Re: Vorshlag 2011 Mustang GT 5.0 - auto-x/track build
Project Update for August 2, 2011 (part 2 of 2): Sorry for the delay on "part 2", but the construction at the new Vorshlag headquarters is eating up every minute of my day. This past week the demolition inside the new space was finished and electrical work is finally getting back on schedule. Let's finish the July updates for the Mustang while I have a few free minutes.
SW Div Autocross #3 - Our most recent event in the car was a 2-day autocross in mid July, where Amy and I drove it (Costas had work stuff pop up). This was the 3rd of 3 SCCA Southwest Divisional Series events, run on a pair of Roger Johnson courses across the biggest patch of concrete around, in College Station, Texas. I went to school there (TAMU!) and ran with the college sports car club for many years (TAMSCC!), and even setup dozens of courses there myself as autocross chairman over the years. The area they had acquired for this weekend was the most prime real estate available at this old air force base, and most importantly it was our first real race in the STX Mustang on concrete , making a great test of the car, just a month before Nationals.
(click thumbnails of course maps to enlarge)
The courses were... very narrow-car-centric, very tight, and very busy. And long - it took 25 minutes to walk the damn things. Cones frakking everywhere. They were very challenging to drive, as is evidenced by the large number of cones hit and DNFs over both days. It looked to me that the small/narrow cars did disproportionally well, due to the narrowness of some transitions (where it was a 3 transition section in wide cars, but a straight in a Miata), but "that's autocrossing". Not knocking Roger, as this is what we see at Nationals from some course designers, and he was probably just prepping everyone for what they should expect. Just can be very frustrating in a wide car like the S197 Mustang.
It was also damned hot - Texas is in the middle of over 30+ days of 100°F heat, and this weekend in July was no exception. The SW Divisional Steward (Todd!) had brought out two massive swamp coolers and a big tent, and we hung out there during our "off" heat on Sunday, which was a life saver. I was also lucky to score a prime work assignment driving the chase car, picking up the cone sheets between runs, so I shouldn't complain about the heat. Vorshlag being a SW Division sponsor doesn't hurt, I guess! But it was so hot that it became another tire-boiling event, with Amy and I running in the same heat, back to back to back.
This time we brought a new tire sprayer (20X better than the last!), and used melted iced water from the cooler to spray the tires, hitting the rears 2-3 times between runs - and boy were they hot, especially after my runs. Since the run order had us running close together, we had a 5 minute clock on us between runs (grid was very well run), which made driver changes pretty hectic again. I guess the car handled as well as we could expect given the course design, excessive heat, and horrific steering shudder. We had the new ARH headers and cat-X-pipe and custom tune, with 21 more hp at the wheels across the rev range for this event as well. Rear tire spin was again a serious issue, but its just another element we have to work with until we can get the Watts and a better differential (lots more fab time and testing needed). I'd rather have too much power than not enough, but if I was smarter I'd have too little weight and less power, as that is what SCCA Solo rewards. Like, say, a 1900 pound ST car in STX. That would be fast!
Our regular, faster STX competitors from the Texas Region were not at this event - the Maxcy's, and Ledbetter's 328is BMWs stayed in Dallas this weekend - so we didn't have much to gauge our performance on, except each others times, STR/STU times, and PAX. Not to knock the two STX competitors who were at this Div, who were in a stone stock RX8 on the OEM tires driving their guts out; they had a lot less prep on their car for the class. My drive in STX class was bad, frustrating, and I coned my fastest runs on both days, which were 1.4 seconds quicker on Saturday and 1 second quicker on Sunday, than my clean runs. I cannot explain this huge gap in my clean vs dirty runs, other than I drove like a hack. I haven't been leaving that much time out there, even in this "difficult to drive car". This was almost as frustrating as the STU Nats win I threw away in 2005 with cones on 2 different runs (as did my co-driver). So this weekend I had 3 cones in 8 runs over 2 days (whereas Amy hit 7 over both days, but never on her quickest runs!), which was still a fairly low cone count for this event (some normally quick drivers had upwards of 3-7+ cones per run and cone counts in the teens for the two days - it was a busy course), but those cones cost me dearly. Even without those cones, and 2.4 seconds quicker times, my PAX placing would have still been "meh". I was 6 seconds behind STR and STU over both days as well - not a good finish.
