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NCC BMW CCA HPDE Summit Point, September 2012

MINI wet

I can tell you exactly when summer ended this year. It was at 3:23 PM on September 8th when this photo was taken. Friday at the track was hot and humid. Saturday was miserable, wet, and wonderful. And Sunday was a gorgeous autumn day.

There were some really cool cars at this event, including this beautiful blue Ferrari 458 Italia seen below. It was good to see that the owner of this car a.) drove it to the event; b.) drove it at the event; and c.) drove it home. The previous owner drove this car only 750 miles in two years of ownership. The current owner drove more than 3,000 miles just bringing it home after purchasing it. I never really appreciated the styling of the 458 until we got out on the track. Even at 100 MPH, we were able to have a conversation with the windows down. That says something for aero efficiency. (You listening MINI?)

458 Italia

The inside even smells good. It smells like that brand-new baseball glove you got when you were a kid. The one you put a ball in and slept with it under your pillow to break it in. (OK maybe not everyone has that memory….) I took some video from my helmet cam as we lapped the course. I was fascinated by the speed of the gear changes and the great display graphics that emulate analog gauges. Unfortunately, you can’t see the gauges very well in the video.

458 Interior

If you look just about 6 inches to the left of the “458 Italia” logo there’s a depression in the leather. It is sort of forehead shaped. That got me wondering about the survival rate of previous passengers. This car accelerates so quickly, just holding my head off of the headrest gave my core a workout.

dash dimple

The GeorgeCo MINI powered by Beano was of course in action as well. In this photo, it’s powering through turn 7. The suspension work paid off and the car was very well balanced, level, and had tons of grip, even in the rain.

Powered by Beano

The telemetry system is still a work on progress. The GPS is not very accurate with the iPhone in its current position so the track map is all over the place. (It looks like I’m taking a grand tour of Delaware.) The corner and straight speed indicators seem to be off too when you compare them to the large central speedo. G meter, throttle position, and RPM seem to be working, but the gear indicator doesn’t seem to go above 3rd. So there’s some work to be done, but the technology is cool. Fast forward to the session time of about 11:50 and again at 13:17 and you’ll see why we spend so much time on the skid pad in this program.

In case you had $229 to $295K sitting around and were wondering what you would get for your money. The answer is at least 3 seconds a lap. That’s the difference in two laps chosen at random from my video of this past weekend. Both were on Friday as we refamiliarized ourselves with the track. The only difference is that in my case, I’m pushing the MINI about as hard as I’m willing to go. There’s a little bit left, but not much. The Ferrari is going maybe 6/10ths on the straights. Alternately, you could take $13-$27K, buy yourself a low mileage 2006 MINI Cooper S, and buy a house with the rest. Just saying.

If you can start the two videos at the same time, they both start at the same point on the track. You want to have the sound playing on the Ferrari video however. (I’m working on editing them into one feed that shows both side-by-side but haven’t figured that out yet.)

More Comp Tire Goodness

new tire goodness

It’s been a busy year since we first bought this car. Our goal was to find a low mileage ’06 Cooper S that could eventually be modified for club racing. Keeping in mind that the cost difference between an R53 Cooper S and JCW is about $5,000, we wanted to make this car better than a JCW model, without completely sacrificing creature comfort as a daily driver until we were ready to gut the interior and install a cage. I think we’ve brought it right to that edge: It’s stiff, but not jarring. And it’s fast.

Given that the majority of R53 Cooper S cars were sold with sunroofs, finding the right car proved harder than you would have thought. We found a 45,000 mile car, with heated Punch Leather seats, a factory limited slip differential, and fog-lights — no other options or packages. This August we replaced the clutch, ball joints and rear main seal just to baseline the car, but it really was in terrific condition. The boxes above contain the last phase of our initial sorting: getting power to the road through light-weight wheels and grippy tires, in this case Nitto NT-01 R-comps which we’ll scrub-in at a test-and-tune autocross event in Frederick and then we should be ready for the track coming up in two weeks.

