Yes, it's finally done. It took a few confused calls to Eastwood, several trips to Home Depot and a significant amount of trial and error, but the #7 StudioVRM.net Prelude finally has a new livery! In the process, I learned quite a bit about Elastiwrap how to adapt basic painting techniques to a rubberized coating. Here's what I have to share from my adventures in my experience with Elastiwrap. Buying Materials and Setting up a Booth I started my shopping spree by ordering the 3-gallon Elastiwrap kit from Eastwood, which had everything I needed. Instead of my order, I received a card saying that my order was backordered three weeks due to the product being out of stock. Blast. It turned out that Eastwood was having trouble getting the charcoal respirators that they included with the kit, and that was holding everything else up. Two calls to Eastwood's Customer Service later, they had replaced my original order with individual orders for the following: 2 gallons of Elastiwrap in Fastback Blue 1 gallon of Elastiwrap in Torqued Yellow 1 gallon of Elastiwrap Gloss Clear 1 can of surface prep aerosol 1 Turbine Paint Gun Being an independent racer without access to a professional paint shop, I also needed a place to spray without making a mess of the garage or letting dirt get into the coating while it dried. Fortunately, the overhead rails for the garage door provided the perfect place to build a makeshift paint booth, So it was off to Home Depot for: 5x 10' lengths of 1.5" PVC pipe 6x 12'x24' rolls of plastic sheeting of varying thicknesses (6 mil on the floor, 3 mil for the walls, 1 mil for the ceiling) 50' roll of masking paper Value pack of 3M Blue tape in 1" and 3" width A gallon of mineral spirits based paint thinner 5 paint mixing buckets 2 of these convenient paint pouring spouts A box of contractor-size garbage bags Zip ties 1 paint mixing paddle for a cordless drill A few key items weren't available locally, so the following came from Amazon: A pack of Furniture Grade (!) PVC 3-way elbows A 100 count pack of plastic razor blades I happened to have safety gear already, but if you don't have them, you will also want to get: Disposable coveralls with hood and boot covers A NIOSH P100 rated respirator (get one. they're cheap) Nitrile gloves Safety goggles Painter's rags A cordless drill The total bill came in under $425 in materials, which I thought was a pretty good deal. Setup of the paint booth came without much difficulty, mostly as fellow racer Cessna Eng helped me set up the PVC piping and tape up the vinyl walls of my makeshift paint booth. It isn't pretty, but it does a fine job of protecting the contents of the garage from being rubberized unintentionally. Masking and Surface Prep While I have years of experience doing sloppy masking jobs for half-baked touchups, I decided to do the job properly this time. I started by covering all of the smaller surfaces with a layer of blue tape, which was trimmed around the edges using my trusty plastic razor blades. The larger surfaces were outlined using 3" wide blue tape before being covered with a layer of masking paper and sealed with blue tape. In addition to covering the windows, I also masked the door openings and engine bay to keep the overspray out. I even went through the trouble of back-masking the trunk and using a folded layer of blue tape between the door seams for good measure (and at this point, just for fun). Finally, I covered the wheels using contractor garbage bags and put cardboard shields in front of the radiator to keep out any overspray. As it turns out, doing a good masking job doesn't take much time. And even if I didn't do a perfect job of masking everything, I wasn't too worried. Eastwood says that overspray can be trimmed and peeled easily, as long as you have a nice hard edge to peel from. If I accidentally sprayed over something that I didn't want wrapped, I could cut it with a plastic razor blade and peel it off. More importantly, I needed to make sure that the surface was prepared so the stuff would stick. This is where things start to deviate from the usual procedure for painting a car. According to Eastwood, the best way to prepare a surface for Elastiwrap is to make the surface as smooth as possible. This is because Elastiwrap is extremely sticky and will not peel off of a rough surface. Instead of scuffing the paint on the car like I normally would, I spent the next hour smoothing out big scratches and edges with 1000 grit sandpaper and using the aerosol surface prep to clean off any grease. Sidebar: The surface prep aerosol itself is a curious thing that probably warrants an article of its own. It seems to clean everything from track grime to leftover vinyl adhesive and leaves a waxy finish not unlike automotive wax. Just for kicks, I sprayed some on the hood and quickly buffed it with an electric buffer. If you want to see the results, scroll back up to the second photo of the car in the paint booth and look at the driver's side of the hood. I'm tempted to use it to polish a whole car just to see how it would look. Of course, being a heavily pitted and scratched up track car, I wasn't going to get a perfectly smooth finish everywhere (especially not in the passenger front fender, where all of those dents are). As far as I was concerned, this was just another opportunity to test Elastiwrap's oft-touted self-levelling properties. Coating, Not Painting. Definitely Not Painting. Onwards to the main event, spraying the coating! Safety gear check, ventilation fans on, electric Turbine gun assembled, reservoir loaded with my preferred shade of green (about 3 parts blue to 1 part yellow with a tablespoon of paint thinner) and it was time for a test spray on one of the front fenders. Within the first few moments, I realized just how different this stuff was from regular automotive paint. The coats came out super thick - about 2x what I would expect from regular automotive base coat from a spray can. It also had huge droplets dispersed them, which looked a bit odd. This seemed to be consistent with everything that I'd seen on YouTube, so I kept going until I had two coats on the entire car. Surprisingly, by the time I came back around, the coating on the front fender had already dried. Most of the droplets had levelled into the surface, but some of it had stayed intact, leaving a slightly rough-looking finish to the surface. Apparently I needed to use a lot more paint thinner to produce a smooth finish. Oops. Undeterred, I refilled the paint gun for a third coat (this time with a cup of paint thinner) and started spraying over this finish in the hopes that the additional coats would smooth out the bumpy surface. This time, the gun started spitting huge drops of paint along with its normal spray, leaving big splotches of coating on some of the body panels. Disassembling and cleaning of the tip of the gun didn't seem to make things any better. In fact, it seemed to be getting worse every time I pulled the trigger. At this point I was so confused that frustration wasn't even a factor. As it turned out, some of the Elastiwrap had dried inside the gun where I couldn't see it. Maybe it was another sign that I needed to use more paint thinner. Completely disassembling the gun and bathing the components in paint thinner solved that problem. Unfortunately the revelation came after I had made a huge mess on the car. From Disaster to Dino Skin At this point, I stared at the curiously textured surface and wondered what I should do. Would it make sense to peel it all off and start over, in the hopes that I could achieve a smooth glossy finish? Or should I continue on with thinner coats in the hopes that it would all level out? Though more importantly... Why does this texture make me feel happy? It took me a moment to realize that the sensation of happiness harked back to my days as a kid playing one of my first racing games, Super Mario Kart on the Super NES. At the time, my favorite character was Yoshi, the drift-happy green dinosaur. Yes, the rough, rubbery green surface I had just laid down reminded me of Yoshi! Silly, maybe, but I won a lot of races playing as Yoshi. Maybe, just maybe, some of that good mojo from my childhood would transfer to the adult racecar-driving me? With that serendipity justification in hand, I named my accidental creation "Dino Skin" and pressed onwards. Base and Clear With a clean gun and plenty of mineral spirits, coats three and four went on much more easily. Following the instructions on their site, I made the latter coats wetter and more even. Each coat took much longer to dry, but it was also self-levelling and covering up some of the bigger splotches I created earlier. Happily, the last two base coats also seemed to fill in some of the chips and pock marks in the surface, making the dents in the passenger front fender much less noticeable than before. Eastwood says that you should apply a minimum of four coats to make a peel-able coating, so I stopped to take a break and test that statement. I cut a small sample of dried material off of the masking paper on the windshield and hand-tested it for peel-ability and strength. I don't really have the tools to measure the thickness of my sample, but considering how easily that peeled off of paper and how sturdy it felt I have no problem believing that this would peel easily off of a car. The material feels rubbery and elastic to the touch, not unlike those adhesive-backed rubber mats they sell at the hardware store. If nothing else, this gave me a bit of hope that this would stand up to the rigors of track use. That said, I had plenty of Elastiwrap left, so on went coats five, six, and seven. I was expecting to use up all of the Fastback Blue, but after the eighth coat I couldn't see any reason to apply any more color to the car. So it was onto the clear... and the arduous task of clearing the Turbine gun of its green hue. Cleaning the Turbine gun and preparing it for gloss was a nightmare and a half. No matter how much paint thinner I ran through the it, the gun always pushed out green tinted fluid. Discarding the thin, Elastiwrap-soaked foam gasket between the paint reservoir and the gun seemed to help. After an hour or so of scrubbing and soaking, I loaded the gun with a quart of clear and moved to applying the clear. This might be a good time to remind everyone that Eastwood sells two different types of clear Elastiwrap: A matte and a gloss. The sample photos make the matte look very subdued and mature, like the kind of finish a design-savvy technophile would order for their laptop screen. In contrast, the gloss seemed to give off a garish shine like a bowling ball that's been left in the polisher too long. As you already know, I went with the gloss. The reason is that I needed the car to be distinctive and many club racers finish their cars with a matte finishing coat. Most racers apply a very thin layer of clearcoat, while some of them skip the clear entirely. I don't blame them one bit. Racecars tend to get scratched up from track debris and touch-up paint repair is easier when you don't have to make a shiny gloss coat look perfect from panel to panel. A matte finish tends to hide small flaws better, making it the clear choice. My hypothesis was that by using the gloss, it would help the car stand out and that the rubberized coating would resist scratching and chipping better than normal paint. So on went two wet coats of gloss clear on top of the base coat. The clear went on just as thick as the base coat and quickly developed into a nice shiny surface on the green Dino Skin. While I can't say whether the car stands out, I can definitely say that it looks very unique under a bright light. The combination of clear gloss and Dino Skin texture makes every coated surface sparkle as you pass over the car. This was not what I was expecting at all, and I'm not 100% sure that I could reproduce this if I tried. As I carefully removed the masking tape, I couldn't help but smile about my budget racecar livery. But Does it Work? Of course, I know as well as most that beauty, however fortuitously obtained, is only skin deep. The real test is whether the Elastiwrap coating is durable enough to withstand the day to day rigors of daily racecar use. Look for the details in Part 2 of "Painting" a Racecar with ElastiWrap.

