Car & Driver's SuperFours Challenge

[neurokinetik]

Anybody else read the article (November issue)?

I had a link to a pdf of the issue, but Miata.net seems to not be responding for me at the moment.

Anyway, I’ve been waiting impatiently for months to read the article after Flyin’ Miata posted specs of what they were bringing and what else was showing up. (Modded Elises and Evos, yikes)

FM brought a Mazdaspeed Miata stroked out to 2.0L, with a Garrett 3071R turbo, full JIC coilover suspension, 16x7.5 SSR Comps with 245/45-16 Potenza SO3s, six speed swapped out to a five speed for better gearing, dynoed 323 at the wheels (in Colorado), but they ran a bit more boost in competition due to 93 octane gas being available (91 is all they get in Colorado). Anyway, they only came in 6th out of 8 in the RWD/AWD category, but they did post a faster lap time than the Forced-Fed Elise, which is a huge accomplishment, IMO. Did I mention they drove the car from Colorado to Michigan for the competition, and back again, with no problems?

How about the Hondata Elise, with the superchanged Honda K-series? (cough what Lotus should have done to begin with cough) The only car faster was the HKS Evo, and the Elise wasn’t driven by a top notch pro driver like HKS had.

The thing that bugs me about the article is that it left me wanting more. More info. More details. FM has some pretty detailed writeups of their car on their site, and even more about the competition itself on Miata.net. The C&D article is merely a tease.

[Adictd2b00st]

havent seen it… any chance u can scan it?

[neurokinetik]

The Miata.net link had a link to download a pdf of the entire issue. I left my paper copy over at Rick’s. :bonk:

EDIT: Here’s the link, if it still works:

http://rapidshare.de/files/5676816/Car_and_Driver_-_2005_Issue_11_November.pdf.html

[Adictd2b00st]

dl’ing now :tup: link still worked, thanks bret

[Rx3]

Forget the PDF. Go straight to the website

Car and Driver Superfour Challenge

[Adictd2b00st]

for the amount of hp claimed by that srt4 it sure isnt very fast lol or is it just me

[RedGoober4Life]

I just can’t get interested in these articles. Or supercar articles. This must make me a bad car enthusiast.

[neurokinetik]

@Adictd2b00st

for the amount of hp claimed by that srt4 it sure isnt very fast lol or is it just me

Well, here’s a bit of info about those kinds of things that comes from Keith Tanner from Flyin’ Miata. Seems like the HP numbers and drag times are mostly BS…

@Keith

As it says in the article, the acceleration times were done on the pit lane of the speedway. We were launching on concrete with no VHT and with no wind or temperature compensation. As granma said, the car was NOT set up for the strip. Unlike drag racers, we had to go through a road course and then run up to 140 and stop. Thus we were using tire pressures and suspension setup that give us the best handling and high speed behaviour. The times are not comparable to what you’ll see on the dragstrip. Still, it’s one number that people understand and can digest so they tend to focus on it. We did have one problem with the ECU that caused a bog on the 1-2 shift that hurt us in the quarter. It’s fixed now but that’s racing.

Tires had to be street tires with a treadwear of 140 (I believe) and had to be purchased from the Tire Rack. We went with the S-03 instead of the KD because of a better size selection (avoided the need for expensive custom wheels) and better wet traction (because we were driving to the event).

I can’t believe that people are complaining we didn’t spend enough on the suspension. We did not just grab parts off the shelf but installed a package designed for this car that we don’t usually sell. For those who follow the link posted earlier, you’ll discover it wasn’t FM springs and KYB shocks. The car ran on JIC springs and shocks.

Then we spent a day at the track doing nothing but setting up the suspension. The time involved there wasn’t included in the cost of the car but it certainly would have bumped the price considerably. If it makes you feel better, add about $5000 to the suspension cost for tuning. A big part of extracting the most from a suspension doesn’t come from dumping money into shiny parts but from adjustment. While engines need to be tuned as well, they are fundamentally much more complex and the basics have to be there to make the power.

The end result? An MSM that rode better than stock according to Car and Driver, was faster than a tweaked Elise through the road course and was able to comfortably drive 3000 miles round trip to and from the event exactly as it ran on the track. Did we do such a terrible job?

@Keith

We did the drive out in three days and came back in two. The MSM averaged 34 mpg at over 70 mph

@Keith

That 380 hp number is a bit of an estimate. C&D wants crank numbers. Every year we protest and say we don’t want to do that, but they insist. We also had to estimate a bit because we were running more boost at the event than we had on the dyno thanks to different gas (the event had to be run on 93 octane pump gas, a mythical animal in Colorado). So it’s possible that 380 isn’t 100% accurate. It’s an estimated number. The car was bogging on shifts as mentioned earlier and that probably didn’t help the trap speeds. Not being a drag racer, I’m not even qualified to bench race the strip

If you want a better indication of our power, look at the 100-140 time.

[91MR2]

Great article there…

[neurokinetik]

I’m looking at the online version at caranddriver.com, and it is much better than what they published in the magazine. You get to see what the complete mod lists are for each car, plus the details of all of their runs on the course. Lots of pics of the cars, too.

[boardjnky4]

I just can’t get interested in these articles. Or supercar articles. This must make me a bad car enthusiast.

indeed it does, but fuck it i aint reading it either