The OPTIMA Batteries OneLapCamaro - Final Preparations

[James OLC]

With the 2010 Tire Rack One Lap of America coming up in less than two months, David and I thought we would start a post on the final preparations of the OPTIMA Batteries OneLapCamaro. We’ll run down some of the work that we’ve done over the last year to dial in the front suspension - all the way to the work we did last weekend (updating the car with new Speed Tech upper and lower control arms) - through the next six and a half weeks of last minute preparation.

Looking back almost a year ago today, the car was just about a mess; I wish I could be kinder about that but it had a lot of issues. Don’t get me wrong, it was far and away the best First Gen that I had ever driven and was more than capable of holding it’s own but it had a ton of issues… first and foremost was a clearance problem between the outer tie rod ends and the inner hoop of the wheel. Admittedly at 5.9” of backspacing we were pushing the envelope but despite having nearly 3/8” of static clearance, there was contact due to deflection under load:



If you notice in the picture (looking past the disturbing trail of aluminum) you’ll see that we were not running any bump stop spacers (mostly for space) at this point. The car felt good on the road 9 times out of 10 but hit a big bump and that 1 out of 10 times was ‘alarming’. HRE helped us out by rehooping the inner wheels so that we could gain some clearance and properly space the rod end for bumpsteer but that left us running a narrow tire (255/35) on a narrow rim (8”) which was less than ideal. We also had no rear sway bar (so the car was rolling pretty badly) and a very conservative alignment.

This was the starting point for David.

The first thing that we addressed at Pozzi Racing was the rear sway bar. We went through (seemingly) countless renditions to get us to where we are now. We started with an off the shelf Second Gen Camaro rear bar that David modified to work with the Lateral Dynamics 3-link:



He cut the ends off and welded on an extension which allowed for adjustability. This setup was really good on the road and pretty decent (a huge improvement) on the track but we were fighting an understeer at autocrosses and the car was simply not rotating the way that we wanted it to. David modified this bar three times - progressively getting shorter and shorter - until it was working fairly well but unfortunately, the packaging was no longer working out.

Taking a step back, David then designed a completely new rear bar starting with a piece of old rebar that was kicking around the shop. One he had the geometry that he was looking for and got it to fit in the car, he called up David Wheeler and the guys at Hellwig Products who built us new rear bar that worked great!



…it was a long (but fun) process of ‘trial and error’ to get it dialed in. We would go to an autocross and run the car, try an adjustment on the rear bar, and run again. We did that for probably three events until we had the rear bar exactly where we wanted it.





At which point we determined that we had just slightly too much front bar. Hellwig Products had built us a great hollow front bar that was working really well with the untuned rear but as we got the car to start turning in better, we wanted to soften the front a touch. Hellwig again came to our rescue and built us a new front bar with a slightly thinner tubing that reduced the rate about 10%. It took nearly 11 months and seven or eight different renditions but we finally have a car that turns.