Should SpecE30 go to coilovers?

#41

Lol, I’d forgotten that rule was still there. I argued, I thought successfully, last Fall that the adjustable spring perches line should go away, but it still ended up in the ruleset.

It’s 9.3.8.6.2. (paraphrasing) Adjustable spring perches are allowed in the rear. That’s a bitter pill to the folks that argued against adjustability.

Be advised tho that there is already a draft of the 2016 rule set and in it’s current form the reference to rear adjustable spring perches is deleted. That can be restored of course, the doc is still a draft. Folks that have strong feelings about this should contact Shawn. The reasoning for the delete was that none of the directors knew how the rule got into the CCR. When we talked about this last Fall, no one recalled ever seeing an adjustable spring perch available for a rear spring of OEM dia. Since it didn’t seem to be available, so the thinking went, no sense having a rule that allowed it.

#42

Ok I changed my mind.

These things are 25 year old shitboxes. The formula is cheap, simple, and equal. Fancy coilovers reduce the cheap and simple parts of the equation, and making a two-class system eliminates the equal. If someone leaves SE30 for SE46 because the cars don’t handle well enough, well, this wasn’t the series for them to begin with.

#43

Run a couple of races without a strut tower bar and you’ll have all the camber you’ll ever want.

#44

So I drafted a simple rule change recommendation for:

9.3.8.1.1 Front camber is unrestricted within the limitation and adjustability of bolt-in camber plates, and an eccentric bushing at the rear mount of the lower control arm. No modifications to the body and/or interior tub panels are allowed.

Basically something like this:

9.3.8.1.1 Front camber/caster is unrestricted within the limitation and adjustability of bolt-in camber plates, [strike]and[/strike] an eccentric bushing at the rear mount of the lower control arm, and bending of the strut housing at the spindle. No modifications to the body and/or interior tub panels are allowed.
9.3.8.1.4 The strut housing may be bent or deformed at the location where the spindle meets the strut tube to facilitate more negative camber and/or caster. The strut housing bending must not serve any other purpose.

I’m not really sure what other purpose there would be, but figure it’s a reasonable “catch-all”.

My main concern over a rule like this revolves around safety, reliability, and liability. Seems to be crossing into dangerous territory to allow a modification that intentionally weakens a component of the car. While I haven’t heard of any issues with doing this change, it’s also not allowed, so maybe not a lot of data points on the longer term effects. If it became a standard part of a build process, then we potentially have people at home bending their own struts to get to the right camber – and maybe over doing it, adjusting it back, then again, and not realizing how much each change is weakening the component.

Then again, maybe there are other rules that have already crossed this threshold that I’m not aware of?

I’m almost thinking the most likely change to allow here would be something that offers equivalent performance to the current H&R + stock strut combo in the front, but in a thinner form factor to allow more camber/caster range of adjustment. No adjustability (to appease people who have concerns about that leading to competitive inequalities).

Either that, or we all continue to just have a “gentleman’s agreement” that tower/housing deformation for camber adjustment purposes won’t be challenged or be cause for DQs.

Som

#45

SE30 was never about going fast or faster. Plus, the rear suspension can barely hold an toe alignment. Can’t imagine it would fair well. It would be a shame to mess with a near perfect formula.

I vote no.

#46

The average person can’t bend their struts at home, you have to find a shop that will do it. I tried to find a shop in my town to do this in 2007 and I couldn’t find one. That potentially makes the bend strut idea more expensive and more hassle then the coil over idea. I can easily imagine a bunch of labor costs associated with disassembly of the front suspension and couple iterations of bend/assemble/check, bend/assemble/check.

That’s tons harder then spending an evening putting in coilovers.

Also, with coilovers I’d get to play with camber and caster a bit and see what I liked. With OEM springhats and bent struts there’d be a lot less of an ability to play with camber and caster because you can’t change the bend. Deep pocket types could have shops bend several strut housings in different ways then they could experiment.

We’d have to have a spec on how much the strut could be bent. Otherwise some would exploit it to create all sorts of crazy things. If there’s a spec, then regional directors have to be able to measure how much the strut has been bent. Measuring this to a fraction of a degree sounds really hard.

I’m not saying it’s a terrible idea. My point is that every solution, EVERY solution, has warts.

Re. rear toe not staying put. This has been mentioned 2x now. Recall in the initial post that one of the charms of the rear coilovers was that they would significantly reduce stress on the rtab ears and therefore reduce the problem of losing rear toe and camber settings.