If you've ever looked at anything that I own, you would know that I value function over form - So much so that my most prized possessions often appear to become the unfortunate victims of blatant neglect. As it turns out, even I have my limits. The 22-year-old factory paint on the Prelude has gotten to the point where even I can't stand its faded paint and its many body panels being a slightly different color from the next. It's time to give the Prelude a fresh new livery. After a bit of research on various budget-friendly paint options, I've decided to do a full-chassis respray using an Eastwood product called Elastiwrap. Elastiwrap is unusual in that it technically isn't a paint. It's a sprayable semi-permanent rubber coating designed with long-term UV exposure and high heat in mind. Eastwood is marketing it as a removable vinyl alternative for people who are looking to quickly change the color of their street cars. While the coating is self-levelling, it has a much rougher matte finish than standard automotive paints. They do make a glossy clear coat to put over a few layers of Elastiwrap base coat, which seems to give painted surfaces the look of a plastic toy. All of these attributes make this the perfect material for a racecar livery. Not only is it cheap, fast and durable, the finished product has a distinctive look that would instantly set it apart from other cars. When it comes to racecars, distinctive is good. Case in point, the old Takata Dome sponsored JGTC NSX, which every Honda fan remembers despite it looking like a gummy frog from an airport candy shoppe. With that, I've just placed an order for three gallons of Elastiwrap base coat, surface prep and Eastwood's electric Turbine spray gun (which I'm also very eager to try out). If all goes well, I'll be up and making a mess in the garage in a week or so. Check back in a bit to read all about it here.

Now that we are done assembling and fiddling with the Tenhulzen 4-Wheel Alignment System, it's time to put it to good use. Our testbed is a '90 Honda CRX Si prepared for endurance racing by the team at ProjectCRX.com. This particular CRX has had a colorful history of racing-related abuse, including being thrashed to a class victory in its first ever race before being rolled onto its roof on the very next day. We are giving this CRX a fresh new alignment to prepare it for another season of rough and tumble racing. Because alignments require mind-numbing precision and frequent double-checking of numbers Martin Szwarc, regular driver of ProjectCRX, is helping me with this task. The Order of Operations Due to the nature of how suspension systems work in production cars, there is a standard order of operations for aligning race cars: Tire Pressures Ride Height Corner Weights Caster Camber Toe The ride height and corner weights had already been set, so we skipped right to the caster and camber. Measuring Caster Traditionally, measuring caster involves a somewhat complex procedure that involves turning plates and a camber gauge. The Tenhulzen gauge shortcuts this a bit with some 20-degree angles built into the sides of the gauge. All you do is attach the gauge to the wheel and turn the steering wheel until the angled cut is parallel to the bodywork of the car. Turn the digital gauge on and hold the zero button down until it reads 0.00. Then turn the wheel until the angled cut on the other side is parallel with the side of the car. Multiply whatever it says on the gauge by 2 to get the caster angle. The procedure is pretty straightforward, and I was relieved to see the caster angles on the left and right front wheels come within 0.1 degrees of each other. This was an indicator that nothing was bent and that I wouldn't have to touch the caster. Adjusting Camber Camber adjustment is very straightforward with the Tenhulzen gauge. Place the magnetic angle finder on the ground to zero it, then place it on the little L-bracket on the gauge. Then stick the gauge on the wheel and read the number that shows up. Surprisingly, Martin and I had a lot of trouble getting the numbers to show up consistently at first. We just couldn't get the fingers to grasp the wheel consistently. It turns out the reason for this is that the slits that make the gauge adjustable are cut slightly too wide, which lets the short arm shift so that it isn't quite perpendicular to the long arm. If the two arms of the camber gauge aren't perpendicular to each other, the fingers can't grasp the wheel properly and the gauge reads incorrectly. Martin also found that he could bend the gauge with relative ease and force the fingers into the tyre to throw the readings off even further. Although this probably has to do something with the fact that Martin weighs 200 lbs and is mostly made of muscle, there is something to be said about the relative flimsiness of the gauge compared to some of the other camber gauges I've used in the past. Nonetheless, through practice and patience we persevered to get the CRX to -2.65 degrees Front and -3.5 degrees Rear that we wanted out of the car. Setting Toe Finally, we set up the strings and rack so that we could get an accurate 4-wheel toe measurement on the car. The procedure is straightforward but requires some care. First, we adjusted the width of the rack so that the inner rivets on the horizontal sections were slightly wider than the car, and made sure that both front and rear frames were the exact same width. Then we pulled the strings out and hooked them onto the frame so they sat slightly higher than the centers of the wheels. Then came the most tedious part - squaring the strings. In order to get an accurate toe measurement on the car, the strings need to be perfectly parallel to the true centerline of the car. With the Tenhulzen system (as with most string-based alignment systems), this is achieved by moving the front and rear frames so that the distance between the center of the hub and the string is the same across the left and right sides of the car. Here's a diagram that helps illustrate what needs to be done: The funny looking box in the center is the car, the black rectangles are the wheels and the blue lines are the strings. If you move the rack side to side so that the two distances marked "A" are exactly the same and the two distances marked "B" are exactly the same, the strings will be perfectly parallel against the true centerline of the car. This took quite a bit of time to achieve, not in the least because I kept snagging the corners of the frames with my pants. But once we got it, measuring the toe was a very straightforward process. All we needed to do was to fold out the rulers on the sides of the gauge and get the difference between the measurements. If the front ruler shows a larger measurement than the rear, the wheel has toe-in. If the rear ruler shows a larger measurement than the front, the wheel has toe-out. One neat feature of the gauge is that if you adjust the two rulers so that they sit all the way on the outside of the gauge, you can measure the toe in degrees. Just read the metric side and remember that 1mm = 0.1 degrees. I usually have to do a bit of trigonometry to get the actual degree measurement, so this is a real time-saver for me. Getting the toe right took quite a bit of time, as I kept having to reposition the frames every time I raised and lowered the car. But because we could measure the toe of each wheel individually, we could adjust all four wheels at once and skip a lot of the guessing and checking. More importantly, the ability to measure against the true centerline of the car meant that, once we were done, the thrust angle of the car would be 0 and the steering wheel would point dead straight. Getting this right without doing dozens of test drives ultimately ended up saving a lot of time and frustration. Is it Accurate? Of course, all of this would be meaningless if the gauge wasn't accurate, so we took the time to check each measurement against my tried and true Joe's Racing bubble camber gauge and Longacre Quickset Toe gauge. Initial comparisons had us worried, as we saw a huge discrepancy in the camber figures between the Tenhulzen gauge and the Joe's Racing gauge. The cause of this discrepancy turned out to be a combination of the gauge sliding about and our inability to get the fingers to grasp the wheel rim consistently. Practice makes perfect, as they say. After a few tries we had both gauges reading within 0.1 degrees of each other. The toe gauge and rack were spot-on. Both the Quickset toe gauge and my Longacre toe plates showed the exact same combined-toe measurements as the Tenhulzen rack. Toe adjustments on individual wheels showed up exactly the same way on the Tenhulzen rack as it did on my other toe gauges as well. Caster was dead-on with my bubble gauge as well. Though the actual measurement process was decidedly easier using the Tenhulzen gauge due to its fingers and re-zeroable digital angle finder. Is it User Friendly? Yes and no. During our alignment session, we found a wealth of time-saving features cleverly engineered into the system. At the same time the flimsy aluminum construction of the gauge and rack led to a litany of do-overs before we had accurate measurements on all four wheels. The rim-grasping fingers, while brilliant, also take some getting used to with certain wheel-tyre combinations. All in all, the Tenhulzen 4-wheel alignment system requires quite a bit more finesse than your usual set of toe plates or bubble-level camber gauge. Final Thoughts and Recommendations The Tenhulzen 4-wheel alignment system is a cleverly engineered tool whose brilliance is tarnished ever so slightly by its flexible aluminum construction. The intricate details that were put into both the frame and the handheld camber/caster/toe gauge take away many of the annoyances of doing alignments. The use of fingers to attach the gauge to the wheel is simply, a stroke of genius. Unfortunately, I can also see a lot of people accidentally bending the gauge as they take their measurements, inadvertently throwing their measurements way off. That said, I believe that the value for money is excellent. I don't know of any other system that comes close to delivering this level of functionality for $500. Sure, you could probably DIY your own string alignment rack and even make your own copy of the very clever camber/caster/toe gauge (little known secret - the fingers are available as off the shelf parts made by SPC). But for that price I would rather buy the whole system than trying to reproduce the meticulous engineering detail designed into the Tenhulzen kit. Overall, I would recommend this system to anyone who has previously owned or used a toe gauge and/or camber/caster gauge. If you have some sort of prior experience with alignment tools, you would probably be able to tell if something looked odd or if you were doing something to accidentally throw your measurements off. If Tenhulzen were to re-engineer this kit using thick aluminum or steel plate like my Longacre alignment tools, I would probably revise this recommendation to include absolute beginners. As for me, I plan to make this system a staple in the garage for use with both our race cars and street cars. See you at the track. Disclosure section: StudioVRM is not affiliated with or sponsored by Tenhulzen. All products were purchased at full price from Roger's own pocket.

