GT4 Challenge: Spec Miata @ the 'Ring

Ok,

First off a big thanks to FarmerDave for throwing the last GT4 challenge. It was suggested that we do an ulimited challenge, fastest car at the Nurburgring. Unfortunately, I feel that the cost of competition in such an event would disqualify too many people, so I've decided to pick the car and (slightly) limit the modifications. And now .. the specs:

Car
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The car is an '04 Mazda Miata RS. Price is $23.5K (It is bought new from Mazda in Japan)

Mods
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All modifications are allowed with the exception of forced induction. This means no Nitrous, no Turbo, and no Supercharger. All other modifications are allowed and recommended. Please note that downforce can be added to all cars by buying a wing at the "GT Auto" store where you normally wash and oil-change a car. This modification can add large amounts of grip and make front/rear high-speed grip easy to modulate. Because of the number of high-speed corners at the 'Ring, it will reduce lap times significantly and is the most important $1200 you will spend on your car

All tires are valid. R5 Super-Soft Racing tires are recommended as Time Trial has no tire damage.

Prize
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A prize will be offered up to the winner, I'll announce the prize as soon as I figure out what it is. =) Contest ends Wednesday, July 6th at 11PM EST. All times MUST be verified with a picture. Please no cheating on the forced induction rule, lets keep this competition honest and fun.

Bill in Brooklyn

 

Rule Change #1 ... Forced Induction is allowed minus Nitrous. Without the Turbo, this is still a 6 minute car, but it feels painfully underpowered. Nitrous is still against regulations. Good luck.

Bill in Brooklyn

EDITED!

 

As the event organizer .. I'm disqualified, but with about 40 laps in on the car (a lot of that was setup time) ... I'm down to a 6:46.xxx.

Some things I've noticed about this car:

Without some serious toe modifications, it wants to swap ends all day long. I had to fiddle a lot with spring rates and dampening to get it to react well to hitting the curb, and even now its the one area I'm still trying to improve the car on.

Phenomenal stopping power. Car slows down extremely quick. That, coupled with a "so-so" motor that means I'm not trying to brake from 190+ means that I've had to re-learn a dozen brake zones or so. This car is very composed under braking which makes corner setup a real joy. The only real problem is attitude adjustment mid-corner which is tricky at best.

To the guy trying to save money ... you're going to need R5 tires. No doubt about it, you're going to need them. The Wing is only 1200 bucks and is a great investment, but the tires will provide the real traction. I know they're $47K, but if you pony up for nothing else, tires should be it. Other than that, work on connecting corners ... there are MANY sections of this track where you do not lift at all, even with the car putting out maximum horsepower, much less in near stock form.

This car has a small power band .. I custom'd the gear settings completely (each gear is customized) .. I highly recommend people do this.

Let me know if anyone needs any help with car setup, I won't know how you like your cars to handle, but I can help you with what works for me.

Bill in Brooklyn

 

Any questions? What is the car doing or not doing that you'd like to change?

Bill in Brooklyn

 

FYI .. just ran my fastest lap at the Ring trying some kamikaze suspension settings on my Minolta Toyota:

http://www.pbase.com/bill_in_brooklyn/image/45673799/large

Over a minute and a half faster than the Miata and still at least 15 seconds hiding in there if the damn car would calm down.

Bill in Brooklyn

 

Current Record: A very quick 7:00.973 by Chocaine. To those of you that have put in times, we'll need pictures people .. pictures.

Bill in Brooklyn

 

Got my Miata time down a 6:43.243 .... come people, get out there and put in some laps!

http://www.pbase.com/bill_in_brooklyn/image/45730188/large

Bill in Brooklyn

 

The car, with the full-on suspension with stock settings was way too twitchy for me ... I'll post my suspension settings tonight when I get home (I have about 70 laps in on this course with this car now).

