Two Guys Rally

Mistakes Not To Make #1

There are some mistakes that anyone is bound to make at some point in a racing career. Those mistakes can either cost you time or, at the worst, a crash. Today’s is Forget to Look Ahead.

Looking ahead is not some cheesy term about how bright the future is, but a more practical EYEBALL oriented piece of advice. It means looking further along the track/road than you first would think you should. It means looking past corners as you enter them and onto whatever landmarks you can. There are a few bad things that occur when forgetting to looking ahead:

• Makes Everything Seem Faster - objects that are closer to you seem to be faster when compared to objects that are further away (Mountains vs Trees vs Telephone poles on a highway/train). Feeling fast will more likely scare you than speed you up. Scared people also like coming off the throttle and pressing on the brake even if they should not.
• Fatigues Your Eyes - Looking close to the car requires more eye movement, when compared to looking far ahead at equal speeds, in order to fixate. Keep in mind, you shouldn’t be fixating, I was just using that as a point.
• You Drive Where Your Eyes Are Looking - It is hard to fight that you will drive where your eyes are looking (hence why you keep your eyes on the road). So look where you want to go, forgetting this could make you end up in a place you don’t want to be.

So dont forget to look ahead, even on the road. Look where you want to go, not where you’re going or where you have been. I bet that could even work for a life metaphor. (Soon TwoGuysRally will be a lifecoaching website and not a rally site </sarcasm>)

Keeping Drivers Cool

The whole point of keeping a racecar cool is so you can keep the driver(s) cool. There are lots of neat ways that race teams around the globe do it. Here are a few of them:

Cut Back On Layers

This may sound obvious but most racing suits have three or more layers of material to them. Keeping the layers down to a minimum (safety still matters) will allow the air you bring into the car to do its job and cool the driver down. The Subaru World Rally Team cuts that down to 2 layers of outerwear for the really hot rallies. The neoprene underwear still restricts breathability but keeps the drivers safe from fire.

One of the neat things about Rally Racing is that short sleeved suits are allowed in the extremely hot rallies. Many famous world champs have rocked the short sleeves or rolled up sleeves during desert rallies. See Colin McRae and Richard Burns for prime examples.

Drink Lots of Water

Being properly hydrated keeps drivers cool for a few reasons. First of all they can sweat, and if the car is breathing right that sweat can evaporate and will take a large amount of heat away from the driver(s). You will also lose a large amount of water through sweating, especially in the heat of a cockpit.

Your body is mostly water, so any heat your body generates related to general metabolism gets dumped into that mostly water body of yours. Less water means higher temps for the same metabolism (when controlling for the effect of sweat).

Your blood volume is also 80-90% water and so losing water means your blood volume will go down. This makes your heart work harder (oh look more energy release) and you feel hotter for the same temperature. Petter Solberg has said that he and Phil Mills will drink 10 liters of hydration fluid (mostly water and some electrolytes) in a day. That works out to over 1 gallon per person on that day not including the water that is in the food they eat. So drink up before and on race days.

Put Things In Freezers

Put everything you wear in a freezer (except maybe the neoprene) as it will make it a little nicer for that much longer. Your clothes will absorb that much more heat before letting you heat up.

Throw in some towels sprayed with water. Freeze those puppies so when at service, or pre and post race, you can wrap one around your neck and keep cool.

Mix Alcohol and Water

I am not saying drink alcohol, but add water and rubbing alcohol together and keep that chilled in a spray bottle. When you can, spray some on your skin and lots of heat will be pulled away with the alcohol and water (so will the oils in your skin). This works so well that some racecars will put this mix in intercooler spray reservoirs. It really will make that much of a difference.

Drinking alcohol will actually hurt your ability to cool off as it is a diuretic. So that is just one more reason not to drink when racing (besides the many obvious ones).

Neat Technologies Help

A loyal reader Dustin Tarditi reminded me about things like UnderArmor (loved it for lacrosse) and their high tech cousins deemed Cool Suits. Under armor is great for wicking away sweat (and with that heat) from the body and allowing air to do its job.

Cool Suits are even cooler as they will run coolant (water or what have you) from a cooler that is in the racecar (or in the pits) through tubes and across your body. The tubes are zig zagged across your chest and they pull heat away from your body into the coolant (which goes into the cooler).

