[Cobra #3170]

Short version: We got our a$$ kicked by 4 corvettes and a Camaro

Long version complete with excuses:
We took 3170 to Goodguys SouthWest Nationals last weekend with high hopes for winning. We arrived on Thursday morning about 6:00 am after driving all night and found that the course had some extremely slow, and tight areas compared to last year which are not good for our set up.
We have been developing the car all year on 315x18 Falkens as many of you know from following my ramblings. Some very talented and winning autox drivers convinced us that Falkens were not the way to go and that we should retry Rivals and the new RS3 Hankooks which are killer on newer Corvettes.
All these tires are 200 TW and are legal for use at GoodGuys.
We have been testing all three tires both together and/or in combination for the last 4 weeks. What we found was the Rival 335x18 rears had so much rear traction that the car pushed like a dump truck with all other front tires including Rivals. This despite a spring change front and rear and a huge rake angle change. We have pictures of the car exiting a corner with both front wheels almost off the ground at 40 mph! Now a smart person would probably go back and just run a known set up with new Falkens but as you have probably guessed I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer so we arrived with Rivals on all around.
Friday Testing: We were 2.3 seconds slower than the fast people all morning.
The tight area I spoke of earlier had the engine in the 1900 -2000 rpm area
which isn't very good with a 297 degree duration cam @ .050. We had a really bad stumble there because of no port velocity and the car was pushing like a dump truck (what a surprise). We cranked up the rake even more in the pits and picked up about .3 seconds. A great guy who is with JRI shocks
suggested we needed to throw some rear spring at it. We drove it back to our trailer at noon and put 800 lb/" rears in and came back to find we missed two practice runs and that we were only going to get one more run before they shut down for the day. This time the car was marginally better but not what we were looking for. We picked up another .3 or so and were roughly
1.7 seconds slow. We decided at that point to really get after the pig and change some stuff. The only smart move I made prior to coming was to buy another set of Jongbloed wheels and mount last summers well used Falkens to bring as a back up. When we got back to the trailer I spent about 30 minutes with the computer tuning on the EFI to try and make it respond at idle rpm (it actually got better in that tight area). Scott Fraser my excellent driver and friend and I then changed every shock setting, all four springs, ride heights and all for wheels and tires. We had to do a lot of the work in the parking lot in the headlights of my truck but we got it done.
Saturday was limited practice , then qualifying for a spot on the ladder and then the big shootout. We took the car up Saturday morning and it was much better out of the box, after adjusting brake bias we got it to within
.6 of the fast people on a 70 second course still not great but better.
We ended up qualifying 5th out of 32 cars to start the ladder. At noon they started the shoot out and Scott won round one with ease and also won round two with not much effort still being careful because if you hit a pylon
you would be out unless you were over a second faster. Now although the crowd loved our engine sounds and acceleration they really don't know how little throttle is being used. Both Scott and I like to brag about that so at the finish he gave it about 3/4 throttle to show them how much was really there and promptly sheared off a half shaft yoke. Lots of people including the winning driver pushed the car back into the pits and then helped work on the car. We have a picture of Robby Unser under the car helping us change to a
spare half shaft that I carry. There were four guys under the car at one time. They got the car done but missed the call to grid by two minutes so they would not let us make the next round of eliminations. I don't know if we could have won but Scott is best when there is pressure and it would not have surprised me to see him pull it off. The man who won overall Brian Hobaugh is a good friend and we have run with him all year in California.
The Cobra was significantly faster (1-2 seconds) on those meetings but not at GoodGuys . What I have learned: don't change from a well developed proven set up at the last minute! Plans for next year: make the car more drivable in super slow conditions and change our spring, shock and differential package to eliminate low speed push on super tight and slow courses.