E30 Rally Car

In reply to Berck :

Congrats and well earned- I was watching the live timing to see you finish the last stage, great to see you get through the notoriously difficult Rally Colorado after the issues you had there the last couple years. 

Congrats on the finish at a tough rally!

Woohoo, made Rupert's GRM sticker photo of the day!

nice!

nice!

Congrats on the finish! It was great to see a handful of RWD cars out there!

I was working Start at both Valley of the Gods and Dragon's Trail. When Bret rolled, we got very little information over the radio - we actually got more info from the competitor sitting at start with us from their RallySafe. As for the regroup at Dragon's Trail on Sunday morning - we were confused to, but also just doing as directed from control. It was kinda fun to have our own little private Parc Expose in the canyons

Added a roof scoop.  Tried out the lights that came with the car.  Looks more like a rally car like this:

The roof scoop is less impressive than I'd have imagined when it comes to airflow.  It does nothing unless I crack the window, then it's fine.  But if I then turn on the defrost fan, all airflow from the scoop stops.  That tells me I was getting more pressurization from the fan than I would from the scoop.  This was at 45mph, but I'm slow.

I was hoping to go rally in Tennessee this year, but my co-driver isn't up for it.  Thus the light experimentation since there's apparently a night stage going on in Tennessee.  It's on a track, so presumably the ancient hellas would be sufficient.  For real stages, I probably need something modern.  Also, you can't even open the hood with those hellas there.

I would just slap a giant diode dynamics light bar on the hood, but... rules: "A headlight shall be considered as any lighting device throwing a beam toward the front of the vehicle (low-beam, high-beam, fog lamp). Auxiliary headlights may be installed. These lights may be fitted into the bumpers, radiator grillwork or the front part of the bodywork, provided that such openings as needed in this case are completely filled by the lights fitted. All auxiliary lights shall be mounted no higher than the top of the hood."

I notice plenty of folks are installing light bars on their hoods, but modern cars have very slopey hoods so I guess if you mount something on the front of the hood it's still lower than the top of the back of the hood?  I have no such advantage with my very flat hood.

Or maybe the rule is such that you can mount them on the top of the hood, but the lights can stick up higher?  It's a bit vague.

That scoop may be too far back to get good pressure with the big flat windshield the e30 has, not sure though.  Mine provides quite a lot of airflow once you get moving, and I think it's the same external dimensions.

The light rule is, I think, primarily to keep people from running super high mounted (roof) lightbars, or to keep them from blocking their own vision.  I haven't heard of a car being dinged for it since ARA has been ARA.

Rats.  I was wondering if that's the issue, as well.  It's as far forward as I could get it.  Any farther forward and the interior section would hit the front bar of the cage.  I think it's exactly the same one that you have.  It's just fiberglass, so I could probably modify the intake section to reach farther forward.  But I'm not sure I could possibly remove it without destroying it, given the amount of windshield adhesive I used.

I guess I could mount a light bar as low as I can go on the front of the hood and see if anyone complains.  Also, if the lights aren't mounted for tech, I suppose it's even harder for them to complain?

Actually, thinking about it some more, since it's two-piece, I only need to remove the top piece to extend it forward.  There's adhesive there too (particularly along the back, because the fitment was terrible), but it should slice cleanly.

Rocky Mountain Vintage Racing announced that for the last race of the season (at Pueblo), they'd let any logbooked race car join.  The wife asked if she could drive the rally car.  After thinking about a bit, I decided, "Why not?"

It's got an SCCA logbook that doesn't actually mention it's a rally car.  I dropped the suspension as low as it'd go, slapped some Miata wheels that already had NT-01s on it, and ajusted the seating position for her.  I don't have any sway bars, and the welded diff is a terrible idea on pavement...

I had some 15mm spacers, but that wasn't enough for the front wheels.  So I ordered some 25mm spacers, but it turns out those weren't enough either.  So I stacked two 15mm in the front and put the 25mm spacers in the rear and that worked.  (I've got 90mm studs, so plenty of grip.)

So, there's the rally car, pretending to be a road racer.  Nothing broke, the car performed flawlessly, and the wife had a blast.  They put her in small bore, and she finished ahead of a half-dozen spridgets.  (The photo is from a practice session, she didn't actually have to race against the Factory Five Cobra, which was also there in response to the any logbooked car invitation...)

Now that I feel like I finally have some idea of what rally is all about, I decided that I really ought to figure out how to drive a rally car.  Even though it's a terrifying amount of money, I signed up for the 3-day RWD Dirtfish class during their Black Friday sale.  I've completed the first 2 days and am looking forward to the 3rd day tomorrow.  Going into it, I'd hoped primarily for tips about how to feel comfortable sliding about in a rally car.  I'd hoped to start getting comfortable with left foot braking and gain a better understanding of weight transfer.  I wasn't prepared for what actually happened in the very first few minutes of my very first in-car session: I learned that everything I've ever done in a rally car is wrong.

