When did it become January
So, we decided it was time to get our butts in gear on this thing. Everyone else keeps getting faster, so there's no point going into this year with the same pile as we ran last year.
First up, though, there was the matter of a certain silver thing that had decided it didn't like having oil pressure after it got warm.
Shop full of broken toys..
With a refreshed bullet tucked safely away into the truck, the Camaro thrash is on. Several items on the to-do list in all areas of the car:
Stiffer, and slightly taller
An equal percentage bump in spring rate front and rear. Also going to bump the ride height back up a smidge and hopefully cure some clearance issues
Floater time
As we started pushing it harder, it became obvious that even the tapered bearings on the rear end weren't up to the loads 315 Rivals can deliver. Also a good time for revisions on our panhard bar
Engine checkup
After pushing it hard several events losing oil pressure in high-G corners, a checkup on the rotating assembly is in order
Trans Swap
We went with the American Powertrain TKO Extreme with hopes it would solve some of the problems we'd had with our first one.. Long story short, it's T56 time.
Let's get to work..again.
When it came time to get a floater, we explored several options. Ended up going with the Mod Lite from Speedway Engineering. Big thanks to Kenny there for his help getting us all the right stuff, and to Mike from Wilwood for giving us a great contact.
This thing is gorgeous inside and out..
I still love working on this car, and it's even more apparent after working on the truck - race car simplicity is just hard to beat. In the span of a few hours on a Saturday morning I had the motor and trans basically ready to pull by myself, and we finished getting it out in short order in the afternoon.
By lunchtime Sunday things were starting to get a little crazy. Front springs out, rear end out, just chaos.
Before this shop, there is literally no way we would have tackled all this at once. It's been a complete game-changer being able to spread out and get the car off the ground. A year in, we're completely spoiled..
By the end of the day, we had it mocked into position at ride height using some shock analogs fabbed up to hold everything at the current ride height.
Panhard bar
The panhard bar has been a question mark for a long time. After doing a bit more learning over the past several years, it became apparent that mounting the bar this high is less than ideal, so we set about getting it down and adding some adjustability.
We now have 2" of up and down adjustment to play with, and will have the bar around 3.5" lower than it was before. The car has always been really twitchy, and from the research we've done I'm fairly optimistic that lowering the roll center will help with this. Having this as a tuning option will be a great new tool at the least.
About that fresh motor..
Replaying the videos from COTA alerted us to a bit of an oiling issue. Turns out, it's less than ideal dropping to 5 psi in high speed corners for multiple events. Spot checking a few bearings led to the decision to play it safe and go ahead and put a set of rod and main bearings (and a new oil pan) in.
We'll be going back with the same Canton oil pan we had on before. That one had some sealing issues on the rear main, but hopefully that won't be an issue with this being a new block.
Some thoughts on Camaros and 'Camaros'
Been thinking a lot with some of the new builds coming out in the Optima and Cam Challenge events, and us pondering some more extreme modifications for the future.
Our car is a racecar. I don't make any effort to deny that. In the end, though, it's still a Camaro. And I'm pretty damn proud of that fact. We've tossed around the idea of cutting it up, building a full custom subframe, and hacking out all of that Camaro to make it even better and faster and more exotic..
.but I still keep coming back to the feeling of knowing that it's gotten to be pretty good..while still being a Camaro.
How many more months til the season starts? Oh, weeks? 2 weeks? Eep.