The Engine This is probably the question that you've all been waiting to have answered. What does the engine bay of a Honda Prelude racecar look like? Well, this is what you see when you open the hood on my car. Those of you who are familiar with Honda engines have probably immediately realized that this isn't a hybrid motor or even a VTEC-equipped H22. It's actually a run-of-the-mill H23A non-VTEC motor from the USDM 4th gen Prelude Si. Yes, the H23 has a lot less power out of the box than the H22. And there's no doubting the power potential of a H22, especially when you are free to tune the ECU as you are in SCCA Improved Touring. Yet there are quite a few reasons to choose the lower output H23 over the h22 for a racecar: 1. Overall Car Performance The main reason is, susrprisingly, performance. Although Improved Touring isn't a power to weight restricted class, the minimum weights and performance allowances are set using a formula which takes into account the stock power of the engine, drivetrain layout (FWD vs RWD) and suspension layout. Since many cars in Improved Touring S are capable of producing upwards of 200hp at the crank, the H23 powered 4th gen Prelude gets a generous minimum weight of just 2555 lbs with driver. While the H22A powered Prelude VTEC is fairly nippy at 2850 lbs, the H23A powered Si is a rocket that stops, turns and goes with the best of them. It also helps that the H23A is actually very responsive to the engine modifications allowed in Improved Touring. 2. Cost Cost is always a factor and of course, the H23A is the cheaper option all around. Not only is the motor plentiful in healthy, low-mileage condition, everything from headwork to internal work is cheaper and easier. Even the transmissions are easy finds. The transmission that's in the car now is a $100 unit from an ordinary salvage yard in Newark. 3. Drivability Unless you have been following all of the drama around the new hybrid motors they introduced in the 2015 Formula 1 season, you probably haven't heard this term before. Drivability is a generic term that racers use to describe the manner in which a car outputs its power. Generally speaking, a car with good drivability characteristics delivers more power as you rev it higher and gives you the feeling that applying a sudden increase of throttle will give you an instant response from the engine. A big displacement V6 or V8, like what you'll find in a new Acura TL or a Chevrolet Corvette will have excellent drivability. Conversely, a car with poor drivability is one that has the driver guessing how much power he'll get when he floors the throttle. Laggy four cylinder turbo motors and the VVTL-I equipped Toyota 2ZZ-GE in the 7th gen Toyota Celica are examples of motors with poor drivability. Drivability is critical in wheel to wheel racing, simply because there's so much that you have to worry about when you are racing alongside other cars at high speed. If I'm fighting for position through a 90-mph sweeper, the last thing I want to worry about is whether I'm going to get a sudden, unexpected kick of power when I open the throttle at the exit. The big displacement and mild cams in the H23A take all those worries away. The motor comes with excellent drivability from the factory and it's very, very difficult to ruin it. So how do you build a race-ready H23A? Let's start backwards, from the outside in. The Bolt-Ons Improved Touring is a very easy class for the budget-minded tuner to work within. You are allowed to change the intake, header, exhaust, catalytic converter and change consumables like spark plugs and the air filter. There's definite value to doing each component separately, but the modifications work best when you do them all together. Cold Air Intake The Improved Touring rules require that the engine air intake pull its air from the stock location. The rules were worded that way to prevent builders from designing odd-looking ram air setups that pull from outside the engine bay. Fortunately, the stock air intake goes to the inside of the front passenger side wheel well. The popular AEM long tube Cold Air Intake is both legal and effective, so that's what I've kept on my car (kept, because the car came with it when I bought it as a street car). In order to give it as much fresh air as possible, I cut away the plastic fender liner on the passenger side wheel well. If you look through the lower foglight hole in the front bumper, you can now see the air filter. It's not quite ram air, but it's as close as I can reasonably get within the ruleset. In order to keep the heat of the engine bay from affecting intake temperatures, I've also taped parts of the header with aluminized fiberglass insulation wrap. Underhood temps in the H23A tend to run extremely high, so this makes a difference over longer races. That being said, there may be even more power to be gained here. Jeff at Evans Tuning once told me that the cheapest way to get power out of 4 cylinder non-VTEC motors from this era is to run as long an intake tube as possible. Robert Oliver, formerly owner and proprietor of North End Performance (now turned my current go-to engine expert), tested that exact theory for me by varying the length of the intake on my car. Take a look at these results: The blue line shows the power vs RPM with the AEM intake. The red line is the same run under the same conditions using a short ram intake with an overall length of about 12" (including the filter). Both runs were done with the hood open to limit the variance from the heat coming from under the hood. If you're having trouble reading the tiny text, click on the dyno graph to see the whole thing in a higher resolution. Under identical conditions with the same air filter, adding 24" of piping to the intake length causes a noticable power difference between 3500 RPM and 4500 RPM. WinPEP 7 (the dyno display software that comes with DynoJet dynos) shows a difference of between 6.5 hp and 7.2 hp between 4100 RPM and 4400 RPM. This might not sound like much, but low RPM torque is vital in a road racing car. This is exactly where the tachometer is when I come out of a slow 3rd gear corner like turn 1 at Summit Point or turn 1 at NJMP lightning. 7 hp at the front wheels is the difference between me having to fight for space alongside RX7s and 240Zs versus being able to get ahead of them coming out of the first corner. My engine experts are both giving me very strong indications that if it were possible to fit an intake tube with another 8 to 12 inches of length over the AEM and fit it into the space available, that I could earn an even bigger boost in the midrange. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out how to stuff 4 feet of piping under the hood of the Prelude without adding some seriously flow-restrictive bends. If anyone has any ideas on how to achieve this, give me a shout. I would love to hear your ideas. Header There's a surprising amount of power to be found in attaching a well-designed, equal-length exhaust header to the H23A. Unfortunately, almost all of the bolt-on header out there barely make a difference in the overall power output of the non-VTEC motor. After trying every option from generic eBay to the ubiquitous DC Sports 4-1, I finally broke down and spent the $1250 to have a header built by Hytech Exhaust in Irvine, California. Boy, was it worth it. even from my terrible photos, you can tell that it's a completely different design from every other header on the market. The huge pipes coming out of the head are almost 2" in diameter and the collector for the 4-2-1 setup sits far back, behind the oil pan. The primaries are almost identical in length, down to the inch. In fact, the Hytech header flows so well that it actually confuses the stock ECU at higher RPMs. This leads to some highly entertaining off-throttle backfires which are both very cool looking and incredibly unhelpful as far as generating power to the front wheels. While there's nothing wrong with using this header with the stock ECU, you really want to invest in a programmable ECU in order to get everything you paid for out of these headers. Believe me, it's worth it. Between this header and a quick tune of my Hondata equipped ECU by Jeff Evans, I saw a 15whp gain at 6000 rpm. In ITS, 15whp is the difference between a front running car and one that can barely keep up with the lower midfield. When I think of it that way, I say that it's worth every penny. Exhaust Part of the reason the Hytech header makes such a huge difference is that the H23A pushes a lot of exhaust out of the back end. Not only does backpressure become a big deal, factors like exhaust reversion (a power-robbing phenomenon which happens when the engine sucks hot exhaust gas back into the combustion chamber from the exhaust side) become a big issue. The guys at Hytech knew right off the bat that this would be a problem and gave me very specific instructions on how to build the exhaust. Through the course of a 20-minute phone conversation with the foremost Honda header experts in the US I was told that the best way to produce power from an H23A is to: Run a 12" straight pipe from the 2.5" ID outlet on the end of the header collector Expand the pipe out to as big an expansion chamber as would fit for the next 18-24". I was half-jokingly told to go look for a 6" straight muffler out of an 18 wheeler and install it here. Build the least restrictive, mandrel bent exhaust aft of the expansion chamber. The pipe diameter has to be a minimum of 2.5" ID. 3" would be better. Being the cheapskate and skeptic that I was at the time, I ignored this advice at first, instead choosing to stay with a 2.5" ID mandrel bent cat back exhaust that I had on hand. Until Robert coerced me into building a custom exhaust to these exact specs (which, by the way, he arrived at independently without any detailed knowledge of my conversations with Hytech), I had no idea what I was missing out on. The exhaust setup that I have on the Prelude today sounds like this: Hytech 4-1 race header from the head to an area behind the oil pan A 12" segment of 2.5" ID stainless going from the header to a stainless steel flex coupling from Summit Racing A 22" long expansion chamber that tapers from 6" to 5" in diameter. The expansion chamber is literally just a huge hollow tube with adapters on both ends to connect to the 2.5" ID pipe on both sides. The 12" segment in part 2 actually extends into the expansion chamber to provide an anti-reversion effect and keep hot exhaust gasses from re-entering the engine. A section of 2.5" mandrel pipe to get the exhaust around the fuel tank and out the back of the car, where the stock exhaust exits A Burns Stainless 17" lightweight muffler A 4.5" ID piece of pipe leading from the muffler out the back of the car so it doesn't set the rear bumper on fire Not only did this setup produce instant power gains on the dyno (something like 8hp just from these modifications), it is significantly quieter than any of the bolt on exhausts I have ever had on the car. The Borla stainless steel exhaust that came with the car would easily exceed 103dBA at 6400 RPM from 50 feet away and it had two resonators before the muffler. This new exhaust barely registers 88dBA at 6400 RPM from 50 feet. If you know anything about the Decibel scale and its non-linear scaling, you'll realize that the noise level coming out of my new exhaust is a tiny fraction of what the old 2.5" straight through exhaust would belt out. Noise is a serious distraction and a cause for major fatigue when you're racing wheel to wheel, so even if this didn't produce significant power gains, I would still recommend this exhaust setup wholeheartedly to anyone working on a Naturally Aspirated setup for their Prelude. *I realize this is hard to visualize without photos and I promise I will get you guys photos. I just need to get the Prelude up in the air and get the lighting in the right spot for clear under-chassis photos. I'll also record an audio clip if things are quiet this weekend, so you can get an idea of what this setup sounds like. Next Up... So what's next? Before I continue onwards towards the ECU and some of smaller items that went into this racecar, I'm planning to get some more details and photos around the header and exhaust. I firmly believe that modifying the header and exhaust is a critical step towards making the usable power that will help you go fast on a real racetrack. Once I have that, I'll move on to some of the other components that make this Prelude Si such a force to be reckoned with on track.