Newer styles of Cool Suits are focusing on the wrists and palms. Why? Because “in order to cool the body you must cool the blood”, and the blood is a lot closer to the skin around the hands. This is the same reason you treat heat stroke/exhaustion by cooling the hands and feet rather than the whole body (the latter is dangerous as it may make it harder for the body to cool itself as it will bring the blood into the core due to shock). The trick to the new technologies is making them lightweight and not interfere with the driver(s) control of the car.

Gas Saving Tip #5

Gas stations need to be refilled just like your car. The trucks that fill the gas stations have pretty busy schedules, so they pump in the gasoline as fast as they can. That is all fine and dandy until you are refilling your car soon after they refill the gas station. The refilling process stirs up all the particulate matter that settles out of the gasoline in the storage tanks. The particulate matter then gets pulled up into the gas pumps and into your car.

So don’t fill up at a gas station that has been refilled recently. While a small amount, you’ll be spending parts of a penny on things that are not gasoline and paying for it as gasoline. Plus you will be making your fuel filter work just that much harder and possibly restrict its flow over time. So if you see the gas truck in the gas station, keep away from there for a few hours. It might save you that much more (if your time is worth it). 

Gas Saving Tip #4

While this is not so much a gas saving tip as it is a money saving tip, I think it addresses a common misconception about gasoline.

Stick to Low Octane Gas. If you don’t have a requirement for above 89, buy the lowest octane gas that will keep your car working. Octane has nothing to do with engine performance by itself. That is 93 octane will not make a car that only needs 87 octane run better.

Higher octane gas can put up with higher temperatures before it ignites, so high performance engines take advantage of this fact. They compress and heat up the gas and air more than a normal engine would in various ways. They could turbo/supercharge, increase compression in the cylinders, etc… All of those would require higher octane gas. If they used lower octane gas, the engine may start to knock. That means the gas is igniting before the spark and you can damage many parts of your engine when this happens.

So unless your engine requires it to prevent knocking (detonation), stick to the lower octanes.

Rollcage As Performance Mod

Many people tend to think that roll cages only provide safety and some extra weight, but they’re forgetting something: what they can add is stiffness.

Because roll cages were mandated as required safety devices in oh so many racing leagues, clever engineers figured out that they could use them to make their cars better. I don’t know who did it first, but they decided to connect all the suspension points together with a tubular space frame and call it a roll cage. Suddenly the mass of tubes becomes a way to stiffen up the car’s chassis.

You might not realize just how much a normal street car’s chassis flexes under any sort of acceleration (0-60, cornering, braking, etc…). This flexing acts much like the suspension, in fact most go-karts depend on frame flexing as the suspension (also the tires). However this flexing in a normal car changes the geometry of the suspension which can make a car less predictable and much harder to tweak (suspension wise).

Connecting the points where the suspension meets the frame with tubing (aka roll cage) can significantly increase the stiffness of a stamped sheet metal frame. This will keep the suspension geometry closer to normal under hard accelerations and allow you to more consistently judge how your suspension is affecting your car. However in most cars, connecting the suspension points (strut towers) will require to send tubes through the firewall of the car. Do you notice the tubes going through the firewall on the Subaru US Rally Team car? You should not be intimidated by the firewall, cut through it and reseal it around the tubes!

So, if you’re going to add a roll cage, don’t just add it to be within your competition rules. Take advantage of the rules and stiffen up your car so you can better adjust your suspension. Also, it results in less deflection in the chassis, which Mark tells me means you’ll end up with “smaller cyclic loading” on it. That means you’ll have more use of the chassis before it fails from normal race stresses. HOORAY ROLLCAGE!!!

Keeping Racecars Cool

While racecars are usually most definitely awesome, today’s weather reminded me they are pretty effing hot inside them. In the quest to save weight (translation: saving time on your laps/stages) common things are kept off the car. Air conditioning is gone, underbody/frame insulation is gone and the lexan windows usually dont roll down. Combine that with the fact that a racecar’s engine runs quite a bit hotter and cars with antilag systems (ALS) have exhaust temperatures above 1000 ºC the car’s interior will be hotter when running. However there are a few tricks to keeping the cabin temperatures survivable:

Air Vents

Racecars have a love hate relationship with air. At really high speeds it slows them down and sometimes even makes them crash, but it also cools their engines. In a similar fashion, it can help cool the cabin and driver(s). Keeping your drivers alive means getting them nice cool air to breath. Good helmets allow the driver to breath and it lets sweat do its work at cooling the driver(s) down. NASCAR likes to use forced air helmets that push air through the helmet, while Rally tends to use open face helmets (very breathable and you can yell at your driver in them).

