The guys in the STX thread are probably sick of my mind-dump posts on this(ish) subject so I figured I'd start my own thread

I want to go faster

I've been thinking a lot about how I want to achieve this next season and I've hit a bit of a wall. After this past season, I've pretty firmly wedged myself into a corner. I've now got several adjustment points (camber, ride height, "shock dampening" [coilovers of unknown quality, no shock dyno yet], sway bars and hell, tire pressures) on my 8 that I barely know how to use. Compound this with the fact that after many long IM's/conversations with a very patient friend back in Massachusetts and no end to tips/advice/rides from the locals and members on these boards, I'm now a much faster driver than I was at the start of last season... but now I can tell I suck

What all this comes down to is:
So, my first thought was to find someone with a well setup car and ask to dual drive for a series (BSCC comes to mind, leaving NWR SCCA as where I compete in my own car). I was thinking if I could find someone with a car that's a little bit older and has an established formula for setup that the car would remain pretty static over the course of the year it would work well. I actually like this option a lot but the hitch is that I haven't found such a person and I like driving my own car for guilt/liability reasons I've put other people's cars pretty sideways before and I'm not wild about going through the growing pains of my second season in someone else's car.

So, barring that, my next thought was "hey, why don't I do what Zack told me to do from the beginning and buy a Miata?" Aside from having to admit that Zack (my buddy from back in MA) was right and I bought the wrong car, a decent one with an LSD is still $3-4k minimum which is way more than my mod budget for the 8 for next season... and I'd have no budget to actually setup the Miata.

So... this lead me back to Craigslist. I was poking around and yah know, it's pretty easy to pick up an RX-7 GXL in good condition for $1-1.5k. The more I think about it the more attractive the idea of buying one has become:
So... Talk me out of it guys. Right now this seems a bit... too reasonable frankly. I think I can keep my insurance total about the same for the two cars and I can live with spending another $1-1.5k setting the 7 up properly if it means learning enough to not waste the same amount on parts I won't fully understand for the 8 (Better coilovers have been starting to look pretty attractive...).


Other things I've considered:



Anyways, I'm locked in indecision here guys, help me out! The more opinions I get the more confused I'll be, which is good because I end up holding off on acting and saving more money that way

 

Buying an old car as a track car isn't a bad idea but in the beginning of your post you say you want to go faster.

That will be harder in a older and slower car, you will probably end up spending big money in suspension upgrades.

There is no magic about that, you get what you pay for when it comes to dampers for example.

 

Interesting dilemma...

If you bought a FC for 1-1.5K, how much more $$$ would you invest in setting it up? If it's another 1-2K, then it might be worth looking at miatas in that price range.

Personally, if it was my money I'd look for a used '90-'91 miata that has a mild STS prep on it for around 3K. Get a fresh set of tires and go run as many events as you can afford next season. There are some very established formulas for setting up those early STS miatas, and those cars are an absolute hoot to drive at the limit.

So my vote would be for a miata.

 

Do you want to go faster? Or win more

You don't need to spend anything except driving costs/school fees to go faster

Winning more is a whole different animal.....

Unless you buy a car that is a lok for a certain class...you will always be chasing your tail to go fast enough to win, and there will always be someone with a bigger pocket book to buy more stuff.....

I really admire the guys that are great drivers that can jump into almost anything...and go fast

My vote would be the Miata too if you want something to compete in that won't kill your pocketbook

 

If you are regularly tracking and want to compete its not a bad idea to get a Miata. They are great cars to both improve your skills and compete in a lot of events. I've heard this repeated by every professional driver I've ever talked to. You can get one for relatively cheap and you don't need much of a mod budget to get started. I think a Miata is a much better idea than an older RX-7 personally.

 

If you want to go faster you need the miata. Period. End of story.

Look at the results, look at the times, look at which one is faster...............Miata.

If you're buying a $1500 FC what items will you HAVE to replace in terms of wear to get back to ground zero? For as much development is available for the FC there is 3X as much for the Miata and since so many more are STILL being campaigned that development is still fresh and ongoing.

