1995 S10 Build for Endurance Road Racing - Thr3ve Racing

That is a great answer!

Okay, sorry for falling behind. Let me continue the narrative:

So after rebuilding and hopping up the 4.3 we went to Atlanta Motorsports Park (AMP) in Dawnsonville, Georgia. It's a 2.0 mile road course that is very tight, twisty, and technical. I really like it. So in November of 2014 we joined the ranks of 53 other crazy teams did a Double 7 event. In ChumpCar, a Double 7 (D7) is two separately scored events, 7 hours on Saturday, 7 hours on Sunday.

On Saturday we started out 29th (remember, no qualifying - they just randomly drop the green flag). Our first driver moved us up to 21st. When I took over in the second stint, he informed me that 5th gear was gone. As it turns out, so was reverse. I came back in 2 hours later and had us up to 14th. During my stint I really drove hard down into a "bottom-out" type of curve and knocked our y-pipe off. Every driver after that had to wear ear plugs because we ran open headers for the rest of the weekend. Painful.

Our third driver went out for his 2 hours and fell to 26th. Our 4th and final driver ended up in a really bad crash (no video) when a car in front of him spun out (out of sight of our driver) and our driver rounded a blind curve and the other car was sliding across the track and T-boned our passenger side door. The truck died and he got hauled back in on a rollback. We looked and the offending driver's rear bumper pierced our passenger door and struck our battery and ripped the battery cable from the terminal. A new cable later and some ratchet straps to hold on the door and we were back out. We lost about 30 minutes and ended up in about 30th place.

Sunday was worse. The transmission died a fiery death. I was second again on Sunday and after about 30 or so minutes I ended up not being able to shift into any gear. RIP NV3500. Believe it or not, an NV3500 just isn't suited for road racing....especially when a couple of our drivers completely mis-shifted and grabbed reverse when trying to hit 4th. Upon teardown of the transmission, a couple of our shift forks had broken and wedged against other shift forks rendering the transmission useless. I'm not even sure where we ended up finishing on Sunday given we didn't even complete half the race.

As you can realize, this is what necessitated moving to the Super T10.

We also discovered our 7.625" rear end and the Auburn we bought for it was toast. According to Auburn, our break-away torque should be about 60 ft-lbs. After two events (we did buy it used) it only took a few ft-lbs to break loose. We still had the terrible issue of getting bite exiting tight right hand turns. We did discover that our rear travel was limited due to the Blazer rear swaybar we put on.

Lessons learned:

1. We decided to add armor plating to the driver's door bar. Had the bumper came in that side, it would have been ugly.
2. We need more rear travel.
3. We need a battery transmission.
4. Our 7.625" doesn't have a lot of performance options.
5. We need a quality installed exhaust. Cheap Chinese exhaust pipe from Advance Auto just won't last in an endurance race.
6. Radios would be nice.
7. Our brake pads are still wedging.

Some pics:

Here's the video of part of my stint on Saturday. The file got corrupted, so it's only 45 minutes of me driving instead of the whole 2 hours.

I was taking my time on the first 4 or 5 laps letting the tires get warmed up (it was freezing outside) and I had never driven the track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MohWYvK_z5g

If someone could tell me how to embed video on this website, that would be great.

sounds like fun!
I think the lack of stiffness in the sliding calipers are going to just cause wedging all the time.
I was amazed at how taper worn the pads I just replaced on my blazer were.

I'm surprised you are looking for more travel out back, I don't remember your setup but coming from a longer travel vehicle (truck) you'd think you wouldn't have to worry about that. I'm getting plenty of flex in the back of my zr2 with the stock blazer rear bar.

Ouch! That truck took a beating! As far as the rear wheel lift, I also run into that problem but only while autocrossing. I never had the issue on the track day I did. It only happens on right turns, which is probably because there is not a lot of weight on that side. If you zoom in on this picture, you can see the RR just barely coming off the ground: https://www.flickr.com/photos/48455382@N05/22392023637/sizes/l

One thing I did that helped was switch from polyurethane bushings and end links back to stock rubber ones. The poly end links were very stiff  and had almost no side-to-side play. It handled slightly better before at higher speeds, but was more difficult on corner exit in autocross.

have you guys thought about maybe lowering the rear roll center also?
I have a feeling you guys might be seeing some more jacking effects and maybe it's not all due to binding

have you guys thought about maybe lowering the rear roll center also?
I have a feeling you guys might be seeing some more jacking effects and maybe it's not all due to binding

How so?

sounds like fun!
I think the lack of stiffness in the sliding calipers are going to just cause wedging all the time.
I was amazed at how taper worn the pads I just replaced on my blazer were.

