Thread: Setting up your B14 for track day duty

In my experience on a B14 even 300/300# rates are a little harder to handle on high speed turns. Nothing that you would notice on the street but at 90mph on the track it's a little loose with the bigger rear swaybars. Also, I never had any real issues with tire wear on my B14 with 2.5 degrees camber. Camber + Toe will wear tires but keep the toe at nearly zero and it's fine. If you are running 16+ inch tires then you will have more of a issue as well. But with 15's and street tires you get some initial wear but then it settles into just even wear after that. Of course I never got much more then a year out of tires with my track usage. Nice write up though.

Thanks!

Yeah, the rear end can get a little loose on a car with a big bar. On a car with modest output, I solve that by keeping the rear end loaded through the high speed sections. If the car's so low and so stiff that the driver can't do that, I would probably choose to cover it with aero.

I have to admit, I do drive around on the street with the same ride height and alignment settings that I ran at the last track day. Even then, the wear on my street tyres is, as you said, surprisingly even. But I'm finding out more and more nowadays that my definition of "acceptable" is a tad more extreme than that of the general public. I wasn't sure if everyone else out there would see things the same way.

You can get away with more rear spring on a car with out the bent beam. Don't know if you have that done.

i just emailed ground control, so see if they can make a custom spring rate for my drag car

I am running 400 / 350 on AGX with SE-R solid front bar and NO rear bar .. STOCK rear beam ......works very well ...very neutral with a tad of understeer out of the corners and a tad oversteer on hard lift .... Very predictable .... It also depends on HP output ... I am pretty stock engine wise so I dont have a ton of power pulling out of the corners ....

good info man. im working on putting togeather a b14 for auto-x right now and ive been searching for info for a while. i have tokico blues with road magnet springs, whiteline f&r sways, nx2k front brakes, and some ebay strut braces. this is all in my garage not on the car yet i wanted to do everything at once. besides alighment is there anything else i should pay attention to?. up untill now im used to having independant rear beacuse ive only owned b13's, this solid rear is kind of dissapointing. i took it on the auto-x at work the other day and its like driving a green marshmellow i was actually getting a rear tire off the ground durning cornering and no rotation. im hoping this setup will make it easyer to rotate. idk i will have to see how it reacts to the additions i am fearing understeer. again thanks for the info,

Gerry

Finding a good base alignment setup is critical in an AutoX car. If you haven't gone through the steps already, you can find a lot of time there. I'd definitely recommend investing in a set of toe plates, a camber gauge, a pyrometer, and having the rear beam bent.

If you have the money, I would also recommend changing out those Tokico Blues with a set of adjustable performance dampers (AGX's or Koni Yellows will do). The Tokicos don't really offer enough damping for your Road Magnets. With your current spring / damper setup, your car will probably feel bouncy and reluctant to take a set under braking and after turn-in.

Adjustable dampers will also give you another means to tweak the understeer / oversteer balance of your car, which will become fairly useful once you start Autocrossing on a regular basis. Here's a link to a Shock Tuning article explaining how that works.

The car will feel dramatically different once you install everything, so I'll hold off on saying anything else for now. Good luck, and keep us posted on your AutoX exploits.

yea i really wish i hade enough money for a set of coilovers. it sucks because i have all the stuff i need to adjust the caster, camber, toe, and corner wieghts at work. i work at skipbarber racing school, i do the all alignments and scaling on the formula cars and the miata's. we just got a new set of intercomp 3,000lb pads they are so nice. ill have to save up a little more for coilovers i just went balls deep on a new motor and tranny. is there a better set of coilovers to look for?. whats up with this bending of the rear beam how do you go about this?. sorry for all the new questions but like i said ive only delt with b13's these b14's are a whole differant mess.

Gerry

That's pretty cool. I wish I had access to all that. Do they give you a discount on their schools too?

Here's a link to the NPM article on the deal on the whole B14 beam bending thing.

As for product recommendations on coilovers (and pretty much everything related to off-the-shelf suspension parts), I would check out this mega suspension thread from the How to Section.

yea we get a disscount if we want to race and we get one school a year free, plus mounds of track time...anyways thanks for the info man. ill start a thread on the auto-x section with the build and some tracking...later,

Gerry