I've had all of them and the 8 is like a big Miata....with more power (and roll too but meh).

If you want to reduce setup issues quit buying stuff that needs to be adjusted. If you aren't using those things then they are worthless to anything but your signature. The datalogging could help you use all of those new goodies though.

Someone else mentioned it but it bares repeating........do you wanna go faster or do you want to win? Those are two very different ideas. Just my .02.

Here's another idea. Buy the miata or the FC and go road racing. Now that's some fun. Think about it, you look for tenths of a second on the autocross course over the course of a lap that lasts around a minute. On the racetrack you can look for seconds on each lap and do this for 15-20 laps. In roadracing you can actually force someone into making a mistake so that you can take the lead. And you can do this on almost every corner of the track. The cash outlay is really about the same, I can't tell you how many $5000 racecars I've ran across.

Just another thought. Do with it as you please.

 

Nick, i believe one of those was my car



I think you should just keep the 8 as your only car. Another car for another class is just going to turn into another money pit

I know you dont want to take your car on the track before it's paid off but honestly it's not that bad. You're not competing at a track day and you can just go at your own pace, albeit a quick one Leave your traction control on, work on your lines, work on throttle and braking control and being smooth (because you have to be a lot smoother at a road course going 50-120 mph than you do on a flat piece of pavement going 0-60 mph). There is plenty of space at PR if you dabble over the limit in the corners and it's not like you're a complete noob, you know what you're doing and can control your car to make corrections if need be.

You'll learn a lot after just a few track days that you can apply to making you faster on an autox course. For me, after driving at a few track days and going back to autocross i found myself driving completely different -- and a lot faster.

Pay off your car ASAP so you can stop worrying about that and then when you're ready and have the money, buy the perfect car for the right class and spec it out perfectly to dominate the competition. By then you'll have the driving skills to do it and you wont have to half-*** it by buying a cheap clunker which you're still struggling to keep competitive in it's class.

My .02

 

^Well said. HPDE events really show you a whole other side of the car that you don't always get to experience at a short AutoCross course. You'll learn that lifting going through a corner at over 100 is a bad thing!!

 

Stop throwing money at the car. If you want to spend money on it, send that money to the bank. Right now, it's not really your car.

Don't buy another car. A $1500 track toy can quickly become a $6-10k track toy. Really quickly. You've got to make it reliable for starters - I've never seen a 20-year old car that didn't need some work before I felt safe driving it at triple digit speeds. Add suspension upgrades, new wheels and tires, pads, rotors, some safety equipment, and all of a sudden you're talking about real money.

If you have to spend money, spend it on the driver. This is always the best bang for the buck, since you can make any car faster when you make the driver faster. Go to a couple of Evo schools. Go to as many events as you can. Talk to a more experienced driver about co-driving your car. Go to some track days, and see what the car feels like at higher speeds. Seat time, seat time, seat time. You can't get faster unless you put in the time.

Now that you have so many things you can adjust, start tinkering with them, and see what impact they have on the car. Turn the front rebound all the way up and see how the car feels. Turn it all the way down and see how the car reacts. Disconnect a sway bar and see what happens. Drastically adjust the tire pressure. Two caveats:

• Only change one thing at a time. Otherwise, you'll never be able to isolate how changing each thing impacts the car.
• Take notes. Otherwise, you won't remember what does what.

That's my advice. I see guys all the time that have a car full of shiny go-fast goodies, and they're slow. Usually, they don't know why they're so slow, since they've spent so much money. They think if they just buy one more widget, they won't be slow any more. They're wrong.

The driver is always more important than the car.

 

.... yah


A lot of people said more or less this so I'm going to respond to it for Chris: The primary reason I would get a second car would be to have one that has a well established setup that I couldn't mess up. The idea here was to isolate the driver from the car. I want to be able to identify when an improvement has come from me vs. the car.

