The Slow Lane

I gots some catching up to do. Event 1 was back on April 20th. That was a month ago. We kicked the season off at Warminster, and abandoned airstrip. Long fast transition heavy courses are the norm there. I have picked up a co-driver for this season. Doug, a fellow member of the Timing & Scoring team, and the same guy that let me drive his STU RX-8 at the Divisional last year is in between cars this year and need a ride. I figure he can push me as a driver, help with development, and maybe help wrench. The first event was a learning experience on several levels. Doug wanted to play with settings since I have just been running the tire pressures suggested by Andy Hollis and shock settings suggested by Geoff Chambers.

STS2 ran in the morning so we bought some non-comp runs in the afternoon. We kept the tires at 36 psi, what I remember Andy saying was best when he did his testing of the Bridgestones and tried a couple different shock settings. First Doug thought the front needed more rebound damping. The shocks were only 1/4 turn off full stiff. I adjusted to 1/8 turn from full stiff and he felt it was better. I couldn’t tell the difference honestly. Then we lowered the rear shocks just a tad, from 3/8 to 1/4 turn from full soft. Doug thinks going to stiffer front springs, like 600 lb/in, will take some stress of the shocks and allow then to run at lower rebound levels. At first I thought that was BS but now I can see how that might be true. I am worried about upsetting the balance of the car. And I wasn’t planning on buying new springs. I figured I’d wait until I could really drive the car before I went stiffer.

During the afternoon non-comp runs we played with tire presssure. We tried higher which I thought felt good but Doug didn’t like. Lower just plain sucked. Then Doug was using his tire pressure gauge to adjust the pressures and we found something out. MY GAUGE WAS OFF. It was reading 4 psi too high! Needless to say I wasn’t happy about that. Doug suggested we try a lower rear pressure. I had never heard anyone suggest that on an STS2 Miata but figured I’d try it just to keep him happy. So I went out on 32 front (where the tires had been b/c I thought they were 36) and 30 in the rear. Every Warminster course has a big 180 turn at the end of the runway and I immediately spun in it. Nope, don’t like lower rear tire pressures! We settled on 34 psi.

The other thing I learned from riding with Doug is that I was slowing for parts of the course I didn’t need to be. I knew I was doing that from last year but I need someone to tell me I’m doing it. I think I’m still just used to driving a FWD car, especially the front heavy Prelude. But I have to work on intentionally telling myself I don’t have to break in certain situations, especially offsets. Most of the time just a lift will do, and sometimes you don’t even have to lift. I finished 4th out of 9 in STS2, 2.036 out of 1st, and 42nd out of 144 in overall PAX.

I’ve hinted about this in my previous two posts. Andy Hollis has raved about the results of installing one of these. Things like lightweight pulleys may give you back a horsepower or two. But when you only have 110 or so to the ground an extra one or two must make a big difference. Unlike the Prelude where the norm is to replace the P/S pump and alternator pulleys with lightweight aluminum versions that also spin the components slower the norm for the early Miatas is to replace the crank pulley with a lightened one. Unorthodox Racing is a leader in this area and is the brand that Andy used. Unfortunately right after he wrote his blog post Unorthodox decided to cancel production of this unit for 1.6L Miatas due to (presumably) slow sales. Doh!

After Unorthodox canceled the item I attempted to track one down via their distributors but no one had any in stock and most had taken the item out of there online catalogs a while ago. It was time to turn to eBay and the OBX brand. Several people had used the OBX and it worked fine but there were reports of having to alter the bolt hole pattern. Apparently some of them were drilled incorrectly. Oddly a few weeks after Unorthodox pulled the 1.6L pulley OBX pulleys for the 1.6L disappeared from eBay. OBX doesn’t sell direct, only through eBay so I couldn’t find a contact for them. I gave up on the idea except for keeping my eye out for a used one to pop up for sale.

Eric Simmons, a local competitor picked up a Miata to race in STS2 (he quickly changed his mind and is now in CSP ). He managed to find an outfit called ISC Racing which had a 1.6L Miata crank pulley on their website. A few posts on rr-ax.com and I found out ISC Racing was a reputable place and it was actually the OBX one that was modified to remove the P/S & A/C belt portion of the pulley for lower weight. Good and bad. Andy Hollis had done this to his. But I was planning on keeping my P/S. See my previous post on that. This issue weighed in on my decision to ditch the P/S. After that it was a no brainer to pick one of these up. I am excited to see how much it “wakes up the engine” after ll I’ve hard about it. Best of all since Eric is converting his car to CSP and will be installing a more powerful motor from a 99+ he offered to sell me his. Now all I have to do is find a manual rack.

