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I went back to the Army.

Every