The chassis and suspension package of the 4th gen Prelude is amongst its most redeeming features. The 92-96 car uses a very mod-friendly evolution of the late 80's to early 90's Accord and Prelude suspension system, which have been long praised for their natural camber curve, bumpsteer-resilient geometry, and shock travel that allows for some very aggressive lowering. In addition, the longer overall length means that this generation of Prelude exhibits very stable cornering behaviors. In the handling department, it's like an anti-CRX that can corner just as well. For those of you who aren't familiar with the suspension configuration on the 4th gen Preludes, take a look at these diagrams, courtesy of Honda: 4th Gen Prelude Front Suspension 4th Gen Prelude Rear Suspension The Approach Since there wasn't too much data out there on Prelude suspension systems, the best way for me to study the suspension behavior of the car was to disassemble one corner of the car, take the spring off of the damper, reassemble it, and watch how everything moved while I moved the lower control arm up and down using a floor jack. I quickly realized the following: The front and rear suspension have crazy high motion ratios for a production car. This means I will have to install some very stiff springs in order to get the suspension system stiff enough to work well with R compound tyres. Stiff springs mean high forces, which equates to a need to use the stiffest possible bushings in every pivot point in order to make sure that I don't get any funny behaviors from bushing squish. Unfortunately, almost every pivot point in the suspension system works on at least two axes. This means that I won't be able to use Delrin, one of my favorite inexpensive bushing materials, in the suspension system. The front radius rod pivot (where the radius rods stick into the front suspension subframe behind the radiator) is a particularly odd joint. It needs to be rigid front to rear so that it can keep the suspension in place, but it also needs to be free to pivot to accommodate the lower control arm moving up and down. This one will have to be turned into a spherical bearing. The front dampers are small and short due to the fact that it needs to be mounted on a Honda shock fork. I'll need to find either twin tube dampers with a huge outside diameter or use a monotube with a big external canister to ensure that the front dampers can keep the stiff front springs in control. While the rear end of the car has fantastic adjustability (especially in the 4WS model), front camber is really hard to come by. I'll need to install some aftermarket bushings or shims to get enough camber up front. Some of the bolts holding the lower control arms to the subframe were completely seized on both ends. Break out the grinder, hacksaw, and sawzall. All in all, not too bad. Most of the hard work would be in the bushings and the joints. First Step - Replace all of the Broken Stuff A lot of people hate doing this, and I don't blame them. When I first got my Prelude, I went through every tie rod, joint, and bolt in the suspension and replaced every part that looked even remotely worn out. Fortunately Honda parts are cheap and plentiful (Rockauto.com and Honda Parts Unlimited makes acquiring the components easy too). The really tough part was that the bolts that attach the lower control arms to the chassis had seized to the metal inserts in the stock rubber bushings. The rears were easy - My Harbor Freight grinder fit readily into the space between the control arm bushing and the frame, and I was able to slice right through the stuck bolt. There was so little room in the front, however, that I couldn't get any of my powered cutting tools in there. We finally freed the stuck control arm by manually cutting the bolts using metal hacksaw blades. Hours of not-fun for two. It's unavoidable though - a racecar with seized bolts and torn bushings just isn't going to handle very well. Second - Suspension Bushings As much as I love all-spherical bearing suspension setups, they are a pain to maintain. Since my next favorite option, Delrin inserts, aren't an option, I ordered a full set of polyurethane bushings from Energy Suspension for the Prelude. The only bushings that I didn't use were the front radius rod bushings. I adapted a metal spherical bearing kit for a CRX to fit the car. You could do the same thing I did, or you could just buy this kit from Kingpin Machine and save yourself some fitment issues. Some drilling is required but it's surprisingly worthwhile. $260 to replace one pair of bushings? You bet. And it's worth every penny. Having a solid metal bearing here keeps the front wheels from moving around under hard braking and hard acceleration. If you have the money, I would recommend replacing the inner pivot point of the front control arms with spherical bearings too. It makes such a big difference that the car feels more stable under braking and points better during turn-in. Next Up - Front and Rear Camber Adjustability Like most Hondas, the Prelude gains a ton of camber in the rear when lowered, while not gaining anywhere near enough in the front. The IT rules allow for offset bushings and camber adjustability using shims, so I installed shimmable ball joints in the upper control arm in the front suspension, and offset inner pivots in the rear. This gives me the 4 degrees of camber that I need in the front while keeping the rear at a sensible 2 degrees or so. These shimmable ball joints are made by SPC, and the rear camber adjusting control arm mounts are from Ingalls.Both are available as stock-replacement parts from both online retailers and brick and mortar stores. The nice thing about the Honda multi-link suspension setup is that everything else is fully adjustable. You can even adjust caster from the factory, by shimming the front radius rod pivot point. It's one of the many advantages of being a Honda owner. The Main Course - Springs and Dampers Finally, something that the average street car tuner can relate to: Coilovers! If you are cheap like me, you'll love my choice of damper. The Prelude rides on none other than TEIN Super Street coilovers, purchased used for the paltry sum of $200. They're big, they're green, and they have surprisingly good internals. Chuck the springs though. The springs are rubbish for racecar use. I chose these dampers for a slew of reasons, many of which I've described in nauseating detail in a previous post. Basically, it's the best equipment for the job that fits within the limits of the rules of the class I'm building to (Improved Touring prohibits external canister dampers unless the car came with them from the factory). I couldn't just slap them on the car and go, however. The dampers came well worn, and the springs that TEIN included with this kit were way too soft to work on the track. I would need to buy springs in the right rate, and the dampers would need to go in for a rebuild and re-valve. The extra-girthy damper bodies of the Tein Super Street Kit necessitates the use of extra-large springs. The damper perches for these coilovers are designed to use 70mm or 2.75" diameter springs. Only two racing spring manufacturers mass produce springs in this size: HyperCo and Swift Springs. Both manufacturers are known to make springs which are very consistent throughout their range of travel. Swift springs are made of a unique metal that makes them lighter than normal springs, but it also means that the springs cannot be allowed to block. Blocking is the industry term for what happens when you compress a spring until the coils touch each other (effectively turning into a solid metal block). In order to figure out if I could use the lighter Swift springs, I took the dampers and compressed them by hand to measure how much stroke they had and compared it to the maximum stroke figures listed on their application chart. Fortunately, they had springs which had enough stroke to ensure that they would never block, even if the damper was compressed past the bump stops. In order to compensate for the high motion ratios, I chose 8" long 14kg-f/mm springs for the front and 18kg-f/mm springs for the rear. I also added some 70mm helper springs (also from Swift) in order to keep the main springs from rattling around when the wheels unload. The front springs are part # Z70-203-140, and the rears are part # Z70-203-180. The helpers are H70-070-008. Those metal shims are slider bearings that go between the springs and the adapter perches that come with the kit. They're not as cool looking as the Torrington bearings that come with some coilover kits, but they work just as well as long as they're not filled with dirt. As soon as the order was in for the springs, my used dampers were off to Tein's California facility for re-valving. The re-valving process involves a phone conversation about the spring rates, specific uses of the car, the car's weight, type of tyres, anticipated ambient temperature during races, and even the type of surface that the car will be driven on. Tein also had me fill out an email questionnaire which asked about the behavior of the car, and if there were any bad behaviors that I wanted to fix with damper tuning (e.g. corner-exit oversteer, porpoising under braking, repeated bouncing after coming off of a kerb). A few weeks later, a huge box containing my freshly revalved dampers arrived with a few copies of the shock dynos for future reference. Here they are, by the way, for the front and for the rear in PDF form. Important Addition - Anti-Roll Bars Thanks to the crazy high motion ratio in the rear end of the Prelude, I had to find the biggest stock-shaped anti-roll bar I could find to ensure that the car would respond quickly enough when turning into corners. I settled on this 1" hollow bar made by Tanabe, since I had no desire to spend the money fabricating custom mounts for a straight bar. For some bizarre reason, Honda decided that the Prelude Si should have a moster 1-1/4" diameter front swaybar. When the rear bar went on, the front bar came off and went on craigslist. With such benign suspension behavior and stiff springs, the Prelude doesn't need a front bar. The All-Important Corner Weighting and Alignment A good race shop will charge upwards of $150 for a race alignment and have an hourly rate for a corner weighting session. It may also cost a few hours of your time too, since the alignment techs need to weigh down the driver's seat with something that simulates the driver's weight. Nothing simulates the driver's weight as well as the driver! It's an expensive service yes, but it's the necessary final piece of the puzzle. Here are my current alignment specs, so you don't have to make too many extra trips to the alignment shop: Front Camber: -3.75 degrees Toe: 1/8" out (yep, that's toe-out in the front) Caster: 2.2 deg positive Rear Camber: -2 degrees Toe: 0 These settings are for Toyo RRs in 225/45R15 on all four corners. Depending on what tyres you choose to run, you may want to tweak the camber settings. Consult the tyre manufacturer for their recommended guidelines and rely on the pyrometer and stopwatch to determine what works for you. So How Well Does the Car Handle? It's difficult to describe how well a car handles in words or in numbers, so we took our car to the VRG Turkey Bowl to see how it compares to other cars of similar weight and power. Once there we found a great match - a 2005 Mini Cooper S with the older supercharged 1.6L engine. We were both on similar tyres, and the two cars were similar in weight. The Mini has aftermarket dampers and some mild suspension modifications done to it, while my green-blue Prelude is set up exactly as described above. While the Mini's late 2000's suspension geometry should give it a fundamental advantage, the Prelude's dialed-in suspension helped me gain a little bit of a gap through each corner. All I had to do was to drive carefully enough to now mess up any of the corners or braking zones, and I could inch away from the Mini without much trouble. Is all of the time and money spent on suspension work worth it? Yes, I'd say so.