A popular thing to do for STS2 Miatas is convert them to “Base Models” that did not have power steering or radios or power windows. This is done to make the car lighter. And the absence of a power steering pump frees up a horsepower or two. I have been debating whether or not to do this “conversion” on my car. The only downside to converting to a manual steering gear is that they have a higher ratio. That means you have to turn the steering wheel more to make the wheels turn a given amount. Not good when you are trying to hustle the car through a tight slalom. But auto racing is all about compromises.

I had been hearing from the top runners in other parts of the country that the steering ratio wasn’t that bad. But I heard over the winter from another competitor local who had driven a CSP Miata with manual steering that the steering “was a lot to deal with.” He had bought a Miata and was going to move into the STS2 class as well and suggested not doing the conversion. Since I really didn’t want to spend the money I thought that was reason enough to change my mind. He ended up changing his mind and and doing the swap. He did it a few days before our annual banquet and I ran into him there and he starts telling me how the steering is easy to move and the ratio really isn’t that bad. After ribbing him because he had me convinced not to do it it comes out that the CSP car had a power steering rack with the power steering pump removed. And the “lot to deal with” was the amount of effort it took to turn the wheels because you were fighting the friction of the seals and still pumping air & fluid from one side of the rack to the other. Grrrrr.

Now I was back to my original question, to spend the money or not. I decided it was worth it because while I don’t have the resources right now for an all out effort I shouldn’t leave something such as this on the table. Getting this done, with the other stuff should bring me up to about 90% of “full prep.” Most of the rest of what I can do involves trial & error testing of different spring/swaybars and shock/alignment/tire pressure settings. That is when it starts to get real involved time & money wise. That’s just not possible right now and I’m OK with that. I can still win locally and may still be able to grab a low trophy spot at the national events if somebody has an off day & I’m on.

My car started life as an “A package.” That means it came with power steering and leather wrapped steering wheel & shift knob. Technically I have to remove my leather wrapped steering wheel & swap it for a base one. Uuummm, NO. I’m usually all for following the rules but there is no advantage to the leather steering wheel so go ahead and protest me. Now the challenge is to find a manual rack. I was hoping my dad could hook me up since he works at an autoparts wholesaler. Having worked in that industry when I was younger I knew that you could by re-manufactured steering racks, even manual ones. It’s just a matter of if someone made them for this particular application. Apparently one company does, but they have none in stock and no idea of when they may make some more. Booo. So my choices are to find one at a scrap yard or recycler, find one used through a private party, or buy from Mazda which ain’t cheap even with my motorsports discount. So on the hunt I go. Kinda related to the manual steering conversion is the front crank pulley which will be the subject of my next post.

I should have written this post back in January when it really was the off season since there has been a few test & tunes already. None that I’ve been able to go to though. Typically the winter is spent planning what you are going to do to the car, or I should say planning what you are going to spend on the car. Since I sunk a lot of money into getting the Miata to it’s current level of prep last year and I’m saving for a wedding and honeymoon I’m on a limited budget for this year. Fortunately there is not a whole lot of stuff left to do to the car. Since the season is right around the corner I started ordering parts last week.

Some small stuff I had to take car of is replacing stuff that is broken on the car. That meant ordering a new gauge hood from Mazda Motorsports. While there I picked up some new spark plug wires to hopefully address the occasional rough idle I get. I also ordered some NB style upper shocks mounts from Fat Cat Motorsports. There is a lot of conjecture about if these mounts are better or needed. But I purchased them to solve a very specific problem. I wrote before about how the perches on my coilovers are dangerously close to the axles, especially on the left side where the axle has rubbed against the perch. These FCM mounts are 1/2″ shorter than the stock mounts. Normally they lower the car by 1/2″. But since I have coilovers I can raise the car back up to where it should be, and this will move the perches away from the axles.

The only other thing I’m going to do is convert the car to manual steering. The manual rack could turn out to be hard to find and not exactly cheap. I’m still looking around for this item and something that goes with it, a lightened crank pulley. More about that stuff in my next post.

I had to write a custom function in Excel for work. So I had to use Visual Basic for Applications. Using that language feels like the going back to the stone age after getting pretty familiar with PHP. I kept thinking “I could do this in five minutes in PHP.” You have to worry about type casting, or rather type conversion, constantly. I had CStr and CDbl everywhere. And you can’t easily do a dictionary array. And it was the lack of sensible type conversion that did me in. My function kept complaining about incorrect types. I ended up finally finding code for what I needed to do online. I didn’t see any obvious differences that would have caused the error. So be glad for PHP being as good as it is.