I'm REALLY, REALLY torn on the HPDE thing... I'm going to make mistakes, it's a part of how I/humans learn. I'd prefer if the mistakes don't have much of a chance of totaling a car I haven't paid off and potentially don't have track insurance for. I put my own car sideways through the finish lights at an Autox once in the wet. The car kicked left, I corrected and brought it back in line and was too impatient in waiting for it to settle before getting on the throttle again. I could make that mistake on 80% of Bremerton and nearly 100% of Packwood and be fine, no worries at all, but what about PR? (Note: it was poor course design, two experienced other drivers did the same thing in the exact same spot with one of them ending up out on the grass. This was a BSCC event while everyone else was out at nationals)

Add to that the increased tire and brake wear of HPDE's + autocrossing with 2 clubs and their respective practice days and it's going to put a lot of unknowns into my budget for the season.

I know I'm making excuses but as a general statement, I over analyze everything I do so these things matter to me

Good advice. As I said before, the primary reason I would want a second car is to have a car in an established formula so that I can isolate the driver. I want to avoid the question "Did I get faster because I changed X on the car or because I did Y differently when I drove?"... but I could completely see myself being like "well... a lot of other people had better luck with lighter springs and stiffer bars and..." and spending way more money than I set out to on a second car.

$1k in mods to bring a car up to an established formula may be too optimistic. Especially with, as you say, added repairs to get it to a point where I'm comfortable with it on a track.


Absolutely spot on with my thinking. My problem is... I guess I'm that guy who has put all the shiny stuff on the car and is now trying to figure out how to go faster. I don't really want to take the shiny stuff off because well, it does make the car faster. I definitely want to hit the evo schools and the first thing I bought for 2010 was a GoPro HD so I can start recording my driving. I'm actually thinking about buying a 2nd camera for use inside the car to watch my inputs as well.

One piece of advice I've been given is to just plain leave the car alone. Put it into a ballpark, reasonable setup and then don't touch it. Make sure the tire pressures are the same every event and then just go for it. The idea being once again to isolate changes in my driving from changes in the car. The problem is I KNOW the car's setup isn't ideal and I suffer heavily from "If you give a mouse a cookie" syndrome:

I'm going to start tweaking things, one at a time of course, but 10 runs in at a practice day I'll be going faster and still not know why so I'll keep changing things and likely get myself completely confused.


altiain, I really like the idea of keeping notes, and I definitely think I'm going to do that. What I really need... is a ton of practice/test and tune days with timing and cone replacement in play.

Thanks for the advice everyone, I think I've been successfully talked into not buying a 2nd car and leaving mine more or less alone. I'm definitely going to do the Evo schools and I'll continue to do every single autox event available to me. I feel like I've had this same discussion 12 times now... and I probably have. The off-season needs to hurry up and be over, I probably just have blue *****

 

The end goal is to be faster in my 8. I'm already off the bottom pegs in STX (woohoo! Finally...). A cone in one of my last SCCA events kept me from beating someone I had considered to be a much better driver than me all season... but the NWR of the SCCA has way too many nationally competitive drivers in STX (now with FAR too many of them also driving RX-8's ) for me to expect to actually win or something.

Though I'd be more than happy to add to my collection of pint glasses from my novice days

God, don't get my started on THOSE ********

One of my best friends from high school (Zack in the OP) has turned out to be one of those guys. He's inherently quick in every car you put him in. He's pretty regularly beating guys on race tires in his under prepared CSP Miata on freaking street tires.

He visited me out in WA for a couple weeks and we went to 5 events. In that time we installed the coilovers as well. The first day was a 1.7 mile practice autox and he was ~2.5 seconds ahead of me all day, but every ride I got with him in my car saw a noticeable improvement in my next run. By the end of his visit, he was still 1.5 seconds ahead of me in my own car by the end of an event. At one of the practice days we went to, he hopped in my friend in WA's '91 Miata which was a bone stock and came within 2 seconds of my best time thus far in the 8.

Back here in MA (home for the holidays) he got a chance to drive someone's C5 Z06 at an autox. They were apparently taking bets on the side line as to how many times he was going to spin but instead he knocked 2.something seconds off the owner's best time over the course of 3 runs.

Needless to say I value his advice a lot, but I'm rather sick of hearing "You bought the wrong car" (So is my other friend from HS with a S2000)

 

Do me a favor and buy me a track toy. I'll use it for you, and tell you all about it!

