The Traccord - 2003 Honda Accord Coupe

re:Stealth

that'll change after it's all stickered up on tech day

Yesterday I drove from the north side of Houston to Mineral Wells airport. This is the same site that they hold the Mineral Wells Pro Solo at. It's a very big piece of decaying asphalt. A friend of spacecadet has the connections to rent the site and the cones to set up a course that's apparently a copy of an old BMWCCA course. It's about a mile long and the Accord is reaching 85 on the back straight. The fastest car there wasn an S2000 who was turning 1.12 lap times and reaching 96mph on the back straight. It's a nice course for testing. It's good to know people. 

They keep the groups small so that we have virtually unlimited runs over the course of the day. This is my second time running with this group and we end by all standing aroudn at about 2:00 and agreeing that we're tired. The Accord did somewhere north of 50 laps yesterday between me, spacecadet, and another friend. I drove spacecadet's Focus ST (more on that in a minute) and we all drove the friend's BRZ with SCCA spec coupe suspension. 

The site is hard on two things, brakes, and tires. The fast guy in the S2k ended up with this rotor. He tracks/instructs the car regularly at COTA and has never cracked a rotor. Spacedet generally can't run his ST more than two laps without clouds of smoking brakes. 

I've got some tire temperature data and I need to take pictures of the heat changing brake paint but it's still dark out, so I'll talk about driving and the cars for a second. 

The Accord did great. Cool brakes. Predictable. It will rotate just a bit under trail braking but otherwise it's stable everywhere. I'm comfortable handing it off to sleepyhead on track with him never having driven it. It's safe and predictable. I drove about 590 road miles in it yesterday. Comfortable, radio works great, I checked the indicated speed with a GPS speedo on my phone and it's dead on. Three of us took the car to get pizza for the group and everyone thinks the back seat is fine. Check that, spacecadet needs to not wear a hat back there becasue significant bumps have him just tapping his head on the headliner at just the right point to have the button on top bonk him. He has plenty of room behind me when I'm driving which confirms that we can leave the passenger to fully recline and sleep. 

The BRZ was fun. Two big takeaways. First is that is accelerates about like the Accord. Ok, not quite that slow, but you can essentially mat it out of every corner and just hold it there until the braking zone. You're not going to learn much throttle modulation on this car in this sort of setting. Second is the Falken 615k+ tires that are spec for the class he's running. Grip is fine, not top of the pile stickly but ok. What they do differently is in how they talk to you when you get to the end of useable slip angle. Rather, they just get completely numb. The BRZ has good enough feedback through the wheel that you can feel the surface and what it's doing right up until just before they let go, and then all goes quiet. Push the tire harder and things get ugly. It's an interesting way to do things and I don't dislike it. Considering their price in Miata sizes and their reported longevity, I'm strongly considering them as a set of tires for the crappy Miata. 

The FocusST was, in a lot of ways, the fun car of the day, so I'm going to write a lot about it. Let me preface this by pointing out that spacecadet is faster than me. Generally a LOT faster than me. If we wanted to place higher on One Lap this year we should just chip in to get him a couple of track weekends in the next few months and crew for him while he drives all the tracks. He's worked extraordinarily hard to get to this point over the last four years. But........ as many fast autocrossers can be, the faster he gets, the more people wince when he drives their cars. He doesn't abuse them, but he drives fast with a LOT of slip angle and car movement. It's a good way to autocross, but not necessarily a good way to turn laps and learn a track, especially if two people share a car for a weekend (we've been discussing doing this in the crappy Miata) which would give the car 16 twenty minute sessons in two days. How then do I communicate that instead of going fast, I just want him to drive my car quickly? 
We started in the Accord. The Continental EC-DWS on the surface at Mineral wells has a particular language. As slip angle increases the tire will feel like it's on an increasingly rougher surface. It goes from feeling like you're on chip seal (because the surface is that bad) to marbles and then finally letting go. Spacedet has turned 100's of laps on this surface and is totaly comfortable finding the marble feeling and going fast. The problem is, holding the car on the marbles destroys the tires so the goal at this site is to keep it off the marbles if you want your tires to last. Not quite as fast, but way cheaper. He had trouble feeling this in the Accord and was rightly frustrated. We came back in and put his AX tires on the Focus even though he wasn't planning on driving. Once he was back in a familiar platform, and doing a few other exercises involving purposely sawing the wheel in long corners, he found it. He's always been a fast learner. 
Next he decided to deal with the brake issues on the Focus. Every time he drives here he's limited to 2-3 hot laps and then a two mile drive down the road to cool the brakes off. Even then the car is VERY hard on front brakes with the e-diff grabbing front wheels constantly to try and find grip. It's not just him either, every FocusST that has run out there has limped home with a smoldering pile of shame and front brakes. Once he figured out how to keep the car on the shallow end of the slip angle, he applied that same feeling to braking, and especially acceleration. He wasn't going slow, in the last session that we went out he was turning laps as fast as the Accord, but he did five in a row and without a cool down run he could set his hand on the wheel face by the hub and it was merely warm to the touch. No brake smell at all. He went into the day talking about buying an LSD and FocusRS brakes to.....still talking about those things, but also knowing that if he's offered a proper track day that he has the skills and sensitivity to drive quickly enough to enjoy and learn while preserving the car. I think he has the potential to be really fast on track, much faster than me, while still being able to feel what a car wants to last a long time. We should go endurance racing. 