Bill

 

Ok .. my suspension setup. Hopefully some people find some of this usefull:

Spring Rates: 8.0 front and rear. On smoother tracks, more like 11 or 12, but for the 'Ring with it's high speed bumps, this is is a good compromise. It's not soft enough to allow dive or body roll, but not stiff enough that the car reacts violently to curbs or bad pavement.

Ride Height: 120 front and rear. Yes, this is tall, and there's a noticible steering response difference between this setting and dropping the car to the bump stops, but again, with the amount of times in any given lap I smack a curb, the extra suspension travel helps keep the car composed.

Bound Dampening: 2 ... lets the suspension travel do it's thing and absorb.

Rebound Dampening: 8 ... works for me, easy for me to "feel" on a bike, very hard for me to determine in this game, but I play with it occasionally to see how if I like how the car responds. If anyone has any advice regarding rebound dampening's exact translation in this game, I'm all ears.

Camber: -5 degrees front, -1 rear. 5 degrees of negative camber in the front is usually 1 or two degrees more than I run for a car of the same downforce level, but in this case it removed some of the high speed twitchy-ness to the front end. This was one of the final modifications I made and although it didn't help much with the lapt times, it helped me put the car where I wanted it more consistantly.

Toe: -2 front, +4 rear. As I've mentioned in a previous thread, this car had a real tendency to oversteer as soon as I threw the fully adjustable suspension on it. In itself, this wasn't bad at it really made the car turn in well, and it was controllable, but it often took a couple of seconds to calm the car back down during which time I couldn't do anything like brake or transition to another corner ... this caught me out quite a few times. Going the +4 in the rear REALLY helped settle this down, but not enough. I went to a -4 in the front to help it out even more, but now there was too little oversteer, the car really lost its front end bite. Bringing the front setting down to just -2 is what I settled at as my preference.

Stabilizers: 1 front and rear. I'm not a fan of using stabilizers in this game. In the real world, they can be an easy way to dial out/in over/under steer .. but in this game, all I can ever get them to do is make the car less stable. If anyone has any examples where dialing in more Stabilizer has helped them, I'd love to hear about it so I can figure out how to use them in this game.

Gearing: With this car's short power-band, I pulled all 6 gears as tightly together as possible. I pushed 1st gear as tall as it would go, pushed 6th gear as short as it would go, and adjusted the 4 gears in between to be fairly evenly spaced (with a taper as we get to 4, 5, and 6). I then use the final drive ratio to set the terminal speed the car is capable of attaining.

Wing: Full on, front rear.

Driving Aids: None.

I hope this helps someone ... let me know if anyone has any questions. Oh, here's a picture of the Mean Miata:

http://www.pbase.com/bill_in_brooklyn/image/45783130/large

Bill in Brooklyn

 

You're going to need to top out the downforce. This track is all about corner speed, the few mph you might pick up on the big straight is worthless compared to the effects of maintaining speed through some of the fast sections of this track.. Throw downforce at max front and rear and use the suspension to setup the car. If you're using downforce to do major adjustments of the car's midcorner attitude in anything but extremely high speed corners (150+ mph), you're using it incorrectly.

With spring rates that low, are you not noticing dive under braking and extreme weight transfer during transitions? My car is set to 8.0 front and rear and that's at my "soft limit".

This is a 6:3x car on that track .... finding another 5 seconds is going to be easy.

Edit: I almost forgot, this car doesn't make enough power in first gear to spin the slicks during a redline brake dump .... there is no need to keep traction control set to 1, its just going to slow you down anytime any sort of slip angle is generated.

And on the gearbox, setting the automatic gear ratios is killing your power band. This car pulls hardest from redline to 8K RPM, and works best when shifted RIGHT before the rev limiter kicks in at 8,200 or so. You're really going to need to tighten up the gearbox to keep the car in the power band.

Bill

 

Damn Dino ... big jump from the 9+ minutes you were running previously, did you modify the car or was this mostly through track time?

Bill