 

You absolutely, positively will not be able to buy an FC or an old Miata and "bring it up to an established formula" (whatever that means) for $1000. Your prep budget is utterly unrealistic.

A set of good 205/50-15 street tires for either car is going to set you back $450-500 at a minimum. That's half your budget right there, and you haven't even touched any of the hard parts or addressed any maintenance issues. A twenty year old track car is going to have plenty of maintenance issues.

It's your money. Spend it wisely.

 

I'm with Iain; I don't see how a dedicated track could cost any less than $5k just to get it to the track in any reasonable condition. Making it competitive is probably additional $$$. Either the base car is old and cheap and will require repairs and upgrades or it's newer or pre-prepped which means the cost will be factored into the car.

Spend money on the nut behind the wheel first.

 

Being the smart guy I am, I'd completely forgotten about tires when estimating prices

My thought with the $1k number was shocks, springs, bars and an alignment. Most of these things will have somewhat agreed upon settings for an STS build... but then more money on tires, likely brake pads, the possible need to rebuild the engine, deal with whatever shape the ball joints and struts are in... you're completely right, it's an entirely unrealistic budget.

 

Did you buy a car to mod it or drive it?

 

FC is way cooler looking than a Miata. But for the track? I think the Miata would be the better choice. S2000 is made for midgets and little folk.

 

keep the 8 and spend your money on an Evo school and more events. as Iain said, a "cheap" autoX toy can quickly become an expensive autoX toy. and even if you are a better driver than you were before, i can almost guarantee you that there is still plenty of time to pick up out there. there always is, even for national trophy winners.

buying and setting up the car might cost about the same, but as someone who regularly does both, i can tell you that the ongoing costs of road racing are a LOT higher than those for autoxing. you can pay for an entire season's worth of autoX entry fees for the cost of one road race weekend.

 

Drive it of course

Comparing you and I is actually a good illustration of the problem. Let's say next time TJ gets the crazy idea in his head to do a 1.3 mile autox practice day we both go and by the end of the day, there's around 1 second between our best times (not saying who was faster intentionally). Why? Or what if we ended up dead even?

I don't think either of us would be confident answering either question.




P.S., that course was totally sweet:
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Trust me - you're not the first guy with this idea.

I figure you're looking at shocks, alignment, spare set of wheels, tires, pads, rotors, brake lines, plugs, wires, timing belt (if it's not a rotary) and all fluids at a bare minimum. Might as well add springs if you're putting in new shocks, so add that cost as well.

Even on a Miata or FC with cheap 15" wheels and parts through Mazdacomp you're probably looking at $2k-3k in the above parts, and that's assuming the rest of the car is in good working condition, and doesn't account for any safety equipment. If it's going to be a track car figure at least a roll bar and harnesses as well, and maybe a seat.

It all adds up quickly, to the point where it almost makes more sense to buy someone else's sorted mid-pack Spec Miata for $10k.

 

I vote pay off car sooner. And use the money for more/different track and autocross events.

 

I got into Stock classes exactly for this reason. I got tired of leaving every event thinking "maybe I need a new swaybar" or whatever. I think buying another car will just get you further down the path of trying new things to go faster (although I do highly recommend trying different cars as a driver development aid).

If I were you I would return the RX8 to stock prep and drive it like that, but I imagine this wouldn't be your preference. Barring this, I would copy the setup of someone who is doing well in the class (Jason's setup is pretty well described in Sportscar) then leave the car alone. Get a local hotshoe to drive it if you need a second opinion on how well it is set up, but then don't mess with it until you are sure you are getting the most out of the driver.

If the car is mostly there, you are not going to find more than a half second or so in setup, so if you are not there, leave it alone and concentrate on your driving. You make pick up time monkeying with the car, but you will most likely be compensating for driving errors.

all IMHO.

Jim

 

Duplicating Jason's setup may be outside my budget... I'll have to go back and re-examine it when I get back from MA.

 

I didn't mean duplicate exactly. Just get the settings in the same ball park (ride hight, wheel rates, and roll couple distribution).