November 26, 2010 - I took the car around my test loop.
Coming up to the house, I decided I hadn't had enough so I kept going to a good spot to take pictures.
How was it working? Well, it needs an alignment pretty badly. I'd guess it has a bit of toe-out and almost no caster, meaning the steering is darty and doesn't self-center very well. I need to sort out both spring rates and damping - never having set up a car with a live rear before, that's going to be interesting. The car also squeaks and rattles quite a bit. Nothing too surprising here.
How does the powerplant feel? Monstrous. After taking things easy to make sure the temperatures were good and there were no obvious problems, I started giving the car a bit of throttle. And it likes it a lot. This is a seriously fast little car. The shift pattern is very tight, the pedal effort is nicely matched between the throttle, clutch and brakes and other than the non-centering steering it feels good to drive. Engine temperatures stayed fairly low and I didn't get the chance to confirm if the fans were kicking in. The intake air temperature was only a couple of degrees above ambient.
Noise levels are reasonably high, with a big resonance at 1500 rpm. I still don't have my sound deadening in the rear yet and when I got home, I realized that the exhaust fires right into the rear valence. That's easy enough to fix and is probably causing a lot of the noise. I'll fix that tonight or tomorrow.
tags: testing |
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