The Safety Equipment The irony behind it all is that what makes a racecar a racecar is not its engine, suspension, brakes, or aero. It's the safety equipment - the roll cage, seat, 6-point harnesses, and the helmet and race suit that you need to wear to safely pilot the machine. As mundane as it seems, it's your safety equipment, not the go-fast gear, that separates your racecar from the average street car. Roll Cages Roll cages come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and costs. You can go racing with a $800 roll cage, if that's all that your budget allowed. At the same time, you can spend $10,000 on a roll cage for a regular regional club racing car. Here's what I encountered while looking for a roll cage for my car: Bolt in Roll Cage The bolt-in roll cage is your cheapest and most basic option. And contrary to popular opinion on internet forums, I would say that there is nothing wrong with it from a safety standpoint. Sure, it might be ugly and it might not provide much rigidity for the chassis, but as long as it's 6" above your head and has no sharp edges or structural weaknesses, it will help save your life in a crash. I have seen several very ugly looking crashes involving cars with a bolt in cage (some of them in person) and in each instance the driver walked away with his life. Obviously, the advantage to the bolt in cage is the cost. An Autopower or Kirk Racing 6-point roll cage can cost as little as $800. If you are careful and have a powerful enough a drill, you can do the installation yourself too. Without the help of an expensive professional cage builder. The disadvantage is the fit. Bolt in roll cages generally aren't tight against the chassis, and often make compromises driver's comfort. Take a look at this example. This is an off-the-shelf Autopower cage that I first installed into the Prelude: See those front legs in the middle of the doorway? Autopower designed the cage so it could be installed with the factory dashboard in place. Yes, it lets you keep the stock dashboard, but it also means that you have to crawl around those bars in order to get in and out of the car. I can tell you from firsthand experience that this is not a pleasant experience. Take a look at those door bars too. Because bolt in roll cages are designed to slip together, the door bars are generally going to be bars that just go straight across the doorway. While this covers the basics for safety, it could be a lot better. This affects driver comfort too. I've driven cars where the door bars are so close to the driver that my elbows contact the cage. It's pretty distracting, not to mention unnerving that the only protection between a big, heavy car and your torso are these two metal bars which sit inches from you. Semi-Prebuilt Roll Cage By "Semi-Prebuilt", I'm referring to a pre-fabricated roll cage which is modified or customized with tubes to fine tune the fit, finish, and characteristics of a roll cage to meet the needs of the driver. This is the hybrid, compromise configuration, and the one that is in my current racecar. The advantage of a hybrid roll cage is flexibility and cost. The most expensive portion of roll cage fabricating is the design and building of the main hoop (the big overhead tube that makes up the center of the roll cage). By buying a pre-fabricated main hoop, you earn a significant cost savings, and you have the opportunity to customize the front legs, door bars and harness bar. Look at the CRX in the photo above. That cage started as a medicore-fitting Autopower weld-in cage, stretched out, refitted, and customized for half the cost of a fully custom roll cage. Without looking closely, it's very difficult to tell that this wasn't bent from scratch. You will need to find a roll cage builder who can weld a safe roll cage, which is one of the few downsides to the hybrid roll cage approach. You should also expect that the fit and finish of the cage will not be as good as a fully custom built roll cage. But with real-life costs between $1200 and $2000, this is an option worth considering for the budget-minded racer. During the 2010 off-season, Charlie Greenhaus from Entropy Racing modified the whole front half of the Prelude's cage from the main hoop forwards. Charlie designed a whole new front end, pushed the front legs forward, boxed the legs, and installed NASCAR door bars that extended into the doorways. Notice how much further forward the front legs extend, and the NASCAR-style side impact bars in the doorway. Not only is this considered a safer design, it makes ingress and egress from the car considerably easier. The overall cost for this cage, including the bolt-in main hoop, was around $1900. Full Custom Roll Cage This is the tailor-made route and is by far the most costly. A frugal cage builder can put a safe road racing cage in a car for under $4000 with careful planning. Often, the costs are much higher. The advantage of a fully custom roll cage is obviously its fit. Pre-fabricated cages are deigned so that they can be partially assembled before they are pushed through the narrow door openings on the sides of the car, and this means that they are never as close to the chassis as they could be. By bending one tube at a time and fitting each tube carefully, the cage builder can make as few compromises as necessary. In many cases, this approach is necessary. Some cars, like the 93-97 Civic del Sol, have such an oddball interior shape that prefabricated cage components don't fit well. The bolt-upright rear window in the del Sol means that the rear legs of any roll cage has to go through the rear glass and bolt into the chassis behind it. Fortunately, the car has Targa tops that can come out to help fit the larger tubes into the car. Otherwise, it would be nigh on impossible to fit a racing roll cage into that diminutive interior. Some cars are so unusual that no one makes a prefabricated cage for them. Take this Subaru Impreza, for example: This car belongs to a very good friend of mine, and the cage was built to his exact specifications by Entropy Racing. The specifications called for a supremely well-fitting cage with cage bars that were so tight against the chassis that they were virtually invisible. Mission accomplished in this car. From a distance, you can barely tell that it's a caged racecar. It's difficult to tell in these shots, but the main hoop is slightly taller than what the factory ceiling should allow. When the cage was fitted into place, it pushed the entire roofline and the skin of the chassis up slightly. How's that for a tight fit? The legs end in fully boxed feet, which are the maximum surface area permitted by the SCCA. Even without gusseting and any welds attaching it to the chassis, this cage contributes significantly to the chassis' rigidity A custom roll cage allows for some highly unusual features too. Take a look at these door bars. They are, to the letter of the law, legal to the rules of all of the major road racing organizations. The ingress / egress is super easy thanks to the forward sloping contour of the bars while the ability to use the factory side impact protection and door skin provides for a significant benefit in impact attenuation when it comes to side-on collisions. What I can tell you is that the conversation only became productive after I started talking to a good cage builder with plenty of experience and excellent welding skills. If you happen to be in the NJ / NY / PA area, I would recommend Entropy Racing or Evans Tuning for semi-prebuilt or custom road race cages. Autopower and Kirk Racing are household names for prefabricated cages, and are trusted by thousands of racers across the US. Before you show up for a cage fitting and consultation though, you need to have the rest of your safety equipment selected and ready to order (if not already In hand). Why? Because all of the car's safety equipment works as a system, and each component needs to be installed to fit and work with the others in order to work properly. Here are the other bits and pieces that you need to think about before you bring your car in to be caged: Dashboard and Interior Before you go adding anything into the car, take a look around the inside and think about what you are going to take out. Having stock carpets and trim might appeal to you initially, but when you aren't allowed to run with the windows up, you'll realize that it gets destroyed very quickly. Not to mention that it's extra weight as well as a serious flammability and melting hazard if your car ever caught fire. The rulebook for your class will dictate what you can and can't remove, so take a close look and take out anything that you don't need. Passenger seats, stereo, speakers, carpet, headliner, trunk trim, door cards. All of that should come out of the car an go straight onto Craigslist. Peel that soundproofing tar off of the floor and back seat area too, either by freezing it off using dry ice and a chisel, or using a heat gun and scraping it off. The stock soundproofing tar can melt in a fire and will get in the way of a safe roll cage installation. Take a close look at your dashboard and your A-pillar and think about whether you want the roll cage to go behind the dash or in front of it. If the rules permit, think about whether you just want to remove the stock dash entirely and replace it all with aftermarket gauges. Look closely at your doors. Do you need the stock door internals, or do you want NASCAR style door bars which go into the door cavity? Leaving the stock door internals is cheaper, and you get to keep some creature comforts, like your door handles and maybe even the windows (surprisingly handy for transportation and storage). Entry and egress is often much easier when the door bars protrude into the doors though, and there is a certain sense of comfort in having the side impact bars further away from your body. At the very least, take out as much of the interior as you can before you take the car to the cage builder. This will help the builder get a good idea of what exactly he or she will need to do to install a cage in the car. When I dropped my car off, the only piece of interior trim in it was the dashboard. And even that was just resting on its studs. All of the nuts that used to hold it in were in a ziplock bag taped to the ceiling. Racing Seat A good racing seat will fit the driver snugly, fit well inside the car, provide sufficient support in all of the important areas, be as comfortable as possible, be installed in a way that it can help dissipate crash forces while allowing for reasonable ingress and egress, and be compatible with all of the items which are needed to meet the safety requirements of your class. Don't worry, it's not as bad as it sounds. If you are building a closed wheel road race car in the US, you generally have two options: Use a FIA 8855 or 8862 homologated composite or tube frame seat Install an aluminum or steel frame seat with a rigidly fixed seat back brace There is a tremendous amount of debate on which option is safer in different types of crashes. What we can say at this point is that when installed to the intent