Marshall Mosty
AI/SI Texas Regional Director
2011 NASA-TX American Iron Champ
AI #67 "Mosty Brothers' Racing" (RIP)
ST6 #21 Toyota Corolla (being revived)...
I completely understand this sentiment. It's one of the biggest things mentally I've had to get over transitioning to this series. In my endurance days it was all about finishing the stint to hand the car back off to the next guy to stay in the race... No risks, no dumb decisions, no risky moves.
One of the best things I've done to my car is not put another $4k machine shop built engine back in it. Mentally it's been great knowing that if I pop the explorer engine I'm out way less money. So I'll hit the limiter occasionally trying to make a pass, etc. Never did that on the old one and it blew up fantastically for my trouble... currently considering picking another one up from the junkyard and having it ready to go in the trailer....
Daniel Records
CMC # 34
In 2015 my car dynoed 70hp low. Turns out I'd lost a rod bearing the last race of the year prior. I forgot how weird the car had felt the last lap or 2 and how I'd just cruised there because we were really spread out by that point. I grabbed a crank off of CL and had it polished, pistons and rods used off of Fleabay, new bearings and gaskets, honed in my garage, all in for about $800. That motor is still in and healthy, has been good and made good numbers. It's getting replaced by an LS. While the rest of the crap is an asspain to hunt down cheap, the motor itself was $220 from the pull and pay for an aluminum LM4. Gotta find another for a spare. 170k and I'm not doing anything to the bottom end. Got a late LS1 cam for free fiddy to pop in there and that's it. I don't believe in machine shop engines for these cars when stock seems to last just fine.
RM CMC Director
Leave the ls1 cam alone.
An lm4/lm7 as is with some work on intake exhaust restriction is all you need.
If you throw the ls cam in there you may have trouble getting the torque you need after choking the power down to get under the HP limit.
I'm pretty confident the reason for Gm having worse rear end reliability than the Fords is all due to axle hop and no diff cover is going to fix that. I've never blown a rear end, and only rebuilt mine recently because the 13 or so yr old T2R was feeling like it wasn't working well any more.
Al Fernandez
a little late to the party on this one.... but what an entertaining read. A bit off the wall at points but good entertainment value! Ya mine was in the early days before I did any sort of mechanical prep to the car and was running HPDE. Do much more these days but Hallett will show that my experience is about the same. Looking forward to getting that part of my racing career behind me. Well to the extent that is reasonable.
So what can we do about eliminating axle hop?
If there's one major platform disparity, it's that fact that F-bodies have to drive and brake bias around rear axle hop while the ford guys can actually use their rear brakes and go fully aggressive with brake compound.
If I understand correctly it can be as simple as converting the nose end of the torque arm to be a sliding type instead if a fixed bushing with no other geometry changes.
Does this include the torque arm bushing?Originally Posted by CMC Rules
#39 CMC Camaro
Orange is Fast!
CMC-NT01 FTW!
Apparently one of the best fixes for axle hop is a stiffer, aftermarket torque arm that doesn't attach to the transmission. Other than that, you are playing with spring/damping/tire pressures to make the car less likely to hop. When that inevitably doesn't work, you crank the rear bias to almost turn the rear brakes off...
Richard P.
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