![\"Jason](\"http:\/\/www.rhoadescamaro.com\/build\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/sdTour-2013.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nThis is on the low-grip San Diego surface, and the car doesn’t appear to be that heavily side loaded – the outside front tire looks to have “enough” negative camber, but certainly not too much, from this angle.\u00a0 Sure the inside front is only halfway on the ground, but it’s so lightly loaded, it’s not doing much anyway.<\/p>\n
So negative camber in the front will stay where it is for now.<\/p>\n
Overall the car’s handling balance felt pretty good on Sunday morning at El Toro.\u00a0 Some of that may have been the higher grip, but in different situations I felt I could reach the limits of the front or rear tires at will.<\/p>\n
At least, most of the time.<\/p>\n
The car felt bad under braking, like it kept wanting to kill me.\u00a0 My first spin in the car was under braking, and that was after almost spinning once in San Diego, and once earlier that same run, on the brakes.<\/p>\n
My initial guess at brakes was done a long long time ago – http:\/\/www.rhoadescamaro.com\/build\/?p=300<\/a>\u00a0(October 2010).\u00a0 I went with\u00a04-piston rear calipers with 3 square inches of piston area, and 6-piston fronts with 5.06 square inches of piston area.<\/p>\n This has\u00a0proven to be too much rear bias.\u00a0 The next calipers I’ll try are\u00a0smaller rears, still 4-piston but with only 1.6 square inches\u00a0of piston area.\u00a0 That seems like a big change (and it is) but there are a few reasons stacking together-<\/p>\n Fine tuning comes later – we are still squarely in the “coarse” tuning phase now.<\/p>\n The other planned change was assisted by another external source, this time video, the\u00a0documentary embedded in the previous post (http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=meybtwmMxQY<\/a>)<\/p>\n In it, at the 2:33-2:34 point, you see the car brake for a left-hand transitional type element.\u00a0 The front suspension very quickly goes from somewhat extended (on throttle) to hunkered down.<\/p>\n The speed at which the front suspension compresses there is a function of front damper bump forces.\u00a0 Spring rate comes into play to determine how *far* the suspension compresses, but not so much the rate at which it compresses.<\/p>\n If we recall the shock dyno for the front shocks-<\/p>\n we’ll remember, they are extremely light on bump damping.\u00a0 The shocks are just as geometrically disadvantaged in bump as they are in rebound, where we have almost 1100lbs. @2in\/sec.<\/p>\n The soft front bump was another dimension of the “I don’t want the car to push” sentiment that went into its initial setup.<\/p>\n In my experience, a car with too much front bump,\u00a0won’t\u00a0turn.\u00a0 This was mostly a problem in the old FWD Civic days (nothing FWD really likes to turn), but I found it could even be a problem on the 240sx if front bump was turned up too high on that car’s Koni 28’s.<\/p>\n This is maybe the first time I’ve experienced “too little” front bump.\u00a0 But I’m jumping ahead here – let’s look at it\u00a0as a handling issue to solve:<\/p>\n The mid-corner part makes me thing the spring\/bar\/roll center parts of the equation are *close*.\u00a0 Too soon to call anything perfect, but close, a lot closer than shocks.<\/p>\n\n
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