of the rulebook, both options will help increase your chances of survivability in a crash. FIA homologated seats are made of either a composite blend (usually fiberglass, Kevlar, and or carbon fiber blend) or a steel tube frame covered in cloth. They are designed to be mounted to the chassis on the sides or bottom of the seat, and are designed to flex to dissipate crash forces during an impact. Most US racing organizations will allow you to use a FIA compliant seat without a seat back brace. Because composite gives designers the flexibility to produce strong, complex shapes, they feature more intricate side supports and side supports that make the seat easy to get in and out of. The seat backs are curved to fit the shape of the human bottom and back - when you find the right fit, it will feel like the seat was designed for you. The downside is that composite seats become brittle over time, and need to be replaced periodically. Oh, and FIA compliant seats are expensive - expect to spend between $400 and $700 for an entry level FIA rated seat. Rigidly fixed seats can be made from a variety of materials, most often aluminum. They are designed to be mounted to the chassis at the sides or bottom of the seat, as well as to the harness bar of the roll cage using a seat back brace. Aluminum seats are designed to deform in specific areas to dissipate the energy from an impact. Aluminum seats tend to be thinner and have taller supports, so taller drivers will tend to gravitate towards an aluminum seat, especially in a smaller car. The taller lateral supports do make ingress/egress more difficult for smaller drivers though. Being blocky in construction, they are not the most ergonomically sound pieces, and you should expect much less of your body to be in touch with the seat. The big advantage in rigid fixed back seats is in the economy of it all. Aluminum seats, for example, are significantly cheaper than FIA compliant composite seats, and are easily modified to your needs. A basic aluminum road racing seat can be had for about $150 - $250 brand new. And there are tons of options. Need better shoulder support? Just unbolt the supports that the seat came with and install new ones. Want to upgrade to a full containment seat with head restraints to protect you? Just order that piece from Kirkey and bolt it onto the seat frame. Aluminum seats also don't wear out the same way that a composite seat does, so if you don't crash and don't do anything to damage the seat, it will last a long time. Seat shopping for the Prelude involved sitting in as many different seats as I could find. I was looking for a seat that met all of these criteria: A snug fit that's just loose enough so I can get in and out of it quickly with my race suit on Maximum contact area from my legs all the way to my lower back As little open space as possible between my thighs and the side supports *Seat back that curls the back slightly when I sit back into it *Shoulders sit in the middle of the shoulder supports, so that sitting back in the seat brings the shoulders forwards very slightly A little bit of space directly behind me at shoulder height, so I can fit my head and neck brace (a Simpson Hybrid) comfortably Side mount bolt holes so I can adjust the angle of the seat once it's in the car If the seat has head containment braces, a design that has a "window" in it so I can see through it when I turn my head (look at the Bride Gardis III for an idea of what that looks like) *The two starred criteria are a product of the anticipated usage of the car and some practical knowledge of human physiology. Curling your back and your shoulders forward in a boxing-like stance contracts the muscles around the weaker bones in your upper body. This in turn helps them protect your fragile innards against sudden impacts. However, this position also happens to be very tiring if held for an extended period of time. I wanted to build the Prelude for sprint races between 15 and 60 minutes in length, so I looked for protection over comfort. If I was building an endurance racing car, I would have chosen a seat with wider shoulder supports and a seat back that allowed for a more relaxed posture. After sitting in countless seats of many different make and type, I settled on a Bride Zeta III. It cost as much as some full containment seats, but it had all of the qualities I needed and fit my body the best. Crucially, it also fit in the car. The 4th gen Honda Prelude has an unusually low roofline for a near-luxury GT car. I had to return two seats because they either hit the B pillar or they sat way too high for me to fit safely under the roll cage. I'm not the first to encounter this either. This poor chap put serious money into putting a beautiful cage in his 4th gen Prelude before he was about half a foot too tall to fit under it. Bonus Fun Fact: Speaking of size, if you weigh more than 175 lbs you may want to be careful when shopping for FIA certified composite seats. The FIA uses the Humanetics Hybrid II and Hybrid III 50th percentile dummies on the sleds when they crash test seats for 8855 and 8862 certification. The Hybrid III 50th percentile weighs around 171 lbs, and the Hybrid II 50th weighs just 164 lbs. If you weigh significantly more than this, there is a possibility that the seat might not protect you as well as it is designed to. Almost all of the major seat manufacturers will list a weight limit for each seat. Caveat emptor. Once you have your seat and the mounting brackets for your car, take some time to install the seat in your car and find a good driving position for yourself before you have the roll cage installed. Make sure that you have the visibility you want, that you can reach the pedals easily, have full range of motion on the steering wheels and unobstructed access to the shift lever and other critical controls, and that you are generally comfortable. Your seat and driving position will determine some critical dimensions on the roll cage such as the height of the harness bar, the position of the dash bar, and even the routing of the tubes above your head. If the cage and/or the seat mounts need to be modified to make everything fit, the cage builder can do it while the cage is being installed. I spent several weeks and spent an entire track day event perfecting my seating position in the Prelude. As pedantic as it sounds, I can tell you it was time well spent. Racing Harness Most amateur road racing organizations in the US require a racing harness with 5, 6, or 7 mounting points with individual mounts for each shoulder belt and carrying a SFI 16.1 rating or a FIA homologation tag. Since nylon webbing degrades over time and with exposure to UV light, these harnesses must be replaced regularly - SFI rated belts can only be used within two years of their date of manufacture, while FIA belts can be used for up to five years from its date of manufacture. On top is a SFI 16.1 rated latch and link harness, and on the bottom is a FIA certified camlock harness. Generally speaking, a 6-point racing harness is easier to install than a 5-point racing harness, because the anti-submarine straps can share the same mounting bolts as the lap belts. In a closed wheel car, you always want pull-down style shoulder belts, which are easier for the driver to fasten. FIA homologated racing harnesses are expensive, at two to three times the price of a similar set of SFI belts, but most racers will spend the money so they don't have to replace and reinstall them as often. At the center of every FIA homologated racing harness is a camlock mechanism, a small disc-shaped with a slot for each belt. Click each belt into the buckle individually to strap yourself in, and turning the small lever in the front to release all of the belts at once. SFI rated belts will either use a camlock or something called a latch and link, a heavy, secure-feeling metal buckle that fastens over a leather pad. Many drivers prefer the latch and link mechanism over a camlock, as the distinctive lever mechanism of the latch and link is very easy to fasten by feel. This is a surprisingly convenient, since you won't be able to the buckle when you are strapping into the car (the helmet obscures your view). It's important to know exactly which harness you want in your car when the roll cage is installed, so that it can be fitted and mounted to the strongest possible parts of the chassis. I chose a 6-point SFI Rated GForce racing harness with a latch and link buckle for the Prelude. The shoulder belts are 3" to fit tightly into the grooves of my Simpson Hybrid head and neck device, and they are wrapped tightly to the harness bar of the roll cage in accordance with the instructions from GForce. Yes, I have to ship them back every two years and pay $55 to have them re-webbed. I don't mind. There a few studies out there correlating UV exposure and how it affects the tensile strength of nylon based high strength strap material. The material used in racing harnesses loses around 50% of its tensile strength after two years of indirect UV exposure and loses almost all of its tensile strength by the fifth year. The reason they can certify any racing harness for that long is that the belts are constructed with astronomically high tensile load ratings in mind. But I do prefer to keep the belts as new as possible. Just in case. Window Net Technically, the cage builder will be more interested in the mounting hardware for the window net than the net itself. After all, window nets are all pretty similar: They are big rectangles of woven nylon material or a mesh made of high tensile fibers designed to keep your arms and head from flying out the window during a crash. There are three popular types of window net mounting rods, each with a different type of quick release mechanism. One uses a seatbelt-like metal buckle, one is a metal latch that swings down, and one has no fastener at all - instead the rod is spring loaded so that it will release if you pull on it. This might seem like a minor point of preference, but if you think about the fact that you may have to release the window net in a panic situation at some point, it's worth taking the time to figure out which one feels the most natural to you. Bring the net and the mounting hardware to the cage builder and ask him or her to do the installation for you. My window net is held up using a rod with a latch-type release mechanism. Charlie at Entropy Racing built this clever pivoting swing arm so that I could raise and lower the net with one hand. Fire System and Fire Extinguisher Firefighting is a topic in which I have very little practical experience, a fact for which I am immensely grateful. That also means that I can't tell you whether an AFFF extinguisher is a better option than a semi-automated fire suppression system with Halon 1301. What I can tell you is that if you plan to install a fire system, tell your cage builder about it so that he/she can make accommodations for it. I use a handheld sodium bicarbonate fire extinguisher in the Prelude. It's mounted to the floor where I can reach and release it from the driver's seat with the belts on.

