235 replies to this topic

[Ron Alan]

Your point A., rule a maximum camber, done deal.

 

Your point B., had the SMAC/CRB paid attention day 1 when they allowed the 99 plus cars they would have equalized the cars at day 1. Your mixing apples and lemons.

 

Take your 1.6 to FL and make ALL 1.6 owners proud. Hopefully your 100% prepared. If not there'll be a bunch of $hit flying your way.

Your point A...way more potential expense to the average racer than the proposed change(If you argue this then we should be limiting/specing every current open item!)

Point B...As is obvious you would have had this figured out day 1...to bad your ability to be all knowing couldn't have been utilized. But could you reach out to F1 with your infinite wisdom and speak with the rules makers please? 

Technology and knowledge marches forward...for someone who single handedly kept the 1.6 parity debate alive until the current SMAC listened...I scratch my head at your thinking with  what I an others here also think is a parity issue among all cars!

 

For me the best potential reason why some are opposed was spelled out very clearly by Steve...

 

Camber is a game of diminishing returns. This year in NASA you could run offset front bushings and extended lower ball joints! Yet I did not see any cars with silly camber...locally nor at the NASA eastern champs. 

IMO...the few that will be helped by this change wont be going from -3.2 to 4.2, they will be going from -2.4 to 3.4. And those who want to try 4.2...good luck!

[Bench Racer]

Your point A...way more potential expense to the average racer than the proposed change(If you argue this then we should be limiting/specing every current open item!)

 

Point B...As is obvious you would have had this figured out day 1...to bad your ability to be all knowing couldn't have been utilized. But could you reach out to F1 with your infinite wisdom and speak with the rules makers please? 

 

Technology and knowledge marches forward...

 

for someone who single handedly kept the 1.6 parity debate alive until the current SMAC listened...I scratch my head at your thinking with  what I an others here also think is a parity issue among all cars!

Your repeat of point A. Had a negative camber rule been set before the off-set bushing we wouldn't be talking about the rear upper control arm slut. Oh my, how things slide.

 

Your repeat of point B., I did my best day 1, I've had legal ambient air intake. Do you believe there was parity before the am

 

Point C., above, yup, that's just how the Production class got all screwed up.  

 

Point D., what do your tire temperatures tell you about camber? Duh!!! When have you last took tire temps?

[Caveman-kwebb99]

Mr. Dewy, since you do no longer race but have all kinds of knowledges may I suggest to you become a tech scrutineer and then you can catch all these creepers while they are doing their creepings and.then we won't have as much to worry about in our ongoing debateses.

[Steve Scheifler]

The slot will allow about .2 - .25 deg more camber. You've gone on record saying 3.5 is the max with stock parts. So at most 3.75deg would be achievable. That's at a given ride height, so you can take that out of the equation.

...

 

Where did you get those numbers?

 

I was not alone in scratching my head at that, but barring a good reason to think you had just pulled a number out of your hat I figured if others who surely have experimented with it didn't call BS then I'd just take your word for it.  Well, nobody stepped up in public but I sure heard it offline so I trekked off to the shop this morning to see for myself.

 

I took measurements to calculate the angle change cause by moving the upper outer pivot inboard 0.2 inches and that yielded over 1.2 degrees, or about roughly 5x as much as claimed.  Because I hate relying on calculations when it is relatively simple to measure directly, I set things up for a sanity check by mounting a digital level to the rotor (rotor held firmly in place with lug nuts), placing a block under the lower control arm and lowering the car onto it until the suspension was in a normal at-rest position.  I loosened the lower arm big bolt to relieve any wind-up load on the bushings during the test and zeroed the gauge.  I then removed the upper bolt and moved the top of the upright inboard slowly.  I could barley even tell the holes were misaligned when I got to -0.2 degrees. You could get that much with an almost visually undetectable wallowing out of the hole and/or very slightly turning down the shank of the bolt. 

