while doing so, I found this....
Crap. We (myself, Downey, a few others) had discussed at earlier times that the e36 stock passenger side arm was a weak spot that should be upgraded with something fabricated. And now there it is.......
Everything was still bolted down tight, so that wasn't the cause. I think it's just a poorly-designed piece that might be ok for street use but can't take the pounding of rally. In any case, I have another one to use for the time being but will put together a jig and try to make one from steel that will be stronger. This old e30 trailer hitch baseplate sitting around is giving me some ideas (this thing is BEEFY), so we'll see what I end up doing.
I also got around to modifying the side-mounts (read: flattening out the vertical bend to narrow them by 1") and got the OMP seat finally fitted in the car.
Took me approximately 5 minutes to seel the Sparco lol.....you may see it in another build thread on this forum sometime in the future :)
As noted before, the other Evo will stay in the passenger spot for the time being (though the mis-match colors are going to piss me off). Jim talked about buying a seat for his side (halo), or just using his seat from the track e30 at rally events. Either way, not an issue for the moment. 3 months to go before SOFR.
In reply to irish44j :
I think you should embrace the mismatch and paint everything a different color on that side of the car.
Picked up a replacement engine mount arm off ebay. Who knows if this one will last, but at very least it looks like it wasn't on a car for long so whatever....I still plan to do something stronger when I get around to it, but this should be sufficient for the first rallycross.
In any case, not having the engine resting on the steering rack likely a good thing.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ said:In reply to irish44j :
I think you should embrace the mismatch and paint everything a different color on that side of the car.
man, this car already has about 50lbs of spraypaint on it! lol.
So, when I fitted the full set of Maxsports on the Mini phone-dial wheels earlier, it was glaringly obvious that one of them was bent. Initially I thought it was just the lip (where there was curb rash), but on the car it was easy to feel it was more than that. Well, I got these wheels super-cheap so figures one was bent. Surprised neither me nor Shawn noticed it, oh well. Off to ebay I want and found a single matching one for under 50 bucks shipped, so that came in today and I had the tire swapped onto it.
The amount of bend in the other was way more obvious with the tire taken off....oof.
Anyhow, another week before the DC season opener. Hopefully all this COVID-19 stuff won't cause any cancellation (or weather, for that matter). Since rallycross isn't exactly a sport where a lot of people are in very close proximity, hopefully that's not an issue. Eric Eisele asked for a co-drive if for some reason he and Neil can't get their new build done in time, so i said yes to him but maybe I'll tell him he has to do it wearing nitrile gloves lol......
I have been trying recently to track down a mysterious very occasional gasoline smell that I get from the car after a very hard driving and wide open throttle. 100% ruled out actual fuel leaks, injector leaks, etc. Just to see if my Dinan Chip is just making the car run too rich I pulled the plugs but they look perfect. While I was there I decided to do a compression test and I'm pretty damn pleased with the results of that as well. So my guess is that I'm just getting a little bit of fuel blow back through the air intake coming off wide open throttle hard, and since my intake elbow sits slightly downhill it is probably getting caught up in some of the ribs and causing the smell through my cone filter intake (The smell is from the vicinity of the intake manifold or intake piping).. That's really about the only thing I think is a reasonable possibility at this point, in which case I'm just not really going to worry about it.
The last time I did a compression test, I didn't like the results.
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