I definitely get it during accel lift-off. My experience in wet racing is very limited though, so I don’t know if it’s my car or driver error. I’ve only ever tracked in rain once, and I spun out twice that day so it’s was most likely because of of my inexperience.
But to put this into perspective My buddies were racing with civics and DC2’s and I felt like they could still push in good laps (maybe +1-3 seconds on dry laps), while I had to considerably slow down alot just to keep my car on the track (about 3-4 seconds off my best times).
I tried softening the dampening that day and lowering rear tire pressures but I still couldn’t find a setup I was comfortable with. Basically, when it’s wet I feel like I have to work alot harder compared to other’s with similar cars and setups. In the dry, my car feels pretty neutral (to me), but I have been told that my car could use more oversteer.
edit: here’s the gist of my setup (its a daily with a bit of track):
-koni + gc coilovers 400/500 spring rates
-stock swaybars
-215/50r15 falken 615’s
-jdm b18c (r)
-lsd
-poly bushings all around
-2.1degrees camber front
-1.5 degrees camber rear
+2 degrees front caster
-type-r front brakes
I don’t really want to play with toe since it’s a daily and I need my tires to last lol
Getting oversteer when you lift off the throttle in the middle of the corner is normal, especially on FWD cars with a more race oriented setup. And normally a car that is neutral or even slightly tends towards understeer in dry weather will be more tail happy on a slippery track.
Looking at your suspension setup, I really don’t think anything is wrong with the car. For comparison, this is what I run.
700f/1000r, race valved Konis
No front bar
Suspension Techniques rear bar
-3.5ish front camber
-2.5ish rear camber
Not sure on toe
If anything, I wish my car would rotate a bit better when the track is dry, but the handling is close to neutral when it’s wet.
Maybe double check that you don’t have any worn bushings or anything that’s causing play in the suspension? Sometimes problems like that can have sudden oversteer as a symptom.
Thanks for your input! I guess there’s not much I can do aside from swapping tires. I know that 90% of the differences in lap times is due to driver experience the other 10% is setup. I’ll have to keep that in mind for this year (if I happen to have another wet track day).
edit: I don’t think that anything is binding, all suspension bushings are new and were torqued with load (car on the ground)
I’m just curious, what do you usually change in terms of set-up for dry vs wet races?
I’m assuming just dampening and tire pressures?
I put on the Toyo RA-1s with tread instead of the Hoosiers, then drive it :-). I usually run my tire pressures a touch higher in the rain because the tires don’t heat up as much. Something like 29-30ish front and 31-32ish rear. That’s around 1 psi more than I usually do when it’s dry. I don’t make any damping changes. Some guys disconnect their anti-roll bars, I don’t.
Most of it, as you say, is driver experience and seat time. I find that these things become more important in the rain:
Smooth, smooth, smooth driver inputs. I can’t emphasize this enough. It helps a lot when it’s dry, but becomes even more important when the track is slippery.
Don’t get hard on the throttle unless you’ll be able to hold it down until the next braking zone. If you have to lift on a corner exit, wait longer to get on the gas next time around.
When the track is wet, the transition from a tire gripping to a tire slipping is much more sudden and makes a much larger difference in how much cornering force that tire can give you. The more track time you get, the better you will become at feeling where that transition is and getting close to, but not crossing it. Because in dry conditions this transition is much more forgiving, some drivers become used to driving the car closer to the slipping side of the transition than the gripping side. This works because the transition is gradual and the change in grip is not that large. Trying to use a driving style like this on a wet track will lead to spins.
When I built my Integra a few years ago I had to replace the hatch because it was completely rusted out. I wanted to move the GS-R spoiler I had to the new hatch but ran out of time. Plus, the mounting hardware on the spoiler was completely rusted out and unusable.
I had some time this off season to fix this problem and my father-in-law was nice enough to machine some new mounting hardware for me, so I was able to get the spoiler back where it belonged after an evening spent measuring and drilling holes:
Back at the track this weekend for the first time this year, and very happy with how things went.