 

The holes are essentially 0.4" so watching the "eclipse" between the holes in the arm and the one in the bushing, at 50% eclipse you simulate a "slot" of +0.2", 0.6" total length.  In that position I see 1.15-1.2 degrees.  Even simpler to eyeball accurately is moving the arm in double that so the edges of the holes in the arm and bushing are adjacent (0% eclipse).  When I do that I get about 2.4 degrees, corroborating my 50% eclipse measurement.

 

I won't attempt to state exactly how much camber gain there will be from the recommended change, I didn't spend enough time on it to actually slot one to the precise size, but I do feel safe in stating this it is multiples above what has been claimed, almost as if there was a typo of .2 - .25 instead of 1.2 - 1.25.  In any case, if we are going to discuss something we need work with data that is off by something less than a factor of 5.

 

Has anyone come up with significantly different results or see a flaw in mine?

[EMatoy]

Steve- your numbers are correct. At least twice I have said if the slot were 0.2" you would get about 1.25 degrees more camber.

[Steve Scheifler]

Thanks Eric. I saw a reference to it in your earlier post but it wasn't real detailed.  I reached out to you yesterday hoping to confirm that it was more than a rough approximation but this morning figured I'd just do my own test.  Always better to have multiple sources anyway, particularly when they are so different than claimed by the official one.

[Bench Racer]

Kyle, the SCCA tech is pretty good at finding the cheats. We who understand what happened in the Production class and we who have desire to follow the Purpose and Intent of the Spec Miata class need to question the Creeper's (being someone posting about and or specifying a .2" slot length increase will yield an increased negative angle of "X" when in fact the angle is "X" plus some amount much larger)  with all the what and why questions. You doing your pick $hit (no longer race) towards me would be just like me busting you the guy who claims he always has a top end prepped car taking his 1.6 to the Turkey Trot being less than 100% prepped. Is it ok that because I likely will no longer drive that I prep the car for someone with capability to drive it. 

 

Thanks Steve and Eric. As I started reading Steve's post before the details using a level, I thought, great I'll do a hard test and measure with level. If it's not freezing a$$ cold I'll do the test on Monday. I'll set lower control arm angle to my normal level, measure the brake rotor angle, insert a .2 diameter smaller diameter bolt in the upper control arm/hub and measure new angle. 

[Steve Scheifler]

Bench, you are as bad as I am.  Knock yourself out but the calculation is simple enough. I predict 1.26 degrees +/- 0.03.   I took the time to do it both ways just because I'm not incapable of screwing up by a full decimal place or making a stupid assumption that starts me off entirely wrong and lands me way out in left.  But when two totally different approaches produce the same answer I feel pretty confident even when they are a factor of 5 off someone else's attempt.  Unless that someone is you, I doubt you could miss it by nearly that much.   My main concern is that people may have been sending their letters to the CRB over the weekend based on faulty data, just as I may have done if the maximum adjustment were so small that it didn't really solve anything and we couldn't get more.  But heck, at 0.2 inches it hardly even qualifies as a slot, we could easily go another tenth and leave no doubt.

[Steve Scheifler]

As for the comparison to Prod classes, sorry but I still reject it.  If this change happens and a year from now someone on the outside notices or hears about the rule they might very well think it was just a change to allow everyone to go faster.  Likewise many of the other changes over the years.  But they weren't.  Each proposed change has to be considered based on its own merit, but if you show me cases where prod cars were granted improvements for the sake of overall class performance and performance alone, then you've probably shown me a case of poor management. Most performance related changes seem to originate as "help car x because I'm getting beat under condition z".  Then there are the realities of old cars and parts availability of course, and safety or repeated parts failures that need an economical fix.  Overall I think the SMAC has done a very good job of avoiding making changes that served no purpose other than increasing performance. 

 

And we can all read the "intent" statement, no need to keep repeating it. We simply differ on what is and is not consistent with it.  I think your gauge is way the heck off when you compare an essentially free 0.2 inch slot to pretty much anything that you loath about the prod classes. Throwing everything into a single basket with a justification of "slippery slope" just looks either closed minded, biased or lazy.