Thanks for the race report, although I'm biased; race reports are my favorite kind of post.

I suspect maybe this got buried because of President's day, but there should be more comments on this.

Any thoughts on the "on-track" performance effect of the splitter?

Cheers!

damen

In reply to badwaytolive :

Thanks! 

The on track performance is hard to say. I wouldn't expect something like this to give me more than about a second total on a track like this under the best circumstances. Combine that with cold temperatures and different tires than last time and it wasn't something I could feel. I don't think it radically altered the balance of the car, it was still stable in the fastest sweepers we did at about 60mph. I can still lower the front a bit to grab some angle of attack in the future. Everyone I talked to told me that aero like this is subtle. Not that gaining a second is trivial, but it's hard to feel seat of the pants for us amateurs, assuming it worked even that well. 

Saying all that, the splitter is ruining the car as a car. This thing was supposed to be a car. A car to drive. Daily. The splitter does hit things, looks weird, and it keeps raining and I don't want it to delaminate before I make a pattern. 10 minutes and its off!

Some inspection shows that basically all the rubbing is on the outboard portion of the splitter. This is happening when we're leaned over in a hard corner and get any sort of bump. Maybe rub strips like Gimp used on his CP splitter? Maybe more sway bar? 

And the aluminum strapping did what I wanted it to do, it gave way. Not sure if this is from on track stuff or in and out of parking lots, but it worked. Cool. 

Time to make a splitter template and a "good" splitter. I need to finish up the dzus for fender liners and the rest of the plastic for when I'm not running the splitter. Washer bottle needs to be mounted. Maybe try an intake from the stock boot to a cone filter to free up more space. Add at least one USB port, try to see if I can find a good rear seat to modify to give us some room. Decide on new brake pads. Still lots to do. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

In reply to badwaytolive :

Some inspection shows that basically all the rubbing is on the outboard portion of the splitter. This is happening when we're leaned over in a hard corner and get any sort of bump. Maybe rub strips like Gimp used on his CP splitter? Maybe more sway bar? 

[... ...]

Time to make a splitter template and a "good" splitter. I need to finish up the dzus for fender liners and the rest of the plastic for when I'm not running the splitter. Washer bottle needs to be mounted. Maybe try an intake from the stock boot to a cone filter to free up more space. Add at least one USB port, try to see if I can find a good rear seat to modify to give us some room. Decide on new brake pads. Still lots to do. 

What's the caliper read on the outboard part compared to an "unmolested" section?

You've got a "power sander" of some type, right?  There's probably something for "pre-shaping" the good spliter with 80 / 120 grits to match what's been taken off... especially if you're going to apply any kind of composite fabric.

and I'm down with a single rear seat mod.  we'll direct any wannabe hitchhikers into onrails' car.

We're going to touch the sides no matter what unless body roll decreases. No good way to take pictures on course, but you can watch it lean hard enough that it's just going to happen. We need to make it one week. I could probably just do a thinned epoxy coat or two and it would survive. Splitters are a wear item. 

A bolt on slider will reduce the clearance even more- could you route a little channel in the plywood and bond something into it at the same level?  Maybe a strip of titanium for cool sparks?

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

And be the team that lights the grass on fire somewhere! See Drstrangeland's hillclimb thread.

So I'm glad I'm not the only one who's thought of this

mazdeuce - Seth said:[edit]

How then do I communicate that instead of going fast, I just want him to drive my car quickly? 

[edit]

He wasn't going slow, in the last session that we went out he was turning laps as fast as the Accord, but he did five in a row and without a cool down run he could set his hand on the wheel face by the hub and it was merely warm to the touch. No brake smell at all. He went into the day talking about buying an LSD and FocusRS brakes to.....still talking about those things, but also knowing that if he's offered a proper track day that he has the skills and sensitivity to drive quickly enough to enjoy and learn while preserving the car. I think he has the potential to be really fast on track, much faster than me, while still being able to feel what a car wants to last a long time. We should go endurance racing. 