#47

The rear adjusters are there to basically replace the difficulty of stacking spring pads, which is legal. Adding adjustable perches also adds about 1-1 1/2 inches of height automatically that cant be removed without cutting away the originals. That is not as easy on the front as there are no pads, only those thin sound deadening rings. You would have to stack a bunch of those to have an effect and then you risk unseating the spring. Coilovers would be a major departure from that. I used to have them before SE30 and even though i didn’t know what i was doing, when i would mess with them I could tell a huge difference. One of the appeals of SE30 for me was that even the top guys couldn’t easily adjust suspension so I didn’t have to add suspension settings to the list of things to learn.

#48

Agree with you, Scott. Not a big fan of the bending idea as permanent rule, but thought it was worth bringing up. Though I didn’t realize it was that hard to find a shop to do it.

I think we’re lumping a lot of things under “suspension adjustability” here. Technically, our current suspension setup IS adjustable for camber/caster/toe. Technically, someone COULD make camber/caster adjustments on a per-track basis to optimize. That said, I’m guessing most people don’t make these adjustments from track to track. I think Sandro even said he never touches it, and I’ve heard that he does okay. It’s possible this is because our cars have never been able to “over do it” on the front camber – setting it as far negative as possible is the best setting for all tracks.

Also, I think the “adjustability” that really starts getting down the time/price rathole is when you can make dampening adjustments like bound/rebound. My impression is those are much more likely spread out the haves from the have-nots. Camber/caster changes would also fall into this problem if the adjustability was SO much improved that you start having different settings be ideal for different tracks. On one track you may want -5 on the left, but on another track, you may only want -4. Right now, there doesn’t appear to be a track where -3 is preferred over -4, so there’s effectively no adjustability needed there. But that leaves a gap between the people who have been willing to make tower/housing modifications (or have cars that naturally had sagging towers) to get to -4 and those, like me, who have not.

It sounds like what we’re talking about here is adjustability for the sake of bringing cars to parity vs. making the cars faster. So the question needs to focus on – what are the elements of the cars that are making them unequal? Body damage, trailing arms bending, strut/shock towers sagging – those are what make our cars different. I perceive suspension height changes to be more about a cheap way to get the cars “back to stock balance” rather than providing any kind of major performance improvement.

By the same token, if there was a rule change in this area, I’d like it to be around allowing camber changes that get to -4 so that I’m on an equal playing field with the other cars I’m racing against. While I’m not sitting here trying to argue that my -3 degrees is why I’m running multiple seconds behind the leaders, that’s not really the point – the point is purely the mentality of saying “the cars around me are the same as mine and have the same capabilities my car has, so any difference in place in a race is purely due to my skill levels”.

To that point, I get why there’s reluctance to going to anything that’s adjustable. It’s not so much that people need to know all the ways it CAN be used as a competitive advantage – it’s that adjustability is a potential unintended enabler of inequalities in our cars. Whether that ends up being realized or not is sort of beside the point – in this case, I think it’s the perception that matters, not whether or not people actually can use it as a way to gain an edge. Since suspension is such a black art to begin with, it’s not really easy to educate and convince people that “hey, change XX really doesn’t provide a competitive advantage”.

Som

#49

The last thing you want to do is fragment SE30 into two classes like a SE30x or whatever. I believe SE30 started out with two classes and it didn’t work. You don’t want to dilute an already popular and fun class.

If you want to prevent racers from leaving this class, then you want rule stability. It kills series all the way up to Formula 1. I certainly don’t want to be rebuilding a portion of my car every year. Like others have said, I want to be driving, not fiddling with my suspension every race.

I love the quirky handling of these cars. They are so much fun to drive!

Therefore I vote NO!

#50

Google helped me find a shop that offers a strut bending service specifically for BMW E30 race cars. $120 plus shipping and the problem is solved.

http://www.iemotorsport.com/bmw/E30-suspension-steering/02strutc1.html

#51

Wow, that’s cool. Wonder how stripped down they need the strut housing to be to do the bending. Hopefully it can be done without removing the bearings/hub or the shock/spring assembly? Would add weight to the shipping, but I’d prefer that over taking the time to disassemble/reassemble it all.

Seeing IE offer this as a service does help sway my view a bit on the safety/reliability concerns. Still might feel weird having a rule that allows bending such a critical component. Almost like if there were some hypothetical rule that said “bending the caliper in order to allow wider or thicker pads is okay”. If someone’s caliper fails because of this modification, how much responsibility falls on the rule setters? Before you answer, I already figure this is the kind of question that could devolve into a political argument about personal responsibility and all that, so I’ll phrase it differently – if you advocated this rule and one of your friends got hurt because their strut housing broke, would you feel responsible?

Unless more qualified people than me – like a few more people with IE’s level of experience – could vouch for the safety of such a change, I would feel bad introducing the change.