In order to let a helmet do its job air needs to be getting to the driver(s) from outside. Vents to the cabin are nice for this. Rally cars often have a vent on the top center of the car to let air in through a diffuser so the drivers can breath and cool off. Air also has to exit the cabin, but if your windows are closed how can it do that? Closable vents in the back windows help with getting air out of the car, however in a Rally application I would suggest a filter on them (dust likes to come into the car otherwise). Andrew Comrie-Picard’s Mitsubishi is a shining example of common air ducting.

Window Tint

Sunlight heats up the cabin majorly. Ever been burned by a seatbelt buckle that was left in sunlight on a hot day? I know I have. Tinting a racecar’s windows with reflective tint can reduce any sunlight that is causing the cabin to get real hot. While black tint works to combat cabin temperatures, mirror tint works better (more reflection, less absorption) as it will not radiate as much heat through the glass into the cabin.

Roof Paint

Another way to keep the cabin temperatures from skyrocketing due to sunlight is to paint the roof of the car. The roof of the car is often not seen by spectators, so diverting from your colorscheme is not as big a deal. Painting the roof white will keep it from absorbing as much heat from the sun and further lowering the temperatures in the cabin.

Interior Paint

The interior is exposed to light too! Roll cages and the inside of the car frame make up a large surface that can absorb even more heat. Painting them white keeps them from absorbing as much heat. Plus a consistent interior color makes the car look neater and better organized. Also white shows everything wrong(great trait in a racecar) like: all sorts of leaks including exhaust, cracks and where you dropped your notes pen.

Insulate Exhaust Pipes

Exhaust pipes in racecars get extremely hot. They get way hotter than the exhaust on a street car so there is a lot more heat that comes off of them and into the cabin. Wrapping the exhaust in heat insulation might add a couple pounds, but it might give you a better performing engine. Higher exhaust gas temperatures means higher exhaust gas velocity, and if you’re running a turbo this means a faster spooling turbo. Not only will you get a possible gain in your engine, the cabin temps will drop. A normal exhaust will radiate heat into the metal on the underside of the cabin (a good amount of it too) which will transfer into the cabin. 1000ºC exhaust gas will conduct massive amounts of heat through a thin piece of metal(exhaust piping).

Regardless of what you’re racing doing everything you can to combat high cabin temperature will make your racedays more enjoyable and more consistent. Heat fatigues people, and tired drivers are dangerous drivers. That one, came straight out of a DMV Manual.

Calm The Eff Down

Slowing yourself down and not ‘pushing too hard’ will, oddly enough, make you faster. The principle behind it works in many other sports, especially those considered “Finesse Sports”. If you calm down and let your tools do the work for you (car vs golf clubs vs tennis racquets) you’ll find yourself performing consistently better.

There was a saying I heard at Team O’Neil Rally School, and it was: “Slow in, Out fast”. Regardless of the obvious: if you cannot make the corner, you cannot win the race. I think they were trying to tell us to calm down and not be so concerned with if it felt fast. If something feels fast, it doesn’t make it so, you need a clock to tell you how fast it really is. I think this is why simulators are so useful, while it may not be the real thing, you can work on your mental game in them.

So I would just like to instill these words on to you: “Calm The Eff Down“.

Performance Loss Hunt: Part 3

A while back, I made two posts about my car, and how there is a lack of power in the top end compared to what it used to feel like. I verified that the exhaust isn’t causing significant restriction and that the turbo is making about as much boost as it should be.

Since this is turning into a guess and check thing, mostly because my car is 10 years old and has almost 150,000 miles on it, and I don’t know how it was treated for the first 130,000 miles of its life, I said “To hell with it”, and ordered two things that I highly suspect to be contributing to the problem: Vacuum hoses and a CBV diaphragm.

Unfortunately, the vendor I’m getting the CBV diaphragm from does not have any in stock, nor does anyone else that I could find, replacing that part will sit on the back burner for now.

The silicon vacuum hoses from StylinMotors came in the other day, and sat in a corner of my apartment until I had the time to start ripping junk out of my engine compartment to get access to some of the hoses. Thanks to Independence Day being on Friday, I got a three day weekend to have fun. First order of business was figuring out what each hose does, and where it needs to attach to. Ideally, I would be able to just take one hose out, cut a new one to match and install. Knowing what everything does is something important to me, so I couldn’t make it that easy for myself.