Left: Terry, driving around a dirty sweeper sideways, like a jackhole. Right: Amy, driving in the same corner, was smooth and fast
My dirty driving and her smoothness allowed Amy to "skirt" me pretty badly for both days - around .9 sec. She had me by .4 sec on Saturday and .5 sec on Sunday clean. It was already frustrating enough but then every announcer in each run group on both days had to rub that it in continuously. "Terry's getting skirted!" comments were popping up every 5 minutes, even in the 2 heats we didn't run in... Ugh. Here's a tip - don't co-drive with your wife if she's fast and you have thin skin. Amy was a good sport and didn't kick me while I was down, at least.
Amy drove some solidly quick runs but still barely won the PAXed "women's class" at the event (a class we have in this Division to avoid having a dozen 1 car entry Ladies' classes), and the win pushed her to the 3 event Division Series W class championship. She had to fight for it, beating some quick drivers/cars. My STX class win did the same for me, but with the Maxcy & Ledbetter STX cars not in attendance at 2 of the 3 SW Div events, it was a hollow victory. More important - our PAX times were NOT good, slotting us well down in the 29th and 34th places. Yeesh... This again points clearly how far back the car still is, better than anything else. We weren't keeping up with the two fast STX cars/drivers at regional events, and not PAXing well at these Divisional events, so why would we take this car to Nationals?
Long story short - we aren't going to take it to Nationals this year. Its more than just the poor performance of the car (which has been consistently slow over 3 drivers, all of whom have trophied or won at National SCCA events) that's keeping us from bringing the red Mustang to STX/Nationals this year. There's lots of other reasons, but the lack of performance in the car with 3 somewhat proven drivers, and the wacked out steering problem we haven't nailed down yet, are reason enough.
I'm also swamped for the entire month with moving Vorshlag into its new building. What I thought would be 8-10 days of construction is looking more like 20-25, including days, nights and weekends. We had to gut the commercial space to make the layout work for us, but at least now we'll have a pretty big shop - that's air conditioned. When its 100-107°F outside its still 100+ inside a non-climate controlled shop. Everyone here will be glad to get out of this crushing heat and into a well lit, spaceous, and air conditioned shop space.
I could point to a bunch of other reasons, like the continued allowance of the ST>STX "upclass jumping" (aka: poaching), which is finally supposed to end in 2012. Then there's the expense of going to Nationals; we'll drop $3000+ in entry fees, fuel towing to/from Lincoln from Dallas, hotel rooms, and food + each of us will lose a week of work. Mostly its the performance of the car and the timing with our shop move.
More preparation needed - Costas and I would consider the car about "half-prepped", at best. We still have the single adjustable shocks on there, and however good they may be, they are still single adjustable shocks and can only get us so far if conditions change or we need to alter the set-up. We do have the Moton Club Sport doubles revalved, and pretty much ready to go onto the car, as of last Friday - but its going to take 1-2 days of testing to get the car reliably fast, possibly including a revalve of the shocks, and we just don't have the days to attack that this month. We're out of time, and the car is just not ready.
We've had a dozen people say "just slap some Hoosiers on it and run ESP", but there's a lot more to ESP prep than big gumball tires, and I'm not fool enough to think we'd keep up with Madderash, Merideth, or Strano in an STX prepped car with Hoosiers thrown on at the last minute.
We're not giving up on the Mustang. I agreed up front to give it 2 years in STX, and that's what we plan to do. Next season we will have time to make a better lateral locating device for the solid rear axle, like a Watts Link, which the car needs for several reasons. Plus there are lots of rear suspension tweaks in STX, unique to a stick axle car, we can still exploit that we just haven't touched. We also never got a chance to swap in/tune/test with an aftermarket differential, which any autocrossed car with over 400 whp desperately needs, especially one that comes with a craptastic clutch-style diff like this car. The electronic steering "issue" is also pretty massive, getting worse, and Ford cannot seem to fix it at the moment. You don't take a broken car to Nationals. And the car isn't even competitive locally, yet. It's as simple is that, and all 3 drivers were in agreement for this year. We ran out of time with respect to testing and additional parts development, and just were not seeing the results we needed to see in the last 2 months of running events to then invest thousands of dollars to go get ~30-40th place in STX at Nationals, especially when ST cars were allowed to run in STX that weigh half as much as ours'.
