I've been using setups sent to me by a couple of other friends who are very fast. (Though they are both probably too modest to be comfortable with the term "alien", in my mind they are just that.) I haven't gotten very far with my own tinkering on the Mazda's setup, so I've really appreciated their generosity in letting me try theirs.
These two aliens' setups are quite similar in some ways: both are using tire pressures in the 20 PSI range (although one is using front pressures down below 18 PSI!) and spring rates at or near the lower end of the range. One is running a little more chassis rake than the other, but if you average their front and rear ride heights their effective overall ride heights are almost identical.
But strangely, the two are at polar opposites in terms of damper settings. One of them uses ultra-soft settings (very high positive numbers) and the other uses ultra-stiff settings (very high negative numbers).
Neither of those setups was working for me. The way the car reacted over curbs - evil - was just driving me crazy. Plus, the softly damped setup was so vague and wallowy - with so much understeer - that I hated driving the car. On the other hand, the stiffly damped setup made the Mazda feel more like a race car - crisper and more responsive - but I was actually slower with it than with the soft one! Augh!
VIR was a miserable experience. During the one race I ran, I ended up just tiptoeing around, trying to stay out of trouble, and, much to my chagrin, I was lapped by the winner at the end! Gad! On a track that's over three miles long! The shame...
At Laguna Seca I began experimenting with higher ride heights and more wing, hoping that getting the car up off the ground a little might help, by getting it away from the curbs and also by reducing the effects of ride height changes which occur when you put a wheel on a curb.
The fast guys seem to be operating from the belief that no matter what the venue, the Mazda is fastest with minimum wing angles (13 degrees front and rear) and ride heights calculated to shave the antennae off of ants. This is because the downforce you get from the ground effects tunnels under the car produces far less drag than the downforce you get from wings.
But I figured if there was any place where a high-riding, high-drag, high-downforce setup might work, it should be a place like Laguna, with tons of medium speed corners and not much in the way of long straights. And all those nasty curbs, plus lots of banked corners which put a high vertical load on the car and tend to squash it down so close to the road that how could it not be scraping and doing weird things to the handling as a result? (Remember GPL's beastly low-rider setups?)
But while the car felt better with my revised setup, my lap times didn't improve. Augh!
Ricardo has gone in a different direction, with significantly higher tire pressures and also less camber, and stiffer springs but with all the shocks at zero, right in the middle of the range.
What a difference! No more instant spinouts if I grab just a skosh too much curb. I can drive this thing like a normal race car now. Amazing!
I still struggled with entry phase understeer at Laguna with Ricardo's setup, so I cranked up the front wing a few notches. That helps; the car doesn't push so badly before the apex, but I have to be a little more careful about getting on the throttle, because it does transition to oversteer fairly abruptly if I mash the throttle in medium-speed corners.
Anyway, with Ricardo's setup the car is simply a delight. I can understand now why he says he loves driving it!
Rock and roll!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment