[clyde]

Some interim Oscar updates…

After New Jersey, Oscar's had a little attention. In New Jersey, we spotted what looked like a slipped alignment bolt. When trying to adjust it back to the markings, we found that they weren't properly indexed, so it's entirely possible that there was no slippage.

Once the car was back at Kevin's and ran through things, he tried to install the Paco Motorsports rear control arms that came with the car, but were not on the car and found out why they did not come on the car. Each side is bent or deformed in some way that makes the distance between the ends a little too small. An eighth of an inch on one side and a sixteenth on the other. Their arms are the go-to for adjustable control arms and make alignments MUCH easier for NB Miatas than the stock arms or any other manufacturer (that I'm aware of). Their website says they are out of stock, but we were hoping they might be able to find a set if we stopped at their site in Kentucky when we're on the road to Lincoln Wednesday…but they don't. They do think they can fix them, so we'll be sending them in, but they won't be a help for a while.

After putting the suspension back together, it got an alignment on Friday. Things had been moved around so much, we don't know where things were before, but we now have a baseline to work from.

Saturday, the local club had an autocross school and we were able to do some testing after the school ended in the afternoon/evening. The school course is short, but a pretty good test and tune course. It begins with a start straight into a six cone slalom, followed by a 115 degree turn to the right, a quick jink back to the left, a near 90 degree sweeper-lit to the right, a juke left, a hard and tight right into a long double apex decreasing radius 170 degree left that spits you through the finish lights. It's very quick to learn and you can quickly try different approaches and settings to see what kind of effect they have.

The short of it for Oscar is that the alignment helped a lot, but it's still very, very wrong. It's pretty amazing in slaloms, but very, very loose on turn in with a lot of lift-oversteer that it shouldn't have. It's much better than it was, but it's still not good. Of the five of us that took runs in it, I was the only one that didn't spin it in the decreasing radius left at the end…but I came very close a few times.

By the time we were done, we had reduced the rear shocks rebound and compression to their minimums, dropped pressures in the rear tires, and were playing with the shocks in front to try to take away some of its phenomenal grip to better balance the car (we can't effectively make the installed front sway bar any stiffer and there's already no rear bar), but it's still pretty bad.

We think the rear alignment can use some additional tweaking (reducing camber from -3.0 to -2.5 and adding a little more toe in), but the big conclusion is the same conclusion we had in New Jersey…reduce rear spring rate. The plan is to back down from 450 pounds to 400. But…

The school course is on asphalt. Our national championship courses are on concrete. It's possible that the car's setup will work a lot better on concrete than asphalt. And we leave for that site in the morning. Over the next week, we have two competition events there on the surface where one of the championship courses will be set up in September and a test and tune course using 2019(?)'s championship course from that half of the pad.

The 400 pound springs are in the truck. We're hopeful we'll be able to take some test and tune runs on Thursday and we'll take it from there. If the car is good, we'll go with it. If it still feels wrong, we expect to change the springs, take some more runs and see what's what.

Another interesting thing we learned by way of doing this test and tune on Saturday is that the car is riding at least half an inch higher than it was when originally put together and turned to work well. We don't know when that happened, why, or how. That could also be a big part of our problem. How did we figure that out? One of the two guys that originally built it was one of the people that ran it on Saturday. At one point when we were standing next to it talking through some things, he said, "Oscar looks high." He couldn't remember the ride height settings, but described a test we could do to see where it is compared to where it was…putting the car on a certain trailer and opening the door. If the door cleared the fender, it's sitting higher. If the door doesn't clear, it's lower. When Oscar was working well, the door kinda sorta scraped the fender. Apparently, it easily clears. What does that mean? How did this happen? We're not sure yet.

On another note, having this test session allowed me to experiment with how I was driving the car without competitive pressure and it was tremendously helpful. I was essentially ran the same times as everyone else (although we were all hitting a lot of cones and some cones saved more time than others) and gained a lot of confidence in the car despite it still being "undriveable" in the words of the others that drove it.

To be continued…