the s2000 is a beast. i have a feeling i'm going to be more than able to reach my goal of one minute, three seconds on tsukuba. with just the addition of sport meduim tires, the car is incredibly balanced and lapped a 1:06.452 without me really trying. i checked online, and a japanese racer in a stock s2000 clocked a time of 1:09.51, so my 1:09.454 is actually spot on time for a stock s2000. changing just the tires, and the car is three seconds a lap faster. that's ridiculous.
not content with the huge amount of time i chopped off, i bought a racing suspension and decided to fuck things up. the amuse s2000 was a huge inspiration for this car, and the concept of tuning it, so i went with the spring rates and alignment settings from that car. that dropped me to 1:05.562. the car had some push in it, so i tried playing with everything i could think of to make it turn better, but nothing was working. i had a faster car, but it wasn't as balanced as the stock car, and so it wasn't as fun to drive.
in real life, i'm very impressed by the suspension components that kw suspensions puts out for cars, so i pilfered their spring rates and went about tuning around them. i ended up dropping the anti roll bar (arb) in the rear all the way down and setting the front bar at 6. the car actually felt a tiny bit better at 5, but the time was slightly faster set at 6, so i left it there. the spring rates are set at 9.7kg/mm f/r and i gave the car a touch more damping in the rear to help it rotate. the car felt really good in tight turns with the camber at 2* f/r, but under hard braking entering a turn, the car would get a touch loose, so i bumped it up to 2.3* in back. toe is set at 0 f/r. a best lap time of 1:05.254 was the result.
i wanted to experiment with aerodynamics in turis, because i never adjust them, so i bought a front splitter, canards and a rear wing for the car. while i was at it, i put an unpainted carbon hood on it. 11lbs weight reduction was the result. front aero is not adjustable, but with just the front splitter the car had a touch more turn in. with the rear wing unadjusted, and with the front splitter on the car, i was turning slower lap times and the car started to understeer again. that's why i bought the canards.
with the balance resorted, i backed some of the wing off the rear and set some times. the car's balance didn't change too much, but the rear seemed less planted and times were slower. i set the wing to full downforce and the car came to life. the balance was almost perfect and times dropped down to 1:04.561. that's 5 seconds a lap faster than the stock car. it has the same horsepower and weighs 11 lbs less. that's an absurd amount of time on a short track like tsukuba. what's even more impressive is the 20 seconds a lap faster the car is on my toscana track. i'm going through most turns in a gear higher than i would in the stock car. there is so much grip.
so, we're at 1:04.561 and we haven't done any real weigh reduction or added any power. the next step is to get the car down to around 2,500 lbs. we'll see what the times are, but i have a feeling i'm going to be in the mid 1:03s with just the weight. i'm going to be adding around 45hp to the car as well, and i think that will put me in the 1:02s. if i decide to put the racing hard tires on, and they make the same kind of impact that switching from comfort soft to sport mediums made, i'll be sub one minute. for those of you who don't know (kevin), that's a really fast time. reeeaaaly fast. the multiple letters make it so.
