I agree with the lowering the steering column. I actually thought that more people did this in spite of the rules infraction. Aside from that the only other big complaint is the Spec Exhaust and that you can’t use a adj. fuel pressure regulator. It’s not a great system, there is only one person to get it from(don’t get me started on that), and the fitment is not that great. The regulator is just to try and cure a lean condition in many cars. I know you guys will say that you can swap out the comps and do dyno pulls. I just think that for many people that is very hard to do and from a cost and time standpoint that MIGHT be a solution. The rule set is fair and tries to keep the cost down and that is the point of the series. If you want better performance out of your vehicle then get some more seat time. The best performance mod you can do it tighten the nut behind the wheel. Sure better weight distribution and less weight would be nice but then you are putting more on the set up and less on the skill and luck of the driver. Just my soapbox moment. Feel free to blast away at it as you will. ALLEN
2011 Rules
Damn, people, it was just an idea. I had no idea that $1,500 was set in stone.
Either you want to police the motors or you don’t. If you want to keep the class honest, and not have people spend uber amounts of money on the engines, that is one way to do it. I highly doubt anyone in this class is going to build an engine “dirt track” style to just run one weekend. I was tryign to think of something reasonable, because usually, the person that files the protest has to come up with the teardown money, including labor. $1,500 was my planned budget for my personal car.
It already sounds like there are quite a few differences in the way that people build motors. Some, not at all, and some build it to the limit of the class. Building an engine to the limit costs dollars, you all know that. It also makes more TQ and HP. There are already complaints that some people are showing up to the track with overbuilt motors. It would be ridiculous for people to be walking up and talking crap about how fast a guy’s motor is with no other information to back it up other than, “he pulled me on the straight.” <—which I believe has already been mentioned in this thread.
Seems like you guys are friendly, but the minute someone talks about an engine claim rule, everyone is up in arms. Looking at it from my perspective, that is one of the first signs that the first to bitch can be the worst offender.
Hell, make it the cost of a crate motor, and include labor. Is that what most people in the class do? Doesn’t sound like it.
If a person isn’t slow in the head, its pretty easy to navigate the peer pressure rules. Anyone can sandbag.
All I was trying to do is be productive. It isn’t as if I’ve never turned a wheel on a racetrack…quite the contrary. Sorry if one of my “suggestions” turned into the worst suggestion ever to hit spece30.
Friendly crowd, yeah…
Foglght wrote:
[quote]
All I was trying to do is be productive. It isn’t as if I’ve never turned a wheel on a racetrack…quite the contrary. Sorry if one of my “suggestions” turned into the worst suggestion ever to hit spece30.
Friendly crowd, yeah…[/quote]
I think the point is, don’t try and fix a series you haven’t seriously raced in. I know if someone really wanted to buy my motor for $1500, they can have it. I’ll get another one from the junk yard for $200 and put it in over the weekend and it’ll feel just the same to me plus I have more money for stickers. We all know how to “fix” Formula 1, but nobody seems to be listening to our suggestions there either.
Foglght wrote:
[quote]Damn, people, it was just an idea. I had no idea that $1,500 was set in stone.
Either you want to police the motors or you don’t. If you want to keep the class honest, and not have people spend uber amounts of money on the engines, that is one way to do it. I highly doubt anyone in this class is going to build an engine “dirt track” style to just run one weekend. I was tryign to think of something reasonable, because usually, the person that files the protest has to come up with the teardown money, including labor. $1,500 was my planned budget for my personal car.
It already sounds like there are quite a few differences in the way that people build motors. Some, not at all, and some build it to the limit of the class. Building an engine to the limit costs dollars, you all know that. It also makes more TQ and HP. There are already complaints that some people are showing up to the track with overbuilt motors. It would be ridiculous for people to be walking up and talking crap about how fast a guy’s motor is with no other information to back it up other than, “he pulled me on the straight.” <—which I believe has already been mentioned in this thread.
Seems like you guys are friendly, but the minute someone talks about an engine claim rule, everyone is up in arms. Looking at it from my perspective, that is one of the first signs that the first to bitch can be the worst offender.
Hell, make it the cost of a crate motor, and include labor. Is that what most people in the class do? Doesn’t sound like it.
If a person isn’t slow in the head, its pretty easy to navigate the peer pressure rules. Anyone can sandbag.
All I was trying to do is be productive. It isn’t as if I’ve never turned a wheel on a racetrack…quite the contrary. Sorry if one of my “suggestions” turned into the worst suggestion ever to hit spece30.
Friendly crowd, yeah…[/quote]
I encourage you to spend time in the series before making suggestions re. what we ought to do.
I’m the one that protested your suggestion the most aggressively. If you’d been around us the last couple of years you’d understand the frustrations of the previous 8 engines. I could have bought a Metric Mechanic or Sunbelt trick engine many times for what it’s cost. The example of the kid that went thru 5 engines is also quite applicable.
When someone has too much hp it’s pretty obvious. Those that have showed up with too much hp, at least in the SE, fixed it. Also, we’re are all pretty open with our dyno results. I have 159hp, 158ftlbs on an .020 over engine with lots of dyno time trying different AFM’s and DME’s.
What you suggested is that you could come take my child. And when I reacted poorly to that, you responded with the sarcastic “Friendly crowd, yeah”.