I hate excuses, but we do have quite a long list amassed this time. We've had several choice co-drives offered for Nationals for Costas, myself, and Amy, and as much as those are appreciated, the business construction/move work is really where we need to be spending our time this month. So we'll spend August setting up the new shop instead of last minute testing, parts installation, and a week in Lincoln. We have the $2011 Challenge to prep for in just 2 month's time as well, and our crapcan E30 V8 needs a lot of repair and set-up work to get ready for that. After that event in early October, we'll jump back to the Mustang (and also the TTD 330 with it's new motor, the E46 LS1 Alpha car development, the black E36 M3 LS1 car, and many other project cars in the Vorshlag shop). Its a bitter pill to swallow, and I'm going to miss being at Nationals this year, but I've been enough times in a row to afford to skip this year.
Click the thumbnails above for HiDef videos from Day 1 (Amy, left) and Day 2 (Terry, right) from the Divisional
An opportunity popped up and we will have the Mustang in a booth at the Yellow Rose Classic car show Aug 13-14th in Ft Worth, if you happen to be going stop by and say "hi". Look for us right across from the SCCA Texas Region folks. I don't know if I'll be there both days, but the car and someone from Vorshlag will be.
Since we won't be at the Solo Nationals, please go here to request Vorshlag decals for your car. We can make them to order in a few different colors, but already have lots of 24" decals ready to mail out in black, silver and white. VTPP Testers at Nationals need to be running Vorshlag decals, per VTPP agreements. AST/Moton will have their trailer at Nationals and will have a limited number of Vorshlag decals on hand.
Good luck to all of the drivers at Nats this year!
Project Update for August 2, 2011 (part 2 of 2): Sorry for the delay on "part 2", but the construction at the new Vorshlag headquarters is eating up every minute of my day. This past week the demolition inside the new space was finished and electrical work is finally getting back on schedule. Let's finish the July updates for the Mustang while I have a few free minutes.
SW Div Autocross #3 - Our most recent event in the car was a 2-day autocross in mid July, where Amy and I drove it (Costas had work stuff pop up). This was the 3rd of 3 SCCA Southwest Divisional Series events, run on a pair of Roger Johnson courses across the biggest patch of concrete around, in College Station, Texas. I went to school there (TAMU!) and ran with the college sports car club for many years (TAMSCC!), and even setup dozens of courses there myself as autocross chairman over the years. The area they had acquired for this weekend was the most prime real estate available at this old air force base, and most importantly it was our first real race in the STX Mustang on concrete , making a great test of the car, just a month before Nationals.
(click thumbnails of course maps to enlarge)
The courses were... very narrow-car-centric, very tight, and very busy. And long - it took 25 minutes to walk the damn things. Cones frakking everywhere. They were very challenging to drive, as is evidenced by the large number of cones hit and DNFs over both days. It looked to me that the small/narrow cars did disproportionally well, due to the narrowness of some transitions (where it was a 3 transition section in wide cars, but a straight in a Miata), but "that's autocrossing". Not knocking Roger, as this is what we see at Nationals from some course designers, and he was probably just prepping everyone for what they should expect. Just can be very frustrating in a wide car like the S197 Mustang.
- Results: https://axwaresystems.com/axorm/file...1_fin.html#STX
- PAX results: https://axwaresystems.com/axorm/file..._2011_pax.html
- Pictures: http://www.vorshlag.smugmug.com/Raci...erside-071611/
It was also damned hot - Texas is in the middle of over 30+ days of 100°F heat, and this weekend in July was no exception. The SW Divisional Steward (Todd!) had brought out two massive swamp coolers and a big tent, and we hung out there during our "off" heat on Sunday, which was a life saver. I was also lucky to score a prime work assignment driving the chase car, picking up the cone sheets between runs, so I shouldn't complain about the heat. Vorshlag being a SW Division sponsor doesn't hurt, I guess! But it was so hot that it became another tire-boiling event, with Amy and I running in the same heat, back to back to back.