Weight Distribution - Get as close to 50/50 as you can A common misconception is that FWD cars need to have as much of their weight over their front wheels as possible to aid traction. This isn't really the case in a track car. More static weight on the front wheels equates to increased load on the front end during cornering and braking, which means that you will overwork the front tyres and brakes over the course of each lap. What's worse, you will be taking load away from the already under-utilized rear tyres, wasting precious grip in the process. Building a front-heavy car isn't great for driver feel either. Cars rotate around their center of gravity, and the closer the driver sits to that CG, the more natural the car feels. If the CG of the car is too far in front of the driver, the car will feel like it's turning less than it actually is. Most production FWD cars come with over 62% of their weight over the front axle, which puts the car's CG somewhere inside the dashboard. Don't make it worse by moving it any further forward. Remember RealTime Racing's B15 SE-R? This car had around 55% of its weight over the front axle, giving it a very natural cornering attitude. RTR had to go to extremes to achieve this, including an aggressive lightening of the front end and moving the driver's seat into the area originally intended for rear passenger legroom. For the practical racer, what this means is to focus your efforts on the front end of the car. Battery relocation, removal of heavy brackets, strategic removal of soundproofing, and even gutting the underside of the dash are all options to take weight out of the front. Conversely, it makes sense to leave some weight in the back of the car, especially if it's low to the ground. For example, don't scrape the soundproofing off the underbody aft of the rear axle. It's not big enough of a difference to help your acceleration or braking, and it will help your car during cornering. Use Cheap Brake Pads on the Rear End This one is more a product of necessity than anything else. As you get faster and faster, you will notice that you are constantly locking up the rear brakes under hard braking. Changes such as decreasing the weight over the rear axle and running sticky tyres will cause the brake bias to naturally migrate rearwards. To counter that effect, you will inevitably have to do things to push the brake balance forwards again. Installing brake bias adjusters, using bigger front rotors, and running more aggressive pads are all ways to achieve this goal. But there's an easier way to tackle this problem - Take those trick racing pads out of the rear calipers and install the cheapest, crappiest auto parts store pads you can find. As bizarre as it sounds, almost all fast FWD cars use OEM-style pads in the rear calipers. Since FWD race cars tend to have low minimum chassis weights, there's often no need to upgrade to bigger calipers or rotors in the front. Instead, drivers will install more aggressive pads up front, cool them with brake ducts, and use the least grippy brake pads they can find in the back. On the left are the Raybestos ST-43, some of the most aggressive and versatile club racing pads available today. A set of front pads for a 93 Honda Prelude Si costs $216 from BestBrakes.com, and lasts almost a year. On the right are a set of Raybestos Service Grade Ceramic Brake pads, my rear brake pad of choice. A set of rear pads for the same car costs $7.99 from Rockauto and lasts almost forever. That's not to say that the rear brakes are worthless in a FWD car. They do work, mostly at the beginning of the braking zone when you have just started pressing the brake pedal. It takes a split second for the load to transfer to the front axle and until that happens you have enough rear grip to use the rear brakes to their fullest. But when that time period is so small and there's so much weight over the front wheels, it's more practical to give some of that up to prevent you from locking the rear wheels. Not only is it easier for the driver to manage, it's also easier on the driver's wallet. Fast forward a fullsSix full years for Part 4 of Weird Ways to Make FWD Cars Fast >>

Considering how much time I spend researching and analyzing automotive suspension dampers, I buy seriously cheap coilovers for my own car. This is partially because I know that dampers are wear items. I don't have thousands of dollars laying about to keep replacing high-dollar race shocks when they wear out or break. The other reason is that with a bit of knowledge and small amounts of money spent in the right places, you can make off-the-shelf coilover kits work really well. Here's what I do when I go shopping for a springs and dampers: 1. Be honest - How is the car being used? The first and most important thing is to make an honest assessment about how the car is going to be used. A $4000 coilover kit built for a street car is a very different piece of engineering than a $4000 racing damper kit. If this is your only car and you plan to do 1~2 track day events per year, you don't want to buy JRZs or Motons for it. The casings aren't designed to take the dirt and grime that comes from driving on the street, and the internals aren't built for the jarring high-piston speed impacts of driving around on city roads. The nicest racing dampers money can buy will last less mere months on a street car before they are completely destroyed. On the other hand, most low-buck twin tube coilover kits will happily take the rigors of street use and still deliver reasonable performance on the track. If this is a dedicated track car, ask yourself the question - "How many of these can I buy on my budget?" Remember, dampers are a wear item. They need servicing on a regular basis, and will sometimes need to be replaced. With race cars, this is a given, because one of the unfortunate realities of racing is car-to-car contact. As a rule of thumb, if I don't have the money on hand to buy two spare dampers, I won't buy the set. AST-Moton makes this extremely nice 2-way setup for my car. It's actually within my budget, but I won't buy it. It's not the right choice for the low-cost, rough-and-tumble environment that is SCCA IT racing. 2. Customer Service & Revalving Options Once you understand what you need, it's time to do some research. With the wealth of information out there on web forums, you'll have no problems finding out who makes suspension kits for your car. It's time to start calling them up and asking about their product. Along with the usual questions about fitment and which model coilover is the right one for the usage in question, I always throw in a few questions to get a sense of the company's customer service. At minimum, I try to get answers to the following: Do I like talking to the person on the phone? This is important. Remember, you are spending thousands of dollars on this suspension kit, and if everything goes well, you will be spending hundreds more on rebuilds and revalves over the coming years. If you can't stand the guy on the phone, how do you expect to get the service you need? How do I get the dampers revalved? If I'm going to spend more than a few hundred dollars on suspension dampers, I'm going to expect that they are fully rebuildable and revalve-able. The question here is, who does it, and where is it done? I always gravitate towards coilover manufacturers who can do the work in-house, in the country, and are willing to let me talk directly to the techs. If the damper has to be shipped overseas to be rebuilt or the seller won't give me a straight answer on rebuilds, I won't buy from them. What are my valving options? Are my valving options limited to what spring rates I'm using, or will they valve my dampers differently depending on whether it's a street, track, or race car? When I send my dampers in for a rebuild, do they ask about things like mid-corner oversteer or harshness at high speeds? Surprisingly, many aftermarket coilover manufacturers have in-house rebuild capabilities and are happy to work with you on the miniscule details of damper valving. You just need to ask. How do I buy replacement parts? Ask how much it would cost to replace a worn out piston rod or to replace the seals on the damper. If they give you boilerplate numbers or send you a price list for parts / replacement services, you are talking to the right people. What are their turnaround times for service? "3-6 weeks depending on whether we need to order parts and how busy things are" is a pretty good turnaround time. It doesn't hurt to ask if they have expedited service. It may surprise you that some high-end damper makers will fail this customer service test, while some cheap coilover manufacturers will pass with flying colors. Don't judge a book by its pricetag or forum cred. 4. Customizability If you are a DE driver or an aspiring racer, you will outgrow whatever suspension setup you buy today. This is a good thing. The smart thing to do is to choose a suspension setup that can grow with you instead of having to keep buying and selling whole kits. Before buying a kit, find out: Are the springs a standard diameter (2.25", 2.5", 60mm, or 65mm)? Do they offer top hats with pillowball mounts and/or do they use a standard shaft size so you can get aftermarket pillowball mounts? Alternatively, can they make mounts for you? If you don't like the standard valving, can you get it changed (without changing the spring rates)? Will the rebuilder dyno each damper so I can keep track of the behaviors as I get the valving changed? I always end up replacing the springs that come with most coilover kits, so the first question is a big deal for me. If your coilovers use a taper-wound spring (where one end is larger than the other), you are pretty much stuck with whatever spring options the coilover manufacturer offers. If your dampers use an oddball spring size (e.g. 70mm springs), it will be harder to get replacement springs, helper springs, or thrust bearings to customize your setup. The valving question is a big deal too. Effective valving is much more complicated than making the shock dyno show a double digressive curve. More often than not, the correct damping for your application will not look like this. You don't need to know this though. You just need to make sure that you have access who does, and make sure that they are the ones revalving your dampers. The corner of my garage is littered with spare coilover springs of various rates and lengths. Over the course of four years, my car control skills improved dramatically, necessitating the move to stiffer and stiffer springs. 5. Personal Preferences (Tech-y stuff) You can't expect to spend this much time around suspension parts without developing some personal preferences. Here are some of mine, along with some explanations as to why: Larger shock bodies over lighter weight A bigger diameter damper holds more oil, uses larger parts, and therefore will have better heat dissipation than a narrower bodied counterpart. The tradeoff is weight. A bigger diameter damper is naturally heavier and will usually necessitate the use of larger springs (which are also heavier). I don't want to worry about cooling my dampers though, so I almost always go for better heat dissipation and choose the girthier dampers. Twin tube over a cheap monotube On paper, monotube dampers have a lot of inherent advantages over twin tubes. What they don't tell you in books is that most of those advantages can only be realized if the monotubes in question use better materials and are built to very tight tolerances. Cheap monotubes tend to be built with crappy materials and inconsistently machined components, which means that they'll exhibit lots of internal friction and more hysteresis than their twin tube equivalents. As a rule of thumb, I won't buy a monotube damper kit that costs less than $300 a corner. Shortened shock bodies are nice A common feature in new cars is to have very little damper travel before they hit the bump stops. I'll gravitate towards any damper that has a shock body that has been slightly shortened to compensate for the fact that I won't be able to lower the ride height as much as I could with older cars. External canister with a hose where available (monotubes only) If the option exists and the rules allow for it, I'll usually take an external canister on a flexible hose. External canisters gives you more fluid, the potential for better cooling, and gives the damper manufacturer more options when it comes to installing adjusters. For me, this means I can fit a big damper in a small space, and I don't have to contort my hands around suspension arms to make adjustments. Buy springs with the most usable travel Springs aren't the same rate all the way through their range of travel. Depending on the manufacturer, a 500lb-f/in spring may be 550 lb-f/in at the start of its travel, 500lb-f/in in the middle, and 450lb-f/in as it gets close to coil bind. Springs also aren't very consistent. A random sampling of four 500lb-f/in racing springs of the same make and model might vary by as much as 5% on a spring tester. I don't really have the time to deal with inconsistencies, so I'll spend the money to buy the most consistent springs I can afford. For me, this narrows my choices to two brands: HyperCo and Swift. Use as little damping as possible Interestingly enough, too much damping increases both confidence and lap times. A heavily damped car will feel like it's planted and predictable, but will be slower because the suspension can't move freely through its range of travel. I try to run just enough damping so that the car doesn't bounce off of kerbs or exhibit scary high-speed instability. The stopwatch is your friend here. Remember, these are personal preferences and they do have quite a bit of bias. Don't take any of the above as gospel. 6. Red Flags Finally, there are some things that are red flags for me. I'm going to skip the obvious stuff like $300 ebay coilovers and obvious counterfeits and talk about some of the less mentioned ones: Adjustable dampers with over 30 clicks 30-way+ adjustment is an indicator that the damper manufacturer has cut the threads on the adjuster screw too fine, and that the adjuster basically won't do anything unless you move it 5 clicks at a time. Damper inserts for MacPherson strut cars There's really only one manufacturer that makes these - Koni. The long and the short of it is, don't do it. By definition the insert is a significantly smaller diameter than the stock damper housing, which is bad news for damping consistency and heat dissipation. The other cheap shock options have caught up and surpassed Koni's budget oriented dampers anyway, so don't even bother doing this. Rebuilds-by-replacement "service" Some companies will "rebuild" your damper by cross-shipping a new damper cartridge. What this really says is that they don't actually have the ability to disassemble or test your damper, and they're just sending you an off the shelf replacement every time you think you've worn one out. Combined camber-caster adjustable top hats There's a well-respected suspension company out there that sells camber plates with the adjustment slits cut diagonally. When you add camber, it also removes caster (and vice-versa). I have no idea why you would want this. What's worse, some cheap coilover makers have started copying this design for their MacPherson strut applications. If you see this, run. Companies that poke fun at needle valves The needle valve is a fundamental design component of automotive damper adjuster design used in everything from $1000 adjustable street dampers to $10,000 racing monotubes. There are companies out there that claim that they are an inferior design of a bygone age, and that their rotary, slide, or poppet valve based adjusters are far superior. This is nonsense. Each valve type has its advantages and disadvantages, and there are many applications for which a needle valve is the best possible option. Any company that claims that one type of valving is inherently superior to another has too many marketing people and too few engineers. 7. Whom to buy from The nice thing about being independent is that I get to say whatever I want without worrying about upsetting any sponsors. If you want to see examples of companies that tick all the right boxes, go to the following three websites: Motion Control Suspension Redshift Motorsports Fortune Auto Tein USA That's all for tonight. Happy hunting.