After a couple minutes of fun wrestling with worm gear clamps and torx screws, the engine compartment of my S70 looked like this:

(click for larger image)

Although it looks like a disaster, all I really did there was take out the intake filter box and two intercooler pipes that were in the way of some hoses I needed to get to. Judging from the hose clamp style, the hoses are the original parts that were on the car when it rolled off the factory floor.

After prying the clamp off, I found something quite comical and frustrating at the same time. The hoses had rotted into place! I had to cut off every single hose I changed, since they would not come off any other way. Unfortunately, this meant that some of the hoses that are in tight spots did not get changed, since I couldn’t fit my knife into the area. I still plan on changing them though, I just need to remove more parts that get in the way.

Afterwards, the hoses in that picture had been replaced with silicone parts:

While changing out hoses, I found something very interesting. In the first engine picture, there is a small white thing on the very left edge in the center of the picture. This is a check valve that only allows air to flow in one direction. That hose comes from the intake manifold and leads downward to a T junction. The hose going to the right has another check valve, and connects to the intake hose just before the compressor inlet. The other hose goes to a solenoid that is part of the onboard fuel vapor recovery system.

Since the check valves are aligned in such a way to only allow air to be pulled out of the solenoid that is attached to a carbon filter, a broken valve from the intake manifold means that boost pressure can leak out of the intake manifold to before the compressor inlet or into the carbon filter. Both of these are things that should be avoided due to loss of efficiency and contamination of the fuel vapor recovery system.

Either way, I replaced the hoses I had relatively easy access to. Some will require the removal of the intake manifold, another is attached to the compressor housing, which the bottom part of the intake hose blocks, there is even a hose that runs over the top and back down to the back of the engine to the fuel pressure regulator. I’ll try to address the rest of these when the CBV diaphragm comes in.

So with all that said and done, did it fix the problem I’ve been seeing? Well, no. It actually did some things I didn’t really expect. Acceleration from a stop is now much smoother and more consistent as the engine speed increases. Fuel economy on the highway seems to have gone up by one or two MPG, but it is still too early to tell for sure. The most interesting is that the brakes feel much more responsive now. My suspicion is that there was a/some vacuum leak(s) that allowed air into the system causing minor problems, but not enough to make the ECU freak out. Knowing that is more motivation to go back and replace the rest of the hoses, since they surely have leaks too.

However, the top end power is still lacking, so the hunt to restore my engine to normal continues! I was joking with Charles earlier that I’m probably gonna replace everything under the hood short of the engine itself before I fix the problem.. I suppose time will tell. Until then, remember that preventative maintenance is the best thing to do to keep your car performing as it should.

Gas Saving Tip #3

Keep Your Tires Inflated

Low tire pressure increases your cars rolling resistance. Why? Because more rubber is in contact with the ground, and while this may generally be a good thing for racing, as we all know racing is not about fuel economy. Increased rolling resistance (which equates to traction) makes your engine work harder. Harder working engines consume more fuel so your MPG suffers. It is the same principle that makes road cyclists ride paper thin wheels and tires. So keep your tires inflated.

Keep your tire pressure around the factory recommended levels. However, if you over inflate your tire you may decrease the life of your tire while decreasing traction (what a loss). So keep an eye on your tire pressures! FYI the tire pressure in my WRX is currently around 36psi.

You should be able to find your factory levels stamped on a plate in one of your door frames. Combine that with the fact that most gas stations have free air for tires you really have no excuse to not keep your tires inflated. Happy hunting!

Gas Saving Tip #2

Don’t Drive Like a Douche…until the corners.

What I mean by driving like a Douche is tailgating, accelerating like a bat out of hell stoplight to stoplight (red light racers) and lots of pedal work on the road. So don’t do that. Accelerating like crazy (braking and gas) wastes energy needlessly, so if you really care about your MPG calm down with your pedals. That also means don’t do any of the neat stuff we’ve been telling you how to do like J-turns.

When you will want to drive like a douche is the corners, if you can safely not slow down for a corner then don’t. Driving for lower gas consumption is like winning a race in a low power car, it is all about preserving momentum. That doesn’t mean keep your foot planted on the accelerator through the corner!

So be nice to those pedals and dont mash them, drive around the speed limit (wind resistance increases with velocity duhhh), if you can, keep your speed up going into the corners and last of all calm down. Hopefully you can adjust the nut behind the wheel this summer and save a few bucks.