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Pastimes : SI vs. iHub - Battle of the Boards Part 2 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: c.horn who wrote (4012)	5/19/2002 11:30:40 AM
From: (Bob) Zumbrunnen	Respond to of 5315

I resent the insinuation and you'll never be able to prove a thing. <g> Come to think of it, when I bought those tires, I also bought the "Lifetime Alignment" package. At the time I didn't know the car would end up seeing track use all the time, but did know the car was a keeper (11 years now). Was happy with them for a while, but then I took the car to a different Firestone store (with Lifetime Alignment certificate in-hand) after having installed cc plates, and asked that they give it the maximum negative camber the plates would allow up to 2.5 degrees and toe the front tires out 1/32-1/16th inch. I was very insistent about this and they assured me they'd be able to do it. When I picked up the car on my way to the track, the tech had written on the ticket that my specifications were outside the factory-specifications and that he couldn't do it. The manager who assured me he could do the alignment as specified told me that their insurance policy wouldn't let them. I was a bit angry that they didn't call and tell me so before messing up the pretty-close alignment the car already had. Fortunately (or maybe not), I'd bought my own camber-measuring equipment. When I got to the track, I gave it the 2.5 degrees of negative I wanted (now I run at 3). This was a Friday (instructors and a few advanced students day) meaning I could enter and leave the track anytime the moood hit. About 15 minutes into my first session, I noticed that the car was getting noticeably more and more squirrely on the front straight. Dangerously so. Brought it in and found that the large amount of toe-in, combined with all that negative camber, had scrubbed the insides of the tires down to cords. 140 mph with heavy straight-line braking on slippery nylon cords. Fun! It was fine in the turns because the load was being spread across the whole tire rather than just the inside edge. I pondered the problem and decided that the tires were apparently toed in so much that they were fighting each other (as they should -- gives cars their self-straightening trait) and also migrating rubber on the edge of the tire not toward the middle of the tire as toe-out would cause, but toward the edge of the tire and off into the air. Figure air provides just a little less resistance to this migration than does heat-cycled rubber. Fortunately, I take plenty of tires to the track with me, so I moved the back tires to the front and threw a new set on the back (Friday is my heat-cycle day -- I run the car 20 minutes with each set of new tires on the back then let them set overnight), then developed the alignment method I use to this day: I run the car hard for a few laps, come in and feel the tires to see if they're hotter on the inside edge, middle, or outside edge, then adjust toe, camber, and air pressure accordingly. It'd be easy enough to make a toe gauge, but just eyeballing it and checking temperatures seems to work well. Anyway, a long way to say I not only didn't burn down a Firestone store, I didn't burn down two of them. <g> Oh, and to continue in this off-topic vein, I ran out of Hoosier tires that weekend, but found Toyo Proxees in my size at a local tire shop and they let me have them real cheap because nobody else would buy them. They're certainly not Hoosiers (cost me about 3 seconds per lap), but they're wonderful rain tires, and I've even taken to running them on the back of the car because I found I'm actually a little faster with the Toyo's on the back and Hoosiers on the front. Since the Toyo's don't grip as well as the Hoosiers, they nicely balance the car; getting rid of most of the evil push Mustangs have. I give the Porsche 911 guys a hard time by telling them I found a way to make my car handle like a 911: Slippery tires on back. Heck, if I put few sandbags in the trunk, it'd handle even more like a 911. <g>