My first ever track car was a 98 Nissan 200sx. It was a 2-door Sentra 1.6, complete with a cast iron 115hp GA16DE motor, 14" wheels and a curb weight under 2300 lbs. On paper, it's the perfect base for a nimble, lightweight handling monster. But for some strange reason, I couldn't get it to handle. My beloved Nissan was easy enough to drive, but getting the car to turn was a constant problem. After three years and dozens of suspension mods later, I finally realized that the advice I received from books and online setup guides were missing some key points in how to set up front wheel drive cars. Here's what those books and guides are missing: Know the two major setup philosophies The first thing you need to know is that there are two major schools of thought when it comes to setting up production based front wheel drive cars, and the difference is in tyre size. One school of thought uses the same size wheel / tyre combination in the front as the rear. The other uses a larger wheel or a wider tyre in the front. This seemingly small difference makes a huge difference in how all of the other pieces fall into the setup puzzle. A larger front wheel and wider front tyre will naturally reduce the amount of understeer the car exhibits through every corner. You can run stiffer front springs, run less extreme alignment settings, and the car's behavior won't change as much when the tyres heat up. But it also means that you can't swap wheels front to back, and that you will need to really work with the brake bias to keep the small rear tyres from locking up. In contrast, most FWD club racing cars and street-driven track cars in the US use the same size wheels and tyres on the front and rear. Along with the economic benefit of being able to use the tyres all the way around, this approach will give you more setup freedom in the rear end of the car. The downside is that the added rear grip will make the car difficult to rotate and you need to rely on stiffer rear springs and stiffer rear anti-roll bars to make the car turn. There are tons of fast FWD track cars on both sides of the fence. But it is important to understand that these differences exist, especially if you plan to use coilover kits or anti-roll bars with off the shelf rates. A coilover kit with super-stiff front springs is probably not what you want if you plan to run the same 245/40R17s on all four corners of your car. Make the rear springs significantly stiffer than the front What a lot of people don't realize is that most passenger cars (FWD, AWD, or RWD) come with higher rate springs in the back than they do in the front. One reason for this is to help with ride comfort when driving over big bumps. By making the rear spring stiffer, automotive engineers can make the front and rear settle from a bump at almost the same time. This reduces the amount of bouncing the passengers experiences and gives the perception of a better ride. However, making the rear springs too stiff would make the ride jarring. So car manufacturers will use progressive rate rear springs to maintain a supple ride while keeping the advantages of a high rear ride frequency for when drivers hit potholes or speed bumps. Another reason for installing a stiffer rear spring is that the rear suspension of most passenger cars are designed with a higher motion ratio than the front. Look under your car and see where the springs mount to the control arms in the front and rear of your car. They will be further inboard in the rear than they are in the front. The further inboard the springs, the higher the motion ratio, and the stiffer the springs need to be in order to achieve the same effective rate at the wheels. Because progressive rate springs are difficult to engineer and produce, most aftermarket coilover manufacturers will use linear rate rear springs that are somewhere between the softest and stiffest rates provided by the factory rear springs. Generally, this is a mistake. The spring will be too soft for the car to handle, while simultaneously being too stiff for a comfortable ride. If you are setting up your car for performance, install a significantly stiffer spring in the rear than the front. So how much stiffer should the rear be? A good way to approach this is to calculate the motion ratios of the front and rear suspension on your car, and look at how different the front and rear motion ratios are. The bigger the difference between the front and rear motion ratios, the stiffer your rear springs need to be. If you are just starting out or aren't confident in your abilities, find out what kind of spring rates racers use for your car, and lower both the front and rear spring rates proportionately. For a detailed explanation of motion ratios and how to calculate them accurately, head to: http://alison.hine.net/cobra/tweaks/motionratio2.htm Dial in as much front camber as you can For some reason many track day enthusiasts don't put enough camber in the front of their FWD cars. Some people seem to think that even 2 degrees is too much. They will claim that it would cause uneven tyre wear or that it would increase braking distances. What these people don't realize is that modern R compound tyres are designed to work with a minimum of 2.5 degrees of negative camber. Even the latest generation of high performance street tyres are so sticky that they need extra negative camber just to keep a flat contact patch under hard cornering. At the last SCCA March Lion test weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting a friendly gentleman who was testing out a new acquisition - A 4th gen Prelude Si, prepared for the Improved Touring S class, very similar to my own. His primer-grey Honda had the weirdest looking setup of any ITS car I've ever seen. It must have been 5 or 6 degrees of negative camber in the front, and the ride height was so low it looked like an early 90's Super Touring car. Definitely not something you would expect from a club racing car running DOT R compounds. But you can't argue with results. Within 15 minutes of hopping in the car, the driver had belted out a 1:16.5 on NJMP Lightning. That's within a second of the ITS lap record. When he broke out the tyre pyrometer, it read a perfect even gradient across the tread. If you have a track driven car and want to run R compounds, I would recommend starting with at least 2.5 degrees of negative camber up front. Adjust your rear camber based on the front, and fine tune both sides using your pyrometer. FYI, I run 4.25 deg negative camber in the front and 2.25 negative camber in the rear. That's all for part 1. Click here for part 2, with more weird setup tips for FWD track cars.

We're back with some more odd-sounding setup tips on how to make FWD track cars fast. Add Toe-Out to the front wheels Adding front toe-out is common sense for racers and autocrossers, but is something that many drivers avoid on street-driven track cars. Most drivers will put a tiny bit of toe-in or run zero toe in the front of their FWD track cars. This is great for straight-line stability on the street, but will greatly hinder the car's ability to turn in. For a track car, start with 0.1 deg (or 1/16 in) total toe-out up front. This is just enough to make the car easier to turn during the entry phase of each corner, but not enough to cause the car to wander or become tail-happy. If you are worried about the car becoming tail happy, dial in a tiny bit of toe-in in the rear. The result should be a car that is stable under hard braking and is eager to point to the apex at turn-in. Use less camber in the rear This one comes straight out of the setup books of my good friend and mentor, Todd Reid. Todd took the unusual approach of running as little camber as possible on the rear of his NASA PTE-prepared Ford Probe. Convention says that this would result in a reduction of the rear contact patch due to the outside rear wheel going to positive camber, and this isn't entirely false. But it also makes it possible to rotate the car mid-corner, which is something that a lot of FWD track cars will refuse to do. The extra contact patch from the lack of negative camber also adds stability under braking and through the exit of every corner. This is Todd's Probe. This car graced the podium at the NASA Nationals a few years ago and was a regular winner at various organizations up and down the east coast. Never mind the 20 year old paint or the oddball air intake. Instead, look closely at the camber angle of the left front versus that of the left rear. Almost all modern FWD passenger cars will naturally gain more negative camber in the rear than they do in the front, so don't be afraid to stand the rear wheels up. If you have a Macpherson strut / Chapman strut rear, try reducing the camber angle of the rear wheels to half a degree less than the front. If you have a double A-arm rear, try it with a full degree less than the front. It won't drastically change the handling feel, but it will make it easier to control the car. In addition to being a veritable fountain of knowledge of vehicle dynamics and racing technique, Todd is also a pro driver coach. If you can spare the cash, have him spend a day or a weekend with you. It's worth every penny and then some. For more info, visit www.reidspeedinc.com or call (410) 441-0201. That's all for today. Click here for part 3, where we'll talk about weight distribution and brake bias.