I'm surprised you are looking for more travel out back, I don't remember your setup but coming from a longer travel vehicle (truck) you'd think you wouldn't have to worry about that. I'm getting plenty of flex in the back of my zr2 with the stock blazer rear bar.

By eyeball, I bet we don't get more than an inch of travel.

1.75" lowering blocks, clamped leaf springs.

an inch is not enough travel. you're missing out on a lot of grip if that's all you have.
either you're binding like you said (a crazy amount), or you have too much friction in the system somewhere (clamped leafs arent helping things... maybe lube and use sliding clamps?), or something is wrong...

How so?

I think the easiest method is a panhardbar to force the leafs to do what you want.

We are heading back to AMP next Friday for an all day test and tune.

The plan is to swap between a multitude of swaybar configurations, set brake bias, fiddle with clamped and u clamped springs, and test our new driver/pit radio setup.

We may add a hop shock to get rid of our mad wheel hop.

The hop shock won't get rid of wheel hop entirely, but it will dampen it. It would be a worthwhile upgrade none the less.

I had a hop shock on my LS powered S10 & it worked great !!

I'll post more definitive info later, but for now, the Test & Tune was a huge success.

1) We unclamped our rear leaf springs and got back the travel we needed to prevent wheel spin upon exit of tight right-handers. Whew. Once unclamped, I couldn't really tell if we had any wheel hop while on the course.

2) Shocks are definitely a must-have. Ours are completely shot.

3) Our radios work great. That's a huge benefit.

4) The brakes stop great, but we seemed to have a whole lot of braking power in half the distance of pedal travel which makes it difficult to brake because factory cars are setup with full braking taking place at full stroke of the pedal not half. We have a few ideas as to why this is going on and are going to look into it further.

5) I even got some point-bys by some Porsches and BMWs. That's always heart warming.

We also mounted a GoPro to watch our steering shaft, headers, motor, and UCA. I'm working on editing a video and should get it on YouTube tonight. I'll post it later.

Here's the video of my 4th stint of 5.

http://youtu.be/iZjyoL3KSvw

After I came in, we discovered our long-standing problem of getting bite on the exit of tight right-handers. All in all,  a great day.

Geez I'm a slacker.

Okay, so after we did our test day at AMP, we came home and readied the truck for Road Atlanta.

We did run into a clutch master cylinder issue (remember, were running a Howe Hydraulic throw out bearing) because we used DOT4 fluid instead of DOT3. So, we put in a new clutch master cylinder with the proper fluid.

February 2016 rolls around and we're back at Road Atlanta. I just can't describe how orgasmic that track is. Anyway, this is our second time there and now we have 100+ HP, C5 brakes, Ford 8.8, SuperT10, Bilstein shocks, and more experience. Surely we'll win.

Not so much. There's been substantial speed creep in the series. We did get faster. On our first trip in 2014, our team's Fastest Time of the Day (FTD) was 1:59.9. On this trip, I logged the FTD at 1:54.3. A 5.5 second improvement! We know our truck is capable with our driving skills of breaking 1:50.

Anyway, of 107 cars battling for 14 hours we ended up 38th. Still not as good as I would hope, but overall not bad for a truck.

Our only blemish was a douche team in a Porsche totally punted one of our drivers in T5 and cut a tire down and that cost us some time as he has to limp back to the pits and we had to put some new rear tires on.

Here's the video of the spin out:

https://youtu.be/xR8yTUdpv3A

Here's a video of s portion of my daytime stint. I ended up doing the last nighttime stint, but haven't edited it yet:

https://youtu.be/jpMB37NUMD8

That looked like a lot of fun (your run). I would have been pissed about being taken out but I guess that's a normal risk with racing.

In 3 events, I think that was our 10th contact...none of which we initiated.