So maybe it’s worth collecting feedback from people like James and other at large BMW/E30 tuners/mechanics to get feedback on that modification. If there’s a consensus that this change doesn’t pose significant risk, then I’d feel better about such a rule change (and while I would feel bad for my friend, I’d feel less responsible about it because I’d feel like I made every effort to consult with people that know the car better than I do). IE’s implicit approval (through offering such a service) is definitely a good first step.

But… if you allow housing bending, the followup problem could then become – now people with bent towers AND bent housings can get 5-6 degrees and you’re back to having unequal cars. So, the more I think about it, I think you’d need to accompany the rule change with a reintroducing a max camber rule. Maybe determine what the max negative camber from a “strut tower straight” car with the IE 1.5 degree bend + plates is, subtract a few tenths as a buffer, and make that the max. I’m guessing we’d be looking at about -4.0 to -4.2 degrees max. The cars that currently have that through sagging towers can keep their cars that way. The people that have never been able to get their cars that low will have a legal way to get that low. And there won’t be a concern about giving the “sagging tower” cars the ability to have even more crazy negative camber because it won’t be allowed.

Som

#52

I think this is a bad idea. I certainly don’t want to have to change things on the car, I just don’t see the point, and I don’t feel like adjusting a bunch of things. I hate adjustments. These cars were not built for coil-overs. Cars that were are simply designed differently. I’ve always thought that the rear spring rate on these cars is wrong. Look at your coils. They fully compress and bind, which sends the rate to infinity. Any lame-o can drive a “race car”. You have to be a boss to wheel a SE30.

#53

[quote=“Som” post=81805]Wow, that’s cool. Wonder how stripped down they need the strut housing to be to do the bending. Hopefully it can be done without removing the bearings/hub or the shock/spring assembly? Would add weight to the shipping, but I’d prefer that over taking the time to disassemble/reassemble it all.

Seeing IE offer this as a service does help sway my view a bit on the safety/reliability concerns. Still might feel weird having a rule that allows bending such a critical component. Almost like if there were some hypothetical rule that said “bending the caliper in order to allow wider or thicker pads is okay”. If someone’s caliper fails because of this modification, how much responsibility falls on the rule setters? Before you answer, I already figure this is the kind of question that could devolve into a political argument about personal responsibility and all that, so I’ll phrase it differently – if you advocated this rule and one of your friends got hurt because their strut housing broke, would you feel responsible?

Unless more qualified people than me – like a few more people with IE’s level of experience – could vouch for the safety of such a change, I would feel bad introducing the change.

So maybe it’s worth collecting feedback from people like James and other at large BMW/E30 tuners/mechanics to get feedback on that modification. If there’s a consensus that this change doesn’t pose significant risk, then I’d feel better about such a rule change (and while I would feel bad for my friend, I’d feel less responsible about it because I’d feel like I made every effort to consult with people that know the car better than I do). IE’s implicit approval (through offering such a service) is definitely a good first step.

But… if you allow housing bending, the followup problem could then become – now people with bent towers AND bent housings can get 5-6 degrees and you’re back to having unequal cars. So, the more I think about it, I think you’d need to accompany the rule change with a reintroducing a max camber rule. Maybe determine what the max negative camber from a “strut tower straight” car with the IE 1.5 degree bend + plates is, subtract a few tenths as a buffer, and make that the max. I’m guessing we’d be looking at about -4.0 to -4.2 degrees max. The cars that currently have that through sagging towers can keep their cars that way. The people that have never been able to get their cars that low will have a legal way to get that low. And there won’t be a concern about giving the “sagging tower” cars the ability to have even more crazy negative camber because it won’t be allowed.

Som[/quote]

The biggest issue I can see with it is potentially mis-aligning the caliper bracket ears, but if they use a jig I would imagine they are bracing these while they do it. Other than that, I can’t really see it being an issue. I’m sure there are plenty of people doing this already?

As far as sending an assembled strut to IE- that would end up costing you about $400 (the price of a 2.5" spring/perch upgrade?) when its all said and done, and I’m fairly sure there is an acetylene torch involved which you wheel bearings and strut inserts would not enjoy.

#54

Since this is a discussion thread on the possibility of changing springs/rates, I thought I’d share the following, which I found interesting:

#55

This.
Every time someone suggests changing this proven formula that has resulted in large fields and close racing I lose a little more interest in continuing racing. Maybe I’m not as well-heeled as some of you but racing is effing expensive for me. Every incremental cost reduces my ability to compete. I spend enough on tires and windshields every year as it is.

#56

I had no idea a respectable shop like IE offers a strut bending service. It seems deeply odd to codify in the rules a procedure that a crafty lawyer for a grieving widow could throw into the soup in a wrongful death case however.

