Benji
Well-known member
Before attending the open day at Redstar this past weekend, we lowered the rear of the car by about 5mm as well as adding about 7mm (per side) rear track width. I also hobbled together a "cabin ventilation" system with repurposed drain pipe by harnessing the high pressure air below the windscreen and redirecting it into the cabin. It has been moderately successful, but we at least have some air blowing across our sweaty faces. It was our first outing with the skimmed front brakes and also our first outing since owning this car (4+ years!) without any brake shudder! 
It really is nice to stand on brakes and get consistent speed retardation. It takes some proper recalibration to learn to trust the brakes.
We are finding we may have a little too much rear brake bias now. The rears underrotate (revs drop under heavy braking) and it will attempt to spin if you have too much brake pressure on corner entry and havent let the rear wheel speed catch up to road speed...I hope this will get better once the front brakes bed in properly, otherwise we will need to look at a more aggressive front brake compound - currently running Ferodo DS2500. We experienced no front brake locking and it is quite easy to modulate the brakes now.
So onto the biggest surprise of the day - the car has suddenly become very playful with the rear end. It is like an excited puppy that wants to be involved in every corner and you need to be careful with the throttle on corner exit. This is probably not the fastest way around a track, but it is fun especially as the car is very communicative about how sideways it wants to go! I suspect that lowering the rear by 5mm has increased the rear camber (was -1.5 before) and increased the toe-in/out due to the "passive" rear steer built into the E34 suspension. If we wanted to fix this, we would likely need to weld in a camber correction bracket with eccentric bolts, but I doubt we will...
Anyway, car was consistently doing low 2.17s at Redstar and I feel it had a high 2.16 to give if I didnt run out of fuel during my last session. That is at least a 2 sec improvement over my previous PB š
What a fantastic machine!
It really is nice to stand on brakes and get consistent speed retardation. It takes some proper recalibration to learn to trust the brakes.We are finding we may have a little too much rear brake bias now. The rears underrotate (revs drop under heavy braking) and it will attempt to spin if you have too much brake pressure on corner entry and havent let the rear wheel speed catch up to road speed...I hope this will get better once the front brakes bed in properly, otherwise we will need to look at a more aggressive front brake compound - currently running Ferodo DS2500. We experienced no front brake locking and it is quite easy to modulate the brakes now.
So onto the biggest surprise of the day - the car has suddenly become very playful with the rear end. It is like an excited puppy that wants to be involved in every corner and you need to be careful with the throttle on corner exit. This is probably not the fastest way around a track, but it is fun especially as the car is very communicative about how sideways it wants to go! I suspect that lowering the rear by 5mm has increased the rear camber (was -1.5 before) and increased the toe-in/out due to the "passive" rear steer built into the E34 suspension. If we wanted to fix this, we would likely need to weld in a camber correction bracket with eccentric bolts, but I doubt we will...
Anyway, car was consistently doing low 2.17s at Redstar and I feel it had a high 2.16 to give if I didnt run out of fuel during my last session. That is at least a 2 sec improvement over my previous PB š
What a fantastic machine!