To recap, here’s what we’ve done to date:
Handling — We added an H&R 27 mm front roll-bar with Alta adjustable end-links and Powerflex control arm bushings. Previously we installed an Alta 22mm adjustable rear sway-bar (now set to the stiffest setting to compensate for the bigger front bar) and adjustable end links. Suspension consists of Bilstein Sport shocks and struts over Bavarian Autosport Performance Springs. We have Powerflex shock bushings in the rear and Eibach adjustable camber plates in the front. Suspension settings are 1.7 degrees negative camber in the front, 1.5 degrees negative camber in the back. (That’s the most negative camber we can get in the front without binding the springs.) Front toe is neutral, slight toe-in for the rear to increase straight-line stability. In the rear we also have H-Sport adjustable control arms to compensate for lowering and to beef-up what’s normally a weak link in the MINI stock suspension. To increase chassis stiffness, we have a strut-tower brace in the rear, Madness Lower Stress Bar in the front, and MINI OEM Cabrio cross braces. To improve braking, we added JCW brakes up front, stainless steel brake lines all around, and brass bushings to the rear brakes.

Power — MINIs have the aerodynamics of bricks so power improvement isn’t ever about top-end as much as it is about mid-range torque. We have a Madness 15 percent reduction pulley, Screamin Demon Coil, MSD plug wires and NGK Iridium plugs. On the intake side, we are using an ALTA intake and intake hose along with an ALTA intercooler diverter. On the exhaust side, we’re using a Scorpion stainless steel free-flow exhaust. The Scorpion exhaust is lighter weight than stock and has a nice deep tone without droning. Behe performance provided the custom tune to take advantage of all the changes. Currently, this car dynos at about 198 whp. We could increase it to get above 200 by increasing the rev limit setting, but frankly we’re more interested in power from 4500 to 6000 RPMs than we are watching pieces blow through the cylinder walls at 7200 RPM. We want this lump to last 200K miles or longer.

Information Management — We’ve brought over the FES-Auto shift-light from our previous R53 and added a new telemetry system this year. We’ve outfitted the car with a PLX devices wireless network adapter that feeds telemetry data to an iPhone. Now we can log data as well as add telemetry data to in-car videos.

Cost total: Excluding the clutch and ball-joints which were just routine maintenance items, we’re just $300 shy of our $5K budget. That’s pretty good considering all of the changes we’ve made so far.

In-Car Video Telemetry

Here at GeorgeCo, we’ve been using on-board video for driver education for a while, but our previous systems were full of compromises. Dedicated professional systems are expensive. Consumer video equipment is not rugged enough. Place the camera outside of the car and you can’t see what the driver’s hands are doing. Place the camera between the rear seats and you can’t see all of the controls. Place it between the front seats and you only see what’s out the front window. There had to be a better way without breaking the bank. Now we think we’ve cracked the code.
Telemetry System
The goal of this project was to create an off-the-shelf solution for under $500 that would provide lap timing, in-car video, and telemetry ($300 if you already have an iPhone).

The iPhone 4 gives you a video camera, GPS, accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope. Optrix makes a rugged mil-spec case with a 175 degree wide-angle lens that works with either an iPhone 4 or current generation iPod. It costs about $100. Put your iPhone in the case and attach it to your car using the CruiseCam mount which costs about $50 or make one yourself. We already had a mount so it didn’t cost us anything. Now to get the telemetry data from the car. PLX Devices makes a cable for $150 that plugs into your OBD-II port and provides telemetry data via a local wireless network. We went with the Kiwi WIFI unit, but they also make a Bluetooth model. BMW doesn’t make everything available that you would like to have (such as A/F ratio or oil temperature), but it does provide some key measures: RPM, gear, speed, throttle position, boost pressure, and intake manifold temp. Set-up is very easy if you follow the instructions for iPhone.

Pulling it all together is a piece of iPhone software called Harry’s LapTimer available from the iTunes store. This $29 program has features often not found on professional systems costing hundreds more. You can download a predefined track map, or create your own as we did in the video below.

If you aren’t getting power to the PLX unit, check your fuses. Typically fuses F3 or F36 may be blown on the MINI and you wouldn’t know it. We look forward to getting it out on the track in September.

