Lateral-g Forums - Street Challenge Results

Quote:

Originally Posted by mazspeed

A few things I have to say here. I'm going to try and not make this a bashing session on air ride. I think what they are doing for what their products are meant for is great. But you cannot take 60's stock suspension muscle cars and compare them to anything that has been done in the last decade. All you have to do is stick different springs and shocks in a stock car and you made a lot of improvements over what came from the factory. You can't take your best stuff and compete against old stuff. What kind of comparison is that? Bob's cuda which was not made for autocross by any means, is not a good comparison. His car was not really built for the autocross, but it does very well (and beat all but one of your autocross setup cars) there but that was not its top primary goal. You cannot set up your best cars for such events and put them against stock cars or cars that were not made for this kid of thing. You want to go against something, go race your autocross cars against a properly set up 510 or rx-3 on a autocross track, or a newer vette on a road race track. Chances are you would get spanked. The suspension while being good for cruising and what not is still not a high performance chassis. The rebound and compression cannot react fast enough for such things. The new cars like the Mercedes air ride is an electronically controlled suspension with springs in the bags. I have seen this argument before. You don't have the speed at what is needed for racing to be competitive. I think what you guys have done is very good, but to make this "as good as anything else" is absurd, especially when you compare against stock cars from the 60's. A shopping cart has a better suspension then the stock chassis Come on now, be fair about this.

I think it is important to note that our air suspension cars did not have any special components, alignment settings, or other tuning specifically for road course or autoX use. These cars were driven to the events and [except for a couple of hurt engines] driven home. Although Putnam Park is only 2 hours from Jasper, Pigeon forge is 7 hours and Kansas City is 10 hours. Any special preparation was to insure reliability...no leaks, tight belts, hoses and bolts, stuff like that.
The cars you mentioned do perform better than most musclecars in large part because they are considerabley lighter. My GSX for example weighs 4150 with driver. A new Subaru WRX weighs, what, 2850? VERY tough to overcome the weight thing no matter what kind of horsepower you have.
IF the objective is to maximize performance regardless of cost or type of car I guess one would have to consider Formula 1 as the pinnacle of success. Everything else from NASCAR to Indycar to Musclecar has to be considered a compromise. Everyone is different, but my main criteria is Musclecar, oem frame, performance, ease of installation, and price...in that order.
As for getting spanked by a newer Corvette...if we're both on street tires, I'm still waiting. [I'm sure after this I won't have to wait long:)]
One thing that has been [so far] un-discussed is the single most important element in going fast...the driver. At Pigeon Forge the local shoe who had serious experience at that track was at least 5 seconds faster in my own car than I was. [he didn't have to stop for directions :)] I think most [sane]people's main criteria when doing an autocross or track day is to NOT hurt the car. Any driver who is not restrained by such common sense will be signigicantly faster than a civilian. And, frankly, some peope are simply better drivers than others. I'll take a good driver in a bad car any day over the reverse.
Johnson's Cuda is just one bad son-of-a-bitch in ANY context. Bob and Alan are both extremely samrt people who have partered with some very knowledgable suspension engineers to create a car that has the potential to do it all. Beyond that, they have stepped up to sucessfully wring out the bugs that are inherent to every car from demo derby to F1. Watching [and listening to]that car go around the track is just awesome. Few people have a larger jockstrap than Bob Johnson.
That said, I still think the majority of the lurkers here are personally interested in oem chassis cars. That is why we did the comparison between the oem suspension and the air suspension. Hopefully at some point we will get the opportunity to do a direct comparison between coilover and ShockWave on a custom or racing chassis. One step at a time.