SpecE30 is the friendliest bunch you will ever meet. The stories of assistance beyond any reasonable call that one of us has done for the other are the things of legend. When engine #2 was hosed up by a crooked mechanic, the senior guys in the region did and engine swap for me at the track. That is SpecE30. We’d be glad to have you join us, but you need to understand our culture. It is a culture of helping each other. It is not one of throwing hand grenades.
Ranger wrote:
Well put!
Here in the SE an overbuilt engine in the hands of a competent driver would really stand out. I sort of think the same would be true in the MA and NE regions. The competition is close enough to make an excessive amount of performance glaringly obvious and the “guilty party” rather quickly remedies that just from peer pressure.
There are folks with built motors, but they aren’t necessarily the ones at the front. And in at least some cases a built motor is done in the quest for reliability more than for performance.
Exactly the point I was going to make. I’m about to embark on a close to AUD$10k (approx USD$8.5k) M20B25 build. That may seem like a lot, but that is for:
-Complete strip down
-Brand new OE Mahle 9.7:1 0.50mm overbore pistons & rings
-Peened & balanced rods
-All new bearings
-New Oil Pump
-Peened, machined and balanced crank
-Acid dip & flush the block
-Centrebore the crank journals
-ARP Rod Bolts & Main Studs, other new OE fasteners
-IJ Teflon Crank Scraper
-TCM Baffle
-12 New HD Rockers
-New Valve Springs, valve guides & valve stem seals
-12 New Valves
-Head porting & polishing
-Etc etc etc
The bill will probably be more once you add in flywheel lightening, brand new clutch kit etc. ONE of the aims is to produce more power, obviously; but the major focus of the exercise is to set the engine up for continued high-load operation (it’s a stock 22 year old bottom end). Ideally this will enable me to do a bottom end refresh every 2-3 years (rings & bearings), and more importantly, removes any doubt from my mind that my engine might let go in the next 5 minutes.
P.S> I should point out that this is for our Australian series, NOT SpecE30 rules!
jlevie wrote:
This to me is a silly argument anyway from what I’ve seen. The guys at the front where I race are there because they are incredible drivers. They aren’t pulling away in the straights; they are pulling away in the turns because they can out-drive the lesser of us fools.
This series is the antithesis of Spec Miata. Do a season or two in it and then decide if the whole engine debate warrants scrutiny. I think you’ll find it doesn’t.
Currently, it is the anti thesis of Spec Miata because it hasn’t caught on yet. It may never do that. Mazda has a much better motorsports involvement than BMW (where BMW is basically 0). When the purse for winning the NASA nationals is $5,000 from BMW, this will be a different story.
Anyway, sure, I’ll drop it.
Foglght wrote:
Nice. C’mon by my car in the paddock. You will usually find the hood open so take a look. I trade data with anyone who asks - even that annoyingly fast kid Palacio. :laugh: Want to know what is illegal on my car? I have a welded-in rear shock tower bar. My steering column has been shimmed down. I’m not sure I still have the horns in the car. If you see something I missed, please call me out on it.
It is not the claim rule that ruffled my feathers. It was your implication that you have an impeccable, novel idea for compliance.
Spend some time with the search function and you will see that compliance methods have gotten a lot of forum space here. There are no silver bullets.
I have been one of the guys who showed up with unintentionally illegal equipment (4.10 left over from an automatic donor car) and I got called out as soon as I posted video with a shift light clearly visible. Some people probably think I did it on purpose. Oh well, I must be even dumber than I look to post the video.:laugh:
More recently, another guy showed up light, with a 4.10, etc. There was some grumbling in the paddock and some of the elder statesmen went and talked to him. At the next race weekend he was compliant. Nobody spent any money, nobody got their feelings hurt.
No doubt. But since we don’t have the Mazda “ladder” system, only fools show up in SpecE30 with a vicious competitive streak thinking they are going to clean house and use this as a springboard to greater things.
PS - I also race a Spec Miata so I have seen the lengths you have to go to if you want strict compliance.
Foglght wrote:
Aside from the $5 grand (which BMW has absolutely no incentive to provide), the real draw for racing a Mazda at Nationals and the SCCA Runoffs is that class winners get invited to the shootout to win a year in the MX5 Cup series. The winner of that series gets a year-long full ride in GrandAm/Conti/World Challenge (used to just be WC but that changed this year).
Broad generalizations: SpecE30 is mostly populated by tinkerers who are BMW guys and gals who want to race a cheap BMW. The motivations are entirely different from those who enter Spec Miata.
I think the essence of your suggestion is that SpecE30 is a great class worth protecting for the long run. I could not agree more!
djs325 wrote:
[quote]Exactly the point I was going to make. I’m about to embark on a close to AUD$10k (approx USD$8.5k) M20B25 build. That may seem like a lot, but that is for:
-Acid dip & flush the block
[/quote]
Be careful. When I embarked on this I found out that the intermediate shaft bearings are hard to replace and the acid dip can damage them. I’ve only read of a couple guys in the States that replace them. Because I didn’t want to screw with the intermediate shaft bearings I used a pressure washer on my block and a rifle bore cleaning brush on the oil galley.
Then you have to soak the block down with WD40 immed or it will start rusting in minutes.
King Tut wrote:
[quote]Steve D wrote:
I am not a tinkerer and never had a BMW before this one. I got this car solely to hang out with people that are fun to race with.