[Caveman-kwebb99]

Kyle, the SCCA tech is pretty good at finding the cheats. We who understand what happened in the Production class and we who have desire to follow the Purpose and Intent of the Spec Miata class need to question the Creeper's (being someone posting about and or specifying a .2" slot length increase will yield an increased negative angle of "X" when in fact the angle is "X" plus some amount much larger)  with all the what and why questions. You doing your pick $hit (no longer race) towards me would be just like me busting you the guy who claims he always has a top end prepped car taking his 1.6 to the Turkey Trot being less than 100% prepped. Is it ok that because I likely will no longer drive that I prep the car for someone with capability to drive it. 
 
Thanks Steve and Eric. As I started reading Steve's post before the details using a level, I thought, great I'll do a hard test and measure with level. If it's not freezing a$$ cold I'll do the test on Monday. I'll set lower control arm angle to my normal level, measure the brake rotor angle, insert a .2 diameter smaller diameter bolt in the upper control arm/hub and measure new angle.

No sir, I seriously think.you should be a tech scrutineer!

As for a car that a bought on a whim and have not decided if it will be a chump car, a rental car, or a top flight am. Why would I be obligated to prep it to any level before deciding what the end game of the car is????? Oh yeah because you say so... When and if I decide it will be raced by me more then for fun at the trott or a regional here or there i can assure you it will be fully prepped like my other cars. We shall see, you seem to believe I bought it to prove something to someone, which I did not... I saw a car rotting in a garage and thought for a good price I can find something fun to do with the car!

[Bench Racer]

^ Post # 168        

 

Watching the football game I got to thinking about the manufacturing process of ONLY the control arms. Looking at only the rear upper control arm the distance from the inner bushing holes to the outer bolt hole would have been the significant features. We know the inner bushing holes were present pre welding, the outer bolt holes were either present pre welding and a pin type welding fixture was used or it's possible the outer bolt holes were machined after welding. Today, right now, no one has provided any data on dimension from the bushing hole to the bolt hole and other holes included which effect camber and until someone provides this data that the slut is truly required to obtain some negative camber number it's an unneeded rule change. The SMAC wanted data for the 1.6 to throw a bone and now we should require the same of the SMAC/CRB. Using the same logic/gathering data as was used to provide a maximum track width should be used for the maximum camber number.

 

 

In the Production class I'd be willing to say rule changes were made for whatever reason, exact reason not important other than the cost of building a car got so far out of control restricted prep cars were introduced. Whatever changes slid in, the incremental additive cost was ruining the class with less and less entries. One little change at a time until the cost of Production cars went through the roof. In approx. 1997 there were let's call it Unrestricted prep (Today Level 1) cars before 1997 and restricted prep (Today Level 2) cars after 1997, to save the class. Facts from an SportsCar article Sept. 1997. Whatever changes slid in the incremental additive cost was ruining the class with less and less entries.

 

Why would a serious SM racer buy a car, prep a car to whatever level and travel to the Trott for grins. Must have way to much recreational money. Or he's posting bull$hit.

[38bfast]

Bench you would argue Day is night and night is day.

[Steve Scheifler]

Bench you would argue Day is night and night is day.

I certainly won’t criticize him for that, but it would be nice if the arguments were cogent. Bench, slow down, proof read, and explain WTF difference the length of the upper arm makes. (roughly 8.875” as I recall, or maybe that one is 9”) The focus of the arguments in favor of the change is not production tolerances if that’s where you are headed again. Catch up.

[Ron Alan]

^ Post # 168         

 Using the same logic/gathering data as was used to provide a maximum track width should be used for the maximum camber number.

 

 

In the Production class...

Did I miss a fastrack with regards to max camber change to SM? 

But I will play...if you were King David and lets say you picked -3.5 as the max camber for front and rear...would you allow bushings and a slot so all could achieve this?