If going to coilovers would change the way the car feels, and our ability to “nail it” through T5 as was thrown out near the top of this thread, I could get behind it. It’s almost comical when we look at the photos of our cars at full boogie leaning over like a sailboat, and anything that could reduce that is a positive in my book. If we don’t head in this direction, I’m going to have to think about replacing my cough-cough years-old springs, apparently. Never heard they were a wear item before. Shocks yes, but not springs.

#57

To be honest, I’m incredibly surprised by how many people posing this question has upset. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that Scott posted it and so it seemed “more official” and therefore more likely to change. Maybe if a nobody like me posted it people wouldn’t have gotten so up in arms about it?

I took it purely as an invitation to discuss – and I think he even stressed that he had no ulterior motives there.

Why are we all so opposed to having a discussion about stuff like this? It’s a few keyboard strokes to say you’re not interested. Done. Instead we’re getting a lot of doomsday predictions about how we’re going to ruin life as we know it because Scott wanted to talk about coil overs.

Talk is healthy. Expressing disapproval is healthy. All I ask is that we tone down the hyperbole here, because then you get into a situation where no one suggests anything out of fear of being pounced on – and I guarantee that’s not healthy, either.

I also don’t think it’s out of bounds to ask people why they feel a certain way. No ones saying you’re wrong to have your opinion, but I think it’s fair to ask why. Sometimes it helps to get an understanding or pulse of where peoples interests and priorities are – cheap racing? car performance? women? booze? other?

Other times you may find out that the opinion is based on incorrect assumptions. Like maybe someone heard “coilovers” and thought “Oh shit! They want me to spend $4000 more on my car! No way!”

In this case, for example, I think the discussion has centered a lot around “performance improvements” for the suspension and so people have legit concerns that the “performance thrill seekers” are going to overpower the people who struggle to justify paying $800 for tires to their wives 2 or 3 times a season. I get that. I totally get that. I’m still on my first set of tires because I’m not looking forward to having that discussion with my wife. :slight_smile:

That said, I’m trying to view this in a different reference frame. Is there a way to help people inexpensively address inequalities between cars caused by wear on these cars or damage over the years? Or, if there’s a benefit to tire wear (which we haven’t discussed a ton, but worth getting more data points on), that could be another reason why discussing suspension could yield a change that makes tire costs ultimately slightly cheaper for everyone.

Those are topics worth discussing to me, and I should hope we can have those kinds of conversations without people feeling like an activity they love is being imminently threatened.

Som

#58

We are discussing it. I’m just vehemently opposed to it. Wouldn’t matter if Carter brought up the topic or not I’d still feel the same way. Y’all can discuss camber, toe, wearable springs and all that as much as you want. I think some of us just get very defensive when the ultimate result would be trying to change something guys like myself don’t see as broken to begin with.

#59

If I am going to be quoted, I might as well chime in. We are altering the Spec3 springs to deal with a format that needed to be updated for two reasons:

  1. The current spring is becoming unnecessarily hard to find
  2. The current front spring is too soft and the rear spring is too tall. These two realities create a platform which is not as stable nor fast as it should be. This is an obvious limiting factor to the rest of the platform and can be addressed for a very reasonable cost.

Other notes: The national office wants to see the gap between these two great classes be a couple seconds. If you examine the tip of the spear of each group it generally is (speaking about VIR for instance). The goal is to see more of the racers have that gap so that we do not see intra-class racing as a by-product of being in the same run group. As one of the first handful of people to have ever raced in SE30, I was always a believer in the ethos of limited adjustment, long-lasting parts, and focus on the drivers’ talent. Spec3 followed suit and it is for this reason that we are NOT moving to a coilover and or height-adjustment platform. In reading through the six pages of comments on this topic, I am truly appreciative that the overwhelming majority of comments have been in support of the existing design ethos for what I personally believe are all the right reasons. Creating additional variability in these classes creates a barrier to entry for the HPDE/TT world and only rewards those who truly want to tune to the second standard deviation (Spec Miata comes to mind). The point of these classes is to welcome the next generation of racers by making it easy to build and fair to race regardless of your engineering abilities or wallet size.

I personally hope your series sticks with its current formula.
All the best,
Jon M.

#60

While I’m not “hell-no” concerned about the, set of tires cost of the discussed changes (who wants to spend money unnecessarily though?), I hear the tinkerer vs. non-tinkerer argument pretty loudly. I’m a newbie this year and I’d pretty much assumed that if I got my HP up to the racing standard and improved my driving skills that I could compete, maybe not for wins or even podiums, but enough to have the fun discussions everyone else has after races. I really don’t have the time, skill or inclination to pay my shop to help set up the car for each track. IMHO the adjustability adds another “issue” for me to deal with in moving up to at least get in the mix.

Having said that, I understand the tinker mentality too and hate that my circumstances would make me vote no on this (should it come to a vote) thereby reducing the fun of the tinkerers.