Pre-Nationals Checkup

If there's one thing for sure, no matter how meticulous you are with alignments, you need check and adjust your alignment regularly if you're pushing your car hard enough. Bumblestook was last aligned before I tucked her away over the winter and after over half a season of hard driving, she was long overdue for another one.

Getting ready for alignment - SJF Performance - 8/7/2016

As expected, some of the settings had drifted over the past few months simply from the G forces generated by the car under extreme cornering. I had reduced front camber on the front right and toe settings were quite a bit off norm. Despite Bumblestook's good pace yesterday at NNJR SCCA, she wasn't running at optimal settings. SJF redid the alignment to incorporate a few changes I wanted to make to have the front end work a bit better. The new alignment settings are:

Front:
-3.6 camber
4.9 caster
0 toe

Rear
-2.5 camber
0.06 (1/16") total toe in

This is pretty much what we started with early in the season but added another 0.2 degrees of negative camber up front. Looks like we'll also have to replace the tie rod ends after Nats. There's a bit more play that we'd like. It's minor but this is definitely on the list of things to do when we get back.

Alignment in progress - SJF Performance - 8/7/2016

Next up, the diff fluid was flushed. I know we really don't need to replace diff fluid this frequently but it's a cheap and effective way to be able to check the health of the diff. The fluid looked very clean. No metal shavings or excessive carbon buildup at all were found on the drain bolt. The driveshaft bolts were double checked and confirmed that they have not slipped since we installed them and finally we checked the front brakes.

Front brakes done - SJF Performance - 8/7/2016

Hmm, besides the rotor being purple from all the heat generated from braking  yesterday, we did find that we had managed to go through an entire set of front pads in just 93.6 miles. How do I know it's exactly 93.6 miles? Because when we replaced the brakes at the beginning of the season, I reset the trip meter to find out how many miles we ran the car each year and it read 93.6 miles as of this afternoon. It's probably got about one event of brake pad left so I'm going to replacing the pads and the rotors again before nationals. I guess it's true that races are won in the braking zones because killing brakes in less than 100 miles was achieved with a fair amount of winning.

As a side note, the lights on the trailer were also replaced as the old ones were no longer functioning correctly. The brake and turn lights were working but not the running lights. I got some new replacement lights and they're working great so the trailer is now 100% sorted for the trip.