Need Help for next Autox

[tomc at satx.rr.com (tomc)]

Nice job Bryan,

A rear sway bar will go a long way, "The Project" needed a new rear axle
when I bought it and I had one swapped in from an '82 Woffy with a stock
rear sway bar. I am not running a front sway bar. 

You may be able to dial out some under-steer by playing with your tire
pressure. I run Falken Azena Sports on mine with a air pressure of 50psi
front and 35-40 psi in back. Your car will vary due to weight, balance
and tires. I've removed most of weight I can from "The Project" and
relocated the battery to back. 

My advise for now, especially since you're new to autoX'ing is keep your
car as it is for now and play with air pressure. Later after you get use
to your car at it's limits then work on improving the cars performance.

Also, check your clubs rules, and make sure the modifications you plan
on running don't bump you up in class. I decided to run in DM this year,
this allows me to do almost anything I want to the car without worrying
about my class, however after pax scoring I am running at the bottom 3rd
of the all the drivers. If I stayed in FSP like last year, I would be
pax'ing much higher.

I tend to change my car a little at a time, once I get use to the new
mod, then I go to the next. I'm still getting use to the new Falken
tires and the battery relocation. My next mod will be a good sport
alignment, since it has never had a real one since I've owned the car.
After all the front end work I've done on the car I've aligned the car
myself using looks right/feels right method, but I'm rolling on the
outside edge of my tires during hard cornering so I need to see if an
alignment shop can give me some more camber. After the alignment I plan
on stiffening the chassis with front and rear upper stress bars and then
slowly build in a custom cage mainly for stiffening than for safety.
Hopefully, at some point a 2.0L 16V engine will fall into my lap...errr
my garage. And I can add some horsepower too.

BTW, you GRM folks, I drove that yellow/black Honda CRX that competed
with you guys at the Challenge the other day. My car feels like an old
Cadillac compared to that car. Man, that chassis is stiff. With some
more torque that car will be kicking my ass in AutoX, right now I'm just
a couple hundreds of a second behind and they're on race tires. I need
to stiffen my chassis a whole lot to compete if they change out their
engine.

Hope this helps some. PS, I added a photo album to my web page, this has
potpourri of VW related pics and stuff, some repeated from the web and
some just collected off my hard drive. There are a couple S1 chassis
tech spec pages on there, I'm not sure what they were scanned from. I
have the original .gif's if the .jpg's are illegible. Let me know.


TomC
'79 "The Project" Scirocco 
http://www.tom-c.com