This time we brought a new tire sprayer (20X better than the last!), and used melted iced water from the cooler to spray the tires, hitting the rears 2-3 times between runs - and boy were they hot, especially after my runs. Since the run order had us running close together, we had a 5 minute clock on us between runs (grid was very well run), which made driver changes pretty hectic again. I guess the car handled as well as we could expect given the course design, excessive heat, and horrific steering shudder. We had the new ARH headers and cat-X-pipe and custom tune, with 21 more hp at the wheels across the rev range for this event as well. Rear tire spin was again a serious issue, but its just another element we have to work with until we can get the Watts and a better differential (lots more fab time and testing needed). I'd rather have too much power than not enough, but if I was smarter I'd have too little weight and less power, as that is what SCCA Solo rewards. Like, say, a 1900 pound ST car in STX. That would be fast!
Our regular, faster STX competitors from the Texas Region were not at this event - the Maxcy's, and Ledbetter's 328is BMWs stayed in Dallas this weekend - so we didn't have much to gauge our performance on, except each others times, STR/STU times, and PAX. Not to knock the two STX competitors who were at this Div, who were in a stone stock RX8 on the OEM tires driving their guts out; they had a lot less prep on their car for the class. My drive in STX class was bad, frustrating, and I coned my fastest runs on both days, which were 1.4 seconds quicker on Saturday and 1 second quicker on Sunday, than my clean runs. I cannot explain this huge gap in my clean vs dirty runs, other than I drove like a hack. I haven't been leaving that much time out there, even in this "difficult to drive car". This was almost as frustrating as the STU Nats win I threw away in 2005 with cones on 2 different runs (as did my co-driver). So this weekend I had 3 cones in 8 runs over 2 days (whereas Amy hit 7 over both days, but never on her quickest runs!), which was still a fairly low cone count for this event (some normally quick drivers had upwards of 3-7+ cones per run and cone counts in the teens for the two days - it was a busy course), but those cones cost me dearly. Even without those cones, and 2.4 seconds quicker times, my PAX placing would have still been "meh". I was 6 seconds behind STR and STU over both days as well - not a good finish.
Left: Terry, driving around a dirty sweeper sideways, like a jackhole. Right: Amy, driving in the same corner, was smooth and fast
My dirty driving and her smoothness allowed Amy to "skirt" me pretty badly for both days - around .9 sec. She had me by .4 sec on Saturday and .5 sec on Sunday clean. It was already frustrating enough but then every announcer in each run group on both days had to rub that it in continuously. "Terry's getting skirted!" comments were popping up every 5 minutes, even in the 2 heats we didn't run in... Ugh. Here's a tip - don't co-drive with your wife if she's fast and you have thin skin. Amy was a good sport and didn't kick me while I was down, at least.
Amy drove some solidly quick runs but still barely won the PAXed "women's class" at the event (a class we have in this Division to avoid having a dozen 1 car entry Ladies' classes), and the win pushed her to the 3 event Division Series W class championship. She had to fight for it, beating some quick drivers/cars. My STX class win did the same for me, but with the Maxcy & Ledbetter STX cars not in attendance at 2 of the 3 SW Div events, it was a hollow victory. More important - our PAX times were NOT good, slotting us well down in the 29th and 34th places. Yeesh... This again points clearly how far back the car still is, better than anything else. We weren't keeping up with the two fast STX cars/drivers at regional events, and not PAXing well at these Divisional events, so why would we take this car to Nationals?
Long story short - we aren't going to take it to Nationals this year. Its more than just the poor performance of the car (which has been consistently slow over 3 drivers, all of whom have trophied or won at National SCCA events) that's keeping us from bringing the red Mustang to STX/Nationals this year. There's lots of other reasons, but the lack of performance in the car with 3 somewhat proven drivers, and the wacked out steering problem we haven't nailed down yet, are reason enough.