Exactly. I helped manage my son's 25hours of Thunderhill team last year running a rental EcoMiata with four Alpha drivers of which my son was one. The car broke around the 15th hour, 3am, mostly due to poor car prep but had these guys quit with the dick measuring exercise in every single session, we could've eliminated at least one tire stop and MAYBE the car would've gone the distance. I could not communicate the need to just run 1-2 seconds/lap slower and keep the car on the track. E36 M3, the night laps were just as fast as the daytime laps. I think one driver was actually faster at midnight.

In reply to rdcyclist :

This is one of my favorite write ups about bringing a car home and the difference driving can make. I read it at least a couple of times a year. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

In reply to rdcyclist :

This is one of my favorite write ups about bringing a car home and the difference driving can make. I read it at least a couple of times a year. 

Thanks for posting this! Great read and mindset on car management.

How's the tiny battery working out? 

I love the size and weight of that thing.  Would go nicely in my TVR.

In reply to TVR Scott :

Currently testing. The car sat from Sunday evening until this morning (Wednesday) and voltage was at 13.2, so either it holds voltage well or the car has very little drain. Word on the street is that draining them flat kills them and the fancy ones have low voltage protection. It's transparent day to day, so I'll keep using it and see how long it lasts.

mazdeuce - Seth said:

In reply to rdcyclist :

This is one of my favorite write ups about bringing a car home and the difference driving can make. I read it at least a couple of times a year. 
 

Yep, hits the nail on the head completely. also there's a lot fo dust in the room... eyes can't stop watering... I want TWS back.

mazdeuce - Seth said:

In reply to TVR Scott :

Currently testing. The car sat from Sunday evening until this morning (Wednesday) and voltage was at 13.2, so either it holds voltage well or the car has very little drain. Word on the street is that draining them flat kills them and the fancy ones have low voltage protection. It's transparent day to day, so I'll keep using it and see how long it lasts.

Good info, thanks.

The nice thing about cheap wear item splitters is that they're cheap and eventually they self clearance themselves to the point of no longer rubbing. You could probably do some pre-shaping to help the paint/epoxy stay on longer. Or what I do, keep a can of the spray on bedliner handy and any time the splitter comes off just hit it with a couple quick coats to help check if you're still rubbing.

We usually wind up with the leading 2" all the way around our splitter half the original thickness.

But, sparks do look cool

one day....

mazdeuce - Seth said:

...Speaking of new cars, this little guy was at the event yesterday and it's magic. 

 

Except it's up against my RS in D Street.  Mission Impossible. 

jstein77 said:

mazdeuce - Seth said:

...Speaking of new cars, this little guy was at the event yesterday and it's magic. 

 

Except it's up against my RS in D Street.  Mission Impossible. 

Yes, the SAC did you a large favor. doesn't make the N a lesser car. 
 

In reply to spacecadet :

Too true.  Not sure who thought it was necessary to move the RS out of B Street; we were doing fine there.

jstein77 said:

In reply to spacecadet :

Too true.  Not sure who thought it was necessary to move the RS out of B Street; we were doing fine there.

The reality is, GS started this trend when they moved the Focus ST into it. That laid groundwork to raise the bar of all the classes. the RS may be the fastest car, but it's not much faster than the CTR or the Camaro. 

The major gains in efficiency has opened the door for a new horsepower war and we've all been reaping the winnings. 



 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

We used to drag race out there on Sundays, terrible traction and always a ton of shenannigans.

Was that the Lonestar BMWCCA guys? I was planning on going to that event but I thought it was on Sunday until it was too late

Opti said:

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

We used to drag race out there on Sundays, terrible traction and always a ton of shenannigans.

 

Was that the Lonestar BMWCCA guys? I was planning on going to that event but I thought it was on Sunday until it was too late

no, BMW was saturday, we privately rented the site sunday with a buddy of mine. 

an f body club showed up sunday as we were packing up and once the donuts and burnouts started we got out of there quickly. 

Not something any of us want to be associated with.

The 1/8th mile paint has become very well kept in the past 8 months and i'm just hoping nobody gets themselves hurt out there.  It's a site like no other for autocross and TnT work from a value and access standpoint. 

There were......noises. Enough that the car went back on the lift. I have a bunch to write about, but it appears that I found the source of at least some of them. Mount on the left should look much more like the mount on the right. More all togethery anyway.