August 10, 2011 - The FM Summer Camp is the last big event before the race.
It's a chance for us to show both Targa cars off to the very people who made it possible for us to go to the race. In the process, the cars spent two days pounding around the track giving rides. This works as a nice shakedown too!
Nancy, the 2006, did quite well. The car currently has more grip than power, but is nicely adjustable in the corners if you carry some speed in. It's got a good tossable balance. The flat torque curve isn't super-exciting, but it does get the job done nicely.
The Targa car is under-tired on the 140 treadwear Toyo R1Rs. It is quite likely they were overheating with the frequent 6-minute sessions and very hot temperatures, as they did feel best on the initial lap. I played around with pressures to see if I could improve things, but overall the car was just not as well connected to the ground as I'd like. The biggest complaint is the turn-in softness, which was really brought into sharp focus when I jumped into the other V8 car with Nitto NT-01 R-compounds. So, given that I wasn't going to set any lap records, I spent the day provoking the car to see how it would behave under duress. I was putting wheels on berms, braking with the car unbalanced and generally trying to make it misbehave. And the car was being the usual excellent platform and just letting me do whatever I wanted.
The car has a bit too much oversteer. This is partly because I was fooling and using wheelspin to rotate the car, but also because the rear spring rates are currently too high at 450 lbs. I have a set of 400 lb springs on my desk at work, and they're going in the car today. That will let me run a rear sway bar, which gives me a few more options for tuning the car's handling. At the moment, I can choose between just a bit of oversteer and way too much oversteer!
The car wasn't perfect. It ended the first day running on 7 cylinders. It's done this before, and last time I fixed it by reseating the plug wire. This time, it simply looked like weak spark. I suspect the coils on the car are from the 2002 Firebird that donated the heads, so I picked up a new coil for the dead cylinder and dropped it in. Voila, problem solved.
Near the end of the second day, I felt a clunk from the front and my steering wheel changed position. One of the new alignment cams had shifted under hard cornering and braking. The change in camber had also changed the front toe, thus the cockeyed steering wheel. I should have seen this coming - the cam is in the new control arm, which is covered in nice slippery new powdercoat. That's easy to fix and to avoid in the future, and exactly the reason why I test like this. I tried a couple of times to eyeball it back into the appropriate position, but couldn't quite get it right. So I called it a day and parked the car.
Overall, a good weekend. As a shakedown, it worked very well. It's a shame the Targa Miata ended the day parked in the trailer early amidst rumors of breakages, but it was nothing serious so there's no harm done.
Now we're about 3 weeks away from departure, and I still have a big list of things that need to be done. It's time to get cracking.
tags: Laguna, skills, testing, handling |
THE DIARY