Autocross question: stock class EF civic

Ah - Didn't know we had met. Thanks! For better or worse, it's no longer mine. Sold it over the winter. Building a 2008 Mustang for CP now.

Your CRX is hotness. I still can't get over how clean that thing is.

DILYSI Dave wrote: No legal way to get camber in a stock class EF. The most useful tuning too you have is rear toe. I know someone who ran 1" of toe out on one. Said it wouldn't drive straight to save it's life, but it turned REALLY well. The next best tool at your disposal is the new allowance for a rear sway bar. Put an ST 22mm bar on there and start having fun.

I'm going to disagree a little with Dave on this one. In addition to the ST Civic experience, we ran an 88 CRX Si in D Stock for a couple of seasons back in the mid 90's before the Neon supplanted it as the car to have. Two national championships in that car...one against Strelnieks (Pro).

In Stock form, there are two major issues, both caused by body roll. The first is the camber problem, and the other is rear toe change (rear roll steer). While it will help mid-corner, adding toe out to the rear will make the car unstable in transitions. And the latter are the car's forte.

I agree with Dave on the rear bar...start there and build everything around it. Put brand new factory bushings on the OE front bar to get everything you can out of it. And you really want that rear bar to be adjustable, so as to deal with different surfaces and weather.

Next, get really good rear shocks (Koni RACE/SPSS, as a minimum, or AST singles with DDP upgrades would be even better). This will slow down the roll to where the rear suspension doesn't overshoot, and also give you another knob to tune with.

Finally, buy a pair of SPC rear toe adjusters with spherical rod ends. No, they aren't legal, but you are gong to use them to test with. Start at zero rear toe and work in both directions until you get a feel for what the car does each way.

As Dave suggests, get thee to the alignment rack and make sure the car is square. If camber on the front is not equal side-to-side, loosen and shift the crossmember or look for bent parts. Most importantly, get the toe all square...and have them tell you what one turn of each SPC adjuster gives you, and also what one turn of the front tie-rod gives you. That will help in the testing.

We used to run massive rear toe-in, along with an HF front bar to make the cars work. With the new bar allowance, I'd go the other way and use massive rear bar along with stock front. Combine that with the good rear shocks and you're there. We had one of the first three sets of SPSS prototypes that Koni built back then and they were magic compared to the regular Sports.

Oh yeah, and verify that none of the OE suspension bushings is toast. That big RTA is notorius, as are the front radius arm bushings.

If you end up running r-comps, consider running staggered. V710 runs at larger slip angles than A6. Try them on the rear. Or vice versa...you never know. And if on street tires, put either Falken RT-61K or pixie dust (195 R1R) on the rear to settle it.

See you in Toledo next weekend. Ask me more there.

Listen to Andy. He knows way more than I about making these things work in stock form. I was one of those idiots who was in SM by my 5th event because I kept adding parts. :)

Might have been brought up already, but if you can find a good alignment shop, the upper control arms can be bent slightly to gain negative camber. A lot of the top national guys did this back when the EF's were running competitively in DS and ES. Bob Smith taught me that one. But you can't exceed factory tolerances, of course.

Thanks Andy for the insight. I'll make sure to try and find you and say hi this coming weekend.

I had a test and tune event today so I spend a lot of time playing with different settings on the car(except for toe, didn't have time as I was tuning the crx as well), I have it to a point where it feels pretty good.

I replaced every last bushing on the car this winter, and when I was done I zero'd out the alignment. so that is all good and new.

Since the new stock rules only allow you to change in one bar, I did in fact keep the stock front and go with a giant adjustable 24mm rear bar. I believe the sedan's front bar is also 1mm larger than the hatchback Si's.

Since this car will never be competitive at a national level, combined with the fact that I am a college student with limited amount of cash to throw around, the off the shelf koni's are in there for the long run.

R-comps I use are just whatever I can find for free or super cheap(used obviously), so I don't have much choice there except to run what is available. right now I have 7 year old v710's.(Which still have a lot more grip than my star specs!). I could certainly tell that they like more slip than the hoosiers I am used to running, it made for a very entertaining drive!

I will make sure to play with rear toe settings in the future, I have a feeling that a smidge of toe-in with the big rear bar would be excellent, as I have no problem introducing oversteer with my bar set to full-stiff at 0 toe.

Bravenrace, I will also look more into bending the arms if I get desperate for more speed :)

And Dave, I feel your pain. My father and I started off in SSM(now SMF, thank god). I wish I learned in a slow car to start!

Thanks for all the help guys!

bravenrace wrote: Might have been brought up already, but if you can find a good alignment shop, the upper control arms can be bent slightly to gain negative camber. A lot of the top national guys did this back when the EF's were running competitively in DS and ES. Bob Smith taught me that one. But you can't exceed factory tolerances, of course.

Clever, but not legal.

While the car may be in factory spec overall, the part itself isn't. The factory camber variance is due to tolerance stacking of everything that contributes to camber. And only a small part of that comes from the control arm.

Tell Bob I said hi.

In reply to Andy Hollis:

Andy, I didn't know it was illegal. It was something he told me back in the early to mid '90's, and I never bothered to do it. There is an alignment shop in my town that does do that, but I'm sure there are other reasons people do it than for stock class auto-x.
In any case, I wouldn't have mentioned it if I thought it was illegal.
I'd say Hi to Bob for you, but I haven't talked to him in years.