 

SM isn't Production...and there are guys on here that weren't born in 97 Its like you're talking to your self in the mirror! Ok...kidding aside...a history of all the things that have changed since the first year of SM would be interesting!

[Brandon]

But I will play...if you were King David and lets say you picked -3.5 as the max camber for front and rear...would you allow bushings and a slot so all could achieve this?

 

This I would be in favor of - if we spec a max (we're either spec'ing parts or measurements in "Spec Miata") then allowing whatever is necessary to attain such a number would be an appropriate change. Then we can debate the number instead of the allowance and what it may open up.

 

My own curiosity: what other classes have a max camber number? B-spec? AS? I know there are at least a couple who do have it but have there been complaints about on-track contact changing those numbers making a car non-compliant in the tech shed?

 

ETA - Touring does appear to have maximum camber numbers. I did a quick Google of "scca 'maximum camber'" and it returned a hit for a T2 Viper maximum front camber (-3*) so I'm presuming other cars in the Touring classes have similar specifications.

 

Additionally, I note there was a protest of a CSA at the 2015 Runoffs for a T4 competitor who appeared to have altered suspension components yielding a greater than expected number. Yet absent the T4 ruleset incorporating a max number, the CSA was overruled by the SOM. This was primarily a procedural decision (not a ruling on any achievable camber specifically) but it's illustrative of how camber allowances (or disallowances) is done within our ruleset.

T4 == "minimal prep", minimal allowances

T2 == "more prep", more allowances

Edited by Brandon, 11-20-2017 07:02 AM.

[Danica Davison]

Bench you would argue Day is night and night is day.

 

Time/day/night ... is all just a figment of our imagination.

[Caveman-kwebb99]

^ Post # 168         

 

 

 

Why would a serious SM racer buy a car, prep a car to whatever level and travel to the Trott for grins. Must have way to much recreational money. Or he's posting bull$hit.

  I will let you decide...

[Danica Davison]

Why would a serious SM racer buy a car, prep a car to whatever level and travel to the Trott for grins. Must have way to much recreational money. Or he's posting bull$hit.

 

 

No, he is not posting BS ... and what is wrong with bringing a 1.6 to a regional race?  Yeah, it is basically a mini-majors, but still a regional with just a bunch of people having fun and not taking it too seriously.  I don't really understand the argument here, especially considering he is bringing a car down worth a lot less money, so I am not sure why the recreational money is brought up.  Kyle Webb is going to come down and have a great time.  We have the Cuban missile and co deep frying turkeys and Cuban food, plenty of beer, plenty of track time for a low cost, and we going to have fun!  I just hope the weather allows him to come down!

[Caveman-kwebb99]

No, he is not posting BS ... and what is wrong with bringing a 1.6 to a regional race?  Yeah, it is basically a mini-majors, but still a regional with just a bunch of people having fun and not taking it too seriously.  I don't really understand the argument here, especially considering he is bringing a car down worth a lot less money, so I am not sure why the recreational money is brought up.  Kyle Webb is going to come down and have a great time.  We have the Cuban missile and co deep frying turkeys and Cuban food, plenty of beer, plenty of track time for a low cost, and we going to have fun!  I just hope the weather allows him to come down!

 

Someone who gets it... What a refreshing concept!

 

Florida Trip:  Seeing my parents for the third time in a year, fun with all my florida friends, Not sure about the Cuban food????, Beer oh boy I cant wait, racing in SMSE a group we dont even need to have.  Cant freaking wait!!!!!

[Danica Davison]

Someone who gets it... What a refreshing concept!
 
Florida Trip:  Seeing my parents for the third time in a year, fun with all my florida friends, Not sure about the Cuban food????, Beer oh boy I cant wait, racing in SMSE a group we dont even need to have.  Cant freaking wait!!!!!

 

Bolanos and his parents cook up an amazing meal every time. I would tell you some of the stuff they make, but its Spanish and I don't remember what it is called lol. Only thing missing is a Pickleball court so I can school you up son!