Track Day 14 - SOW CW - Further Oil Cooler Testing and New Suspension Settings
For whatever reason, late March through April is becomiing quite the busy week for us with track days. Monday March 27th we were just at Streets Of Willow, and here we are again just six days later at Willow Springs driving the cars again!
For this track day there were no new modifications to the Corvette. I figured since my best times and largest track familiarity was CW, I'd test how the oil cooler holds up to the higher paces in this direction.
This time out there was amazing weather, but notable traffic. The warmer temps meant there was no struggle getting tires up to temps, but there were now problems with tires getting greasy as the track got warmer and tire temps started to cumulate. I was stuill able to pull of a few clean 1:28 laps however, and while I'm down about 1.5 seconds from my best times, the temperature has increased and times are reputed to correlate fairly heavily with temperatures. So, I'll call that pretty similar.
Oil temperatures peaked at 243 degrees, which is about 30 degrees cooler than when I was running 1.5 seconds faster but with 20 degree cooler ambient temperatures. I'd say overall, the oil cooler is confirmed as succesful.
One thing that was interesting for me was that I was experiencing a bit of "shuffle" out of the rear end when cornering that didn't have me feeling terribly smooth through the turns. I decided to add some rebound damping in the rear to see if perhaps with the stiffer 650lb springs (up from QA1 550lbs) was causing some bounce in the rear. This in the end fixed nothing about the shuffle, but it did allow me to rotate the car a lot more notably through the tighter turns of the track. This in turn let me drop my times notable and the car was a fair bit of fun to driver. I'll probably keep this adjusted setting for tigher tracks where rotation is beneficial, and keep my balanced setup for tracks I want more straight line drive.
The clutch and I believe the torque tube are pretty toast on this car at this time though, and I'll be replacing them hopefully before I get out next. I'll also hopefully get the AMT motor mounts installed up front, and a remote clutch bleeder while I'm in there as well as a Tick Performance adjustable master cylinder.