Got first place in both my Saturday and Sunday races. I was the fastest I’ve ever been, and during the Sunday race I did a few laps that were quicker than the track record for my class. Unfortunately another guy in my class managed to put in a faster lap and steal the lap record honours from me before the race was even over. I still finished ahead of him, though, which is what I really care about.
The kicker is that I’ve been super busy with work and didn’t have time to make most of the changes to my car that i wanted to. So hopefully there’s some more speed in reserve for later on this year :-).
This year I’m trying the Hankook Ventus Z214 in a 225/45/15. I went with them because they were around $50 a tire cheaper than the Hoosier R6s that I was on last year and supposedly around the same performance.
So far they’ve actually been better than the Hoosier R6. Or maybe I’m just driving better this year. The only question now is how many heat cycles they can handle before the performance drops off.
Another race weekend last weekend. This one didn’t go well at all.
I didn’t set a qualifying time on Saturday because I had accidentally disconnected my car’s transponder while working on the intake. No transponder = no lap times.
As a result, I ended up starting 20th on the grid, 11 spots behind where the 1st place qualifier in my class started. I went in the race with the mentality that I would just go all out and move up as high as I could. I was expecting to hit 4th if everything went well.
Anyway, I had an awesome drive. I was very aggressive and managed to get into 4th in class after only a few laps. I reeled in 3rd place easily. She was struggling with a BMW 325 that was checking her up in corners, and I was able to take advantage of that to pass her and the bimmer. I then caught up to 2nd place. As I was just getting onto his tail, he had an incident with a couple 911s that were lapping us, and I was gifted the position when they forced him off the track.
A few laps later, my car caught fire and I had to stop. It was only thanks to a very quick and effective response by the emergency crews and the guys that were in the pit lane watching the race that my car didn’t end up burning to the ground.
Jeff Grant, a driver with a team called Bullet Racing that runs several 911s, was standing a couple dozen yards away with a camera and caught the incident on film:
On the bright side, I was completely unhurt and it looks like the car is fixable. On the downside, this caused me to get 0 points in 2 races, which will make it incredibly hard for me to have a chance at winning the club championship this year.
We aren’t sure what started the fire yet, we haven’t had it on a hoist to get a good look at the underside.
After the fire was put out, the fuel tank was leaking very badly. We had patched a leak in the fuel tank last year with one of those fiberglass and epoxy repair kits. I suspect that an initially small fire under the car burned through that patch and that’s when it got really, really bad. Just speculation at this point, though, and no idea what initially started it.
Thanks to a ton of effort by my dad, I was able to be back in action for our race weekends in June and July. My work kept me so busy I couldn’t find any time to work on my car, so my dad fixed the whole thing himself. New fuel tank and fuel lines, new rear bumper and it’s back in action. Best dad ever.
First weekend back in June was a 1-race weekend. I finished 2nd. Should have finished first, but I made a couple mistakes and the guy that beat me was quick to capitalize on them.
Last weekend was another 2 race weekend. Had an awesome time, finished 1st in both races. Highlights from the weekend are on YouTube here:
Ok, it’s been a while and a lot has happened. I’ll be splitting this update into a few posts so that it’s somewhat readable.
If you check out the last 1/4 of the video from my last post, you can see that my car was starting to run hot, especially when I was following another car closely. I really don’t want to overheat my engine or have to worry about it during a race, so I decided to beef up my cooling system after I saw it getting borderline.
I went for a Mishimoto radiator because I’ve mostly heard good things about their build quality, and it was cheap. I think it ended up being cheaper than an OEM replacement, actually.
It turned out to be a pretty big jump in size over the stock radiator:
Installation was fairly easy. Fit wasn’t perfect, I had to do a little bit of cutting on the fan shroud. On a race car, I don’t care about having to do this, but I wouldn’t be thrilled if I had to do it on a street car.
As far as performance goes, it’s been fantastic. Absolutely no issues with overheating now. Temperature stays just under halfway no matter what I do to it, and that’s without me even turning on the fan.
