Posted (05/15/2004) -
So far this year in this space we have talked about many different facets of running a professional team. From the logistics of running the Rolex 24 Hours At Daytona to how to campaign five cars on a weekend, we have covered many various aspects of what it takes to run a professional team on the event weekend. Some of the more tedious but productive aspects of racing come away from the high profile events. This issue we will cover one of the more difficult, ambiguous, and at times frustrating tasks: testing.
We got our first long break of the 2004 Grand Am season when we left Phoenix in early April. With six weeks off between events we now had some time to continue tuning our Porsches. Of our two programs, our Grand American Rolex Porsche GT3 Cups were our main focus in testing. Our Grand Am Cup Porsche 996 fleet of three cars has won all three races this season. We ran the cars all last season and won the Championship so we really have a good handle on how to tune the cars to different tracks.
The Grand Am Rolex GT3 Porsche is new to our fleet this season and is a completely different beast than the Grand Am Cup Porsche 996. With 100 more horsepower and 400 less pounds, the car rockets off of the turns. Even in fifth and sixth gears the car continues to sit you back in the seat and when you hit the brakes the car stands on its nose. Because of this we are in the process of developing a completely different setup for these cars.
We first scheduled a test at Beaverun in Pennsylvania. We had never before been to this track and therefore had to take the first fifteen minutes to learn the track. After that we started methodically working our way through the cars.
First on the agenda was fine tuning the Grand Am Cup Porsches. Our team has built over thirty race cars in the last ten years. No matter how identically you build these cars, they always feel just a little bit different from each other and require a small tuning difference in the shocks to accomplish the same balance. Our three Grand Am Cup Porsches are no different.
On a normal race weekend other drivers have control of most of our Porsches and we never get a chance to compare them back to back and tune all three. On an open test day like this, there was no problem jumping back and forth to ensure all the cars were tuned properly. Only minor adjustments were made to all three cars and by the end of the second hour all three had turned times within a tenth of a second of each other.
Now we turned our focus to the Porsche GT3 Cup. It seems since this car has the same chassis as the Porsche 996 that it would require nearly the same setup package. However we have not been able to get the speed or feeling out of that package with the Rolex cars. With the setup we had at Phoenix the car still felt like it had too much roll.
When you begin tuning a race car there are so many different options to tune with it is almost overwhelming. With springs, shocks (adjustable three ways), sway bars, camber, toe, castor, wing, tire pressure just to name the obvious ones, you really have to find a place to start. My theory has always been that you have to start with the spring package. The springs control the balance of the car in high speed and low speed. They control the weight transfer. To me they are the main component of a setup package.
We tested first with the setup we had at Phoenix so we had a good baseline feeling and lap time. After that we made some drastic movements in spring rate, adding nearly 50% more spring rate to the car. Times immediately dropped a second and car went from feeling like a beefed up street car to now feeling like a go-cart.
There still was some floatiness in the front end of the car so that was our next point of attack. Because you have to re-align and re-scale the car spring changes can take nearly two hours. With only three hours remaining in the day we decided to try to fine tune the setup we had with shock changes.
The adv
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