Sim Practice and the next race.

Haha, just going through the 24 hour of LeMons forums and found this analogy of the classes.

“I look at LeMons like it's a knife fight:
Class A guys bring guns of various caliber and capacity
Class B guys bring knives and fight fair
Class C guys bring spoons and beer”

Yeah we run C class, and I would say our Spitfire is comparable to a spoon, well one that has been run through the garbage disposal a few times. They also got me on the other point, I never forget the beer... ever.

We did a small amount of work on the Spitfire the throttle is fixed (it was sticking at the last race), I marked the Tow points, and found a few more useful things off the parts car. Soon we are doing leak down tests on the motors and getting some work done on the heads. The rest of the work is simple maintenance work. What we really need to do is get the motor in the 3rd car started so we can decide if that motor is good. We then can sell the overdrive transmission and take other parts as needed. Another big problem right now is how to get rid of the stripped down parts car, with no rear end it is a pain to move. might have to use a winch and a flat bed trailer to get rid of it. Oh well, we will have just under 3 months to get it done. 

We also got Forza 4 set up for learning the Infineon Raceway. There is no Spitfire in the game so I got the Datsun 510 set up to drive close enough to the way the Spitfire handles and about the same power to weight ratio. Should be plenty good to learn the track, plus it is Forza 4 gotta love it.  I am trying to get an idea of what track lay out we will be running at Infineon this year for our Forza practice.
There are 2 track lay outs they can pick and choose corners from. The Indy layout and the Long Course layout. The corners they can change are 7, 9 and 11. From what I have gathered on the forums it sounds like they use a mix of the 2, but every time they have used 9a from the Indy lay out, which is good and bad. The 9a corner is a tight chicane after a strait away. This means a tight fun corner and that people will be hard on the brakes and likely to dive bomb into the corner and t-bone people. I will have to bring this up with my team to watch out for this and maybe even suggest that we take the inside line away early, though that could be dangerous as well.  I guess there has not been many issues with it thus far so we will just roll with it. 




INDY COURSE


LONG COURSE


Recently I keep spending so much time thinking about things we can do to improve the Spitfire and forget we need to concentrate on the things we need to do to keep it running. I spent a lot of time reading on a guys website which is full of great information on the Spitfire that I feel we can find useful.



I got into another site where a guy was explaining a rebuild of the rear transverse leaf spring for $35, after which I was excited and interested in doing it. After I emailed it to my pops he reminded me that if we stiffen the rear spring it will take away some of the negative camber we added (or add back camber we took out, how ever you want to look at it). He was right of course and I remembered we just need to leave it alone as it handles pretty damn well, and if anything we can just cut ½ a coil of the front springs to make the car sit level. Really what we need to do is ignore it and focus on the motors. If we can keep the car running and have a good spare motor we will be much better off, lasting to the end of the race is more important then a slight improvement in handling or a few more horses under the hood.


Keep it simple...