I'm also swamped for the entire month with moving Vorshlag into its new building. What I thought would be 8-10 days of construction is looking more like 20-25, including days, nights and weekends. We had to gut the commercial space to make the layout work for us, but at least now we'll have a pretty big shop - that's air conditioned. When its 100-107°F outside its still 100+ inside a non-climate controlled shop. Everyone here will be glad to get out of this crushing heat and into a well lit, spaceous, and air conditioned shop space.
I could point to a bunch of other reasons, like the continued allowance of the ST>STX "upclass jumping" (aka: poaching), which is finally supposed to end in 2012. Then there's the expense of going to Nationals; we'll drop $3000+ in entry fees, fuel towing to/from Lincoln from Dallas, hotel rooms, and food + each of us will lose a week of work. Mostly its the performance of the car and the timing with our shop move.
More preparation needed - Costas and I would consider the car about "half-prepped", at best. We still have the single adjustable shocks on there, and however good they may be, they are still single adjustable shocks and can only get us so far if conditions change or we need to alter the set-up. We do have the Moton Club Sport doubles revalved, and pretty much ready to go onto the car, as of last Friday - but its going to take 1-2 days of testing to get the car reliably fast, possibly including a revalve of the shocks, and we just don't have the days to attack that this month. We're out of time, and the car is just not ready.
We've had a dozen people say "just slap some Hoosiers on it and run ESP", but there's a lot more to ESP prep than big gumball tires, and I'm not fool enough to think we'd keep up with Madderash, Merideth, or Strano in an STX prepped car with Hoosiers thrown on at the last minute.
We're not giving up on the Mustang. I agreed up front to give it 2 years in STX, and that's what we plan to do. Next season we will have time to make a better lateral locating device for the solid rear axle, like a Watts Link, which the car needs for several reasons. Plus there are lots of rear suspension tweaks in STX, unique to a stick axle car, we can still exploit that we just haven't touched. We also never got a chance to swap in/tune/test with an aftermarket differential, which any autocrossed car with over 400 whp desperately needs, especially one that comes with a craptastic clutch-style diff like this car. The electronic steering "issue" is also pretty massive, getting worse, and Ford cannot seem to fix it at the moment. You don't take a broken car to Nationals. And the car isn't even competitive locally, yet. It's as simple is that, and all 3 drivers were in agreement for this year. We ran out of time with respect to testing and additional parts development, and just were not seeing the results we needed to see in the last 2 months of running events to then invest thousands of dollars to go get ~30-40th place in STX at Nationals, especially when ST cars were allowed to run in STX that weigh half as much as ours'.
I hate excuses, but we do have quite a long list amassed this time. We've had several choice co-drives offered for Nationals for Costas, myself, and Amy, and as much as those are appreciated, the business construction/move work is really where we need to be spending our time this month. So we'll spend August setting up the new shop instead of last minute testing, parts installation, and a week in Lincoln. We have the $2011 Challenge to prep for in just 2 month's time as well, and our crapcan E30 V8 needs a lot of repair and set-up work to get ready for that. After that event in early October, we'll jump back to the Mustang (and also the TTD 330 with it's new motor, the E46 LS1 Alpha car development, the black E36 M3 LS1 car, and many other project cars in the Vorshlag shop). Its a bitter pill to swallow, and I'm going to miss being at Nationals this year, but I've been enough times in a row to afford to skip this year.
Click the thumbnails above for HiDef videos from Day 1 (Amy, left) and Day 2 (Terry, right) from the Divisional
An opportunity popped up and we will have the Mustang in a booth at the Yellow Rose Classic car show Aug 13-14th in Ft Worth, if you happen to be going stop by and say "hi". Look for us right across from the SCCA Texas Region folks. I don't know if I'll be there both days, but the car and someone from Vorshlag will be.
Since we won't be at the Solo Nationals, please go here to request Vorshlag decals for your car. We can make them to order in a few different colors, but already have lots of 24" decals ready to mail out in black, silver and white. VTPP Testers at Nationals need to be running Vorshlag decals, per VTPP agreements. AST/Moton will have their trailer at Nationals and will have a limited number of Vorshlag decals on hand.
Good luck to all of the drivers at Nats this year!
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