Alignment and RAIN!!!

Crazy good topless car T-shirt weather today, 70 degrees.

I spend about 6 hours fiddling with my suspension and alignment. I got the alignment PERFECT… then realized that my ride height was uneven, right side was about half an inch higher than the left, even though my coils were set to the same height on both sides. Argh.

So I got the ride height evened out, then had to do the alignment all over again. Because everything changes when you tilt the entire car half an inch to the right.

And with the fancy Greene Performance camber/caster plates, I have to drop the strut and plate to adjust camber. But it’s totally worth it, because the added caster is incredible.

So… many iterations of tweaking camber front and rear, drop the car off the lift, shake and roll, measure, put it back on the lift, repeat. Probably 10 iterations. But finally got camber and toe right where I wanted, front and rear. And I took REALLY GOOD notes, so now I have a pretty good cookbook for “X adjustment yields Y change in camber or toe”. I’m getting really good at toe adjustments, and rear camber.

Needed to drive, so decided to head down to visit my mom at the homestead, about half an hour away. Was having a nice visit, then looked outside and it was getting PRETTY DARK. Uh… why is that? Pulled up Dark Sky… and “rain starting in 30 minutes”. WTF? it wasn’t supposed to rain today… I’m in a car with no roof. And i left my car cover at home… Ugh. Looked at the radar… the rain is coming from the direction of home… meaning I’m going to be driving into the rain to get home… Double Ugh.

So I told my mom “Sorry, but I gotta go NOW…” and bolted.

Click the image to open in full size.

Just some sprinkles and a light shower for the last few miles before I got home. The sky opened up just as I was backing into the driveway… LUCKY.

Click the image to open in full size.

But now I know the wipers work. And as long as I’m moving and the windows are up, not much rain actually comes into the passenger compartment.

I’ll keep the cover in the car, from now on…

Then decided to test-fit my track wheels and tires one more time, since I’ve adjusted so much stuff and added the splitter, just to make sure the car isn’t too low for the track.

Click the image to open in full size.

Glad I tried it, because I needed a few more mm of spacing on the rear to clear the trailing arm strut mount. Otherwise all as I expected. FWIW, I’m running 12mm front and 8mm rear spacers with the 6ULs, DT front brakes and 2nd gen JCW rear brakes, and BC/Greene Performance coilovers.

But the splitter is pretty darn low.

Click the image to open in full size.

About 50mm after the car settled; 2″ of ground clearance. cct1 says he ran even a little lower than this at the track and had no issues with riding the curbing on the corners. So should be good. But it’s definitely not a street-friendly setup. I drove about 5 miles just to make sure everything was happy, and didn’t drag anywhere… but also avoided potholes and speed bumps and parking curbs.