Without consciously realizing it, I've developed a habit of using giant steering inputs and thumping bootfulls of throttle to rotate a car on gravel.  Everything about the years I've spent driving a car on track have developed habits and instincts that range from not useful to massively problematic on gravel.

I suppose it's not terribly surprising to me that I've been doing it wrong--I know I'm slow, lack confidence sliding around, but I am shocked that I didn't even know that the actual technique is so far from what I've naturally been doing. In retrospect, Chris did a pretty good job of explaining this to me several pages back, but I didn't get it.

It turns out that rally cars turn in with the brake pedal.  I've certainly always understood that shifting weight forward made the car turn in better.  The same is true of a car on a track, and I'd always assumed that something similar was at play on gravel.  But, no, it's so much more exaggerated that it's not really related.  Somehow I was completely oblivious of the most basic technique: lift off the throttle, put in a small steering input (which will do nothing, but it's fine), and THEN brake, and then just patiently wait for the car to rotate.  Stopping the rotation requires countersteer (which comes naturally to me), and then, and only then, back on the gas.

I'd have hoped that Dirtfish was going to be imbue me with some tips that I could deploy on my next rally to be a bit faster.  I was simply unprepared to discover that I have to learn how to drive again.  Things I've learned I consistently do wrong:

(1) Too much steering wheel input too fast.  My time on pavement has lead me to expect the steering wheel to do something, so I keep spinning it until it does.  If it ever does, my impatience is such that it's going to do way too much at a completely unpredictable time.  In my defense, I'd think a thing called a "steering wheel" that has served perfectly well to steer every other vehicle I've ever piloted would, you know, be useful for steering.  I well know that, on pavement, understeer situations cannot be improved with more steering.  I did not appreciate that every turn on dirt starts out as an understeer situation, or that understeer can be so trivially rectified with a little bit of brakes.

(2) I have developed a near total refusal to apply the brakes while pointed in any direction other than straight ahead.  This serves me well on the track.  Sure, I can trail brake a bit on the track to turn in a bit faster, but this is a matter of just not fully lifting off the brakes on turn-in.  Actually applying the brakes well after turning the steering wheel goes against every instinct I have (not to mention all that is holy).

(3) Throttle on turn-in to get the car to rotate.  I do this in the Formula Vee, mostly because the Vee is set up for oversteer and some amount of throttle is necessary to keep to the rear planted.  More will get it to rotate more.  I simply do it a lot more on dirt.  With a rear wheel drive car it will damn well do something every time.  Unfortunately, it's nearly impossible to figure out how much it's going to do and when.  Up until yesterday, I'd just sort of assumed that the primary thing better drivers than me did was develop a much finer-tuned sense of how much rotation they were going to get under throttle.  Getting told immediately and consistently from every Dirtfish instructor, "Don't do that!" makes a pretty good impression.  Sadly, unlearning bad habits is hard.  One of the instructors pointed out that maybe I should have picked the AWD school because an AWD car just isn't going to do this so I'd stop doing it pretty quickly when it doesn't work.  

(4) Sliding some amount is not just okay, it's required, and I need to be comfortable in a prolonged slide.  Even when I get the car to rotate and slide in the direction I want with the amount I want, I'm completely unable to be okay with letting it do that for a prolonged amount of time even when that's my very goal.  I've developed an instinct, on track, to immediately countersteer and stop all significant yaw the instant it happens.  So even when I do it on purpose, holding a slide around a long corner is totally counter-intuitive to me.

(5) When I get more rotation than I want, and start to spin even with countersteer, I immediately go 2 feet in.  Not only does no one tell you to do this at Dirtfish, they want to know what's wrong with you when you do it.  The name of the game on dirt is keep trying to save it, forever.  If you've got more yaw than you want, why would you press the brake pedal?  That is, after all, the yaw pedal, now.

So, yeah...  Am I going to just be able to go out on stage and immediately apply this?  I doubt it, but I don't know what else to do but go out there and try.  I also have a FV race next weekend, and I'm wondering if I've totally broken myself.

Kudos to the team at Dirtfish--I'm truly impressed at the quality of instruction, the consistency between instructors, and the professionalism of the whole operation.  I worked for years as a flight instructor, and while I'm a good flight instructor, I think most flight schools would do well to manage instruction as well as Dirtfish does.

Things about the car that have come out of this:

(1)  Why am I driving an old BMW when a BRZ does it so much better without being a BMW?  (I'm not going to do anything about this any time soon, but everything about these BRZs is better than my car.)

(2) I should probably de-power the brakes.  The consistency of the de-boosted brakes on the school BRZs is great.  Vacuum boosted brakes are finicky and unpredictable in the face of this sort of driving and replacing the master cylinder with one that will allow reasonable brake pressures without the booster is probably not a hard thing.

(3) I should replace the welded diff with an LSD.  We've talked about it before in this thread, but I really think I should actually do something about this.  Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear to me exactly what I should get, how I should set it up, etc.

I'm planning on Rally Colorado yet again this year...