Things that go Wump in the Night

Driving home yesterday when it was 110 degrees, the guy ahead of me swerved at the last second and served up a chunk of cast iron pipe for me to drive into. It was a broken piece with an end-cap, perhaps eight size inches in diameter and six inches tall. My car is only 4.5 inches off the ground. Concrete center divider to my left, traffic to the right, I could only choose where to hit it, not if: Straddle it and risk puncturing the oil-pan; hit it with the wheel, cut a tire and bend a rim. I went for the most clearance — between the wheel and the center-line of the car.
bottom left in pic
Most of the impact was taken by the lower stress brace. The darn pipe turned up as it wedged under the car, pitched me about 20 degrees to the left (fortunately I was approaching an intersection by then with an empty turn lane on my left) lifting the right-side of the car off the ground with a big “Whump”. D’oh. Not good. I pulled over expecting to see oil or brake fluid gushing from below. Everything looked good and the car still tracked straight so I headed home.
sacrifice
Getting under it today I could survey the damage. The brace sacrificed itself and took most of the impact, but the sub-frame was dented as well. I know the sub-frame on these cars is pretty stout.
bent
So here’s the question: Do I worry about the sub-frame damage if the car is otherwise still in alignment? Replace or just weld a reenforcing panel if otherwise straight? It looks like the sub-frame (Part #31106763721, “Front Axel Support”) runs about $600 (and involves dis-assembly of the entire front end of the car). If I go down that route, anything I should upgrade at the time? I need a new clutch anyway and was already thinking about replacing the control arm bushings with powerflex bushings. Is it easier to replace the front swaybar if everything is out? In for a penny, in for a pound… Any other bushings which I should look at? Or can I just pull the crease and weld on a patch panel to add some strength and not worry too much about it?
comparison
Update 7/22/12: I finally got the replacement lower stress bar from Madness Motorworks (formerly MINI-Madness). The good news is that the mounting holes still line up. That means that the bar deformed under the impact but didn’t deform the sub-frame along the way.
clean
Now that I’ve changed the suspension (again) to Bilstein Struts, the ride-height is slightly higher. Hopefully the extra 10 mm in higher ride-height will keep me off of speed-bumps and road debris, but the bar is still the low point in ground clearance. At least for now it’s easy to spot….

MINI Adjustable Camber Plates DIY

I had been using Bavarian Autosport lowering springs for about a year.  I like the drop in ride height resulting in a lower center of gravity and less body roll, but the struts were overpowering the springs resulting in a harsh ride.  I had also been using Ireland Engineering fixed camber plates which gave 2.7 degrees of negative camber up front.  The problem with this combo was that the front air-dam was was only about 2 1/2 inches off the ground, and the driver’s side spring would bind at lock.

spring binding

So I figured it was time to rethink my entire suspension set-up.  I needed to dial back the negative camber slightly to prevent binding and improve tire wear; I wanted to increase ride height by about 10 mm to better clear speed-bumps and road debris; I wanted to better match my struts to the spring rate of the BavAuto springs to improve the ride quality; and I’m slowly adding Powerflex bushings to reduce deflection in the suspension.

rear shock

Starting in the rear, I added new Bilstein Sport Struts which have a lower spring perch resulting in a similar ride height as before, but longer suspension travel.  I topped them off with Powerflex rear strut top bushings.

front strut

The Bilstein Sport Struts in the front raise my ride height by about 10 mm when combined with the Eibach (SPC) camber plates.  This set-up is still about an inch lower than stock.

camber plates

Using the instructions that come with the Camber plates and your Bentley manual, the installation is pretty straight forward.  You can actually install them without removing the axle shafts from the transmission or separating the tie-rods.  Just lower the entire strut by removing the 3 nuts to the upper shock mount (it won’t pull out completely); compress the spring by using a spring compressor; put the upper shock mount back into the cavity; remove the upper shock mount; then the strut will pull out the side.  Finish removal as per the Bentley manual.

top plate

Installation is similar.  Attach the strut to the hub; place the spring on the strut while it is still compressed; and attach the lower plate.  At this point you can remove the spring compressors.  Slide the strut and top plate into the cavity and attach the top plate through the circular opening. Use a lever to stop the top plate from spinning on the shaft so you can tighten to torque spec.  Finish by attaching to the adjustable plate.

finished camber plate

When the whole thing is installed, you can adjust camber to maximize negative camber while avoiding spring binding.