[SSLance]

Ever since we put Stage 1 of Ron's setup under this car, the car has been friendly to drive. I am not exaggerating...all of the evils the car had previously just went away.

From then on it has just been a matter of fine tuning and tweaking both shock settings and driver ability to get the car to carry maximum speed through the corners...which in turn led to faster times on the clock and higher rankings in the day's results.

Each subsequent upgrade in front bar (and rear springs) just made the car more responsive to steering input and gave it the ability to carry even more speed in all 3 phases of a turn.

We are at a point now with both driver ability and car setup that a single click on a shock or a single pound of air pressure will make a slight change one way or the other...whatever we need to carry just a bit more speed in a specific turn. There are no more large problem areas...it's all just minor tweaking to tune to a specific course...or driver preference.


At CAM East when Ryan was co-driving the car with me, his preference is a "tight" handling car. He likes to lean on the outside front tire the most, feel where it's grip level is at and drive up to that point...while I like more of a "free" feel (probably comes from driving a car that would not turn for so long).

We discussed this beforehand and also discussed where to start on the rear shock settings...knowing what it would be like and how we'd sneak up on tightening the rear rebound hopefully without going too far. We knew it would start off pretty free, and the opposite side would be once we tightened up the rear rebound too much it would start carrying the inside rear tire and upset the car that way. We adjusted 1 click into the rear shocks 1 after my first run, then 1 click after his first run...after his second run he wanted 1 more click and that got the car pretty good everywhere on the course.

By then he was putting laps in almost a second faster than me, in a car he had never driven before, with a setup like he had never driven before. After that, each of his runs were within 1 or 2 tenths of his best time. On his last run he asked me if we could lower the front tire pressures about 4 psi. He had his fast time in the books already and wanted to see if lowering the front pressures would tighten the car up enough for him to carry a bit more speed thru the large 180 at the back. His time was about the same as previous runs, he said it was a tick better in the large 180, but it felt lazier just about everywhere else on the course. On Sunday morning he didn't hesitate...we put the original tire pressures back in the car and we both set pretty fast times on our first runs that day as well.

My point for typing all of that is...I feel that anyone can adapt to driving this type of setup, it really is that easy to drive. You do not fight the car, you just have to coax it into finding the most speed you can with little tweaks here and there...both on the car and from the driver seat. The car has been like that ever since we had the F-body bar on the front...it's just a LOT faster now with the MonsterBar up under there.