Spring rate help?

wstar

I've gutted my car fairly thoroughly throughout at this point. I'm sure a little more was removed in the rear than the front, but it's not like my car is super-light in the rear. Having a full cage in the car restores a little balance, too. I haven't put it on scales or corner-balanced it yet, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I know I have more-significant setup changes than that left to make.

You'll notice there's a lot of things I just haven't measured or done yet for where I'm at, which may seem a little odd. The thing is, I'm a super-geeky guy, and I'd have a natural tendency to over-engineer all of this and math out on it and nitpick a thousand details. If I let that side of me run wild, I'd be making like 4 significant setup changes between every run on the track and trying to blame everything that happens on some subtle issue with the car even though it probably only makes 0.5% difference, and even then only to a much better driver than me.

So I tend to consciously try to push myself in the other direction. I just go drive, and if the car doesn't feel seriously out of whack, then it's up to me to drive the car and adapt. It's probably better for my skill development anyways, and it's nice that the car's response is relatively stable from run to run most of the time, even if not optimal. I try not to futz with any settings during a track-day/weekend unless I think something is really feeling unstable and strange, or if I think there might be a mechanical problem with the car. And I try not to over-engineer things between, either, or I'd waste so much time on tweaking and math that I'd lose my day job And honestly, I have no good judgement yet on exactly which items are worth the time spent obsessing over, and which are just nitpickery for -0:00.001 lap time in a hyper-competitive environment that has no bearing on me today.

But yeah, especially now that I seem to have finally broken out of another skill plateau and I'm feeling pretty confident in my driving, my suspension needs some geeking on in the near future, at least one little burst of it to consider these basic suspension issues and get the car up to the next approximate level of goodness. Even so, the primary thing driving me to start toying with suspension again isn't so much lap time as getting my tire wear even on the slicks so I don't destroy sets of tires too fast.

I have no idea what this even means, but I don't suspect wheel width ratios is much of a determinant of weight distribution.

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7AT Track Car!
Journal thread / Car setup details

synolimit

I mean I drove to a scale for semi trucks. I measured the distance from the front tire to the rear tire. I split that distance in half, about where my torso sits in the drivers seat. I drove on and parked so the front half was on the scale. Then I drove the back half on with the front hanging off. That's how I got 57/43. I figure its as good as any to find the front to rear ratio. Till I get my cage and add 100lbs back to the back, no matter what I think I'll have over steer.

I need to go again if it truly works and also drive on with right side/left side/one tire at a time. Figure that way I'll know all 4 corner weights for free and give me an idea about ballast. I like math too and doing this stuff!

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13 370z-