So Champcar dinged us pretty bad for our recent upgrade Koni Yellows in our 1994 Honda Accord and it put us over their 500 point limit. An oversight on my part for not reading the rulebook completely; but, luckily we were able to remove most of the aero and the shock/strut cross bars to be back under 500 points for the Daytona race.
The friendly yet stubborn tech guys for Champ said "you can run coil overs for way less points" and the co-owner of the car has taken that as gospel and I need some input from the peanut gallery to either back up my argument or refute it.
1) The car has Koni Yellows with Eibach springs
2) It handles very well - there's a noticable difference from the Koni STRs that were on there before. The car stays planted through corners and doesn't transfer weight as much as it did before when stopping or turning.
3) You get what you pay for with coil overs IMO. Most options out there for a 1994 Honda Accord are trashy tuner style and if you want something great it's going to be upwards of $1500+ for a set and likely to not include springs.
4) Do we really need a rear diffuser, rear wing, and front/rear strut tower braces? I know I posted a thread months back about a rear wing; but, it's a 1994 Honda Accord with 200whp - it's not getting anywhere fast. It's a boat.
5) A front splitter/air dam is all I really see us needing for brake cooling. Champcar tech hit our splitter with double points because there wasn't a gap between the bumper and splitter and they considered it an air damn as well.....GTFO with that one (rollseyes LOL).
Pick up cheap adjustable sleeves, match the Eibach spring rates, install on Koni's
Paint the koni's whatever color you want to match cheap Racelands, etc.
Go race because ChampCar's rules in this situation is poorly written and stupid.
It's mostly clear on the tech sheet, but you do need to understand some of the verbage. A shock with adjustable damping, such as your Koni Yellow, is 25 points each. Spring height adjustment is 10 (the spring to go with it is free). So for your common "coilover" kit that as an adjustable spring perch and an adjustable damper is 35 points per corner. Paying for a damping-adjustable shock at all four corners is 100 points....rarely worth it. 40 points for race springs and height adjustment- maybe/probably, if you can get a suitable non-adjustable shock to go with it.
You definitely don't need strut bars, so there's 20 points back. The full aero treatment? It's worth some time if done right, but again, is it worth the cost? Post your tech sheet if you want.
We've been running for 5 years with Chump, we've always been well under the 500 point margin because its an Accord, these Konis sent us over the moon with the other things we added in the offseason. I also don't do much work on the car because I'm constantly on travel for work so I just buy all the parts and the other guys install them.
The adjustable shock portion of the rules is an oversight on my behalf because I lazily grazed through the BCCR and read the 2x portion only in which the yellows do fall under. I didn't look at their tech sheet either. Again oversight on my part. I'm not complaining or asking for verification on the rules - I've got that part down now
dps214
HalfDork
7/13/20 12:03 p.m.
How much money/effort are you willing to put into it? Back when that rule first went into effect, a friend of a friend team owner took the konis off the car, had them dynoed, then bought a bunch of bilstein shocks and found the ones that dynoed the closest to the konis to run.
As far as the aero, I don't have any technical knowledge. But I know that there's been a huge shift towards maxing out aero even on the lower powered cars, and it seems to be working out. Not sure how crazy people are going on fwd cars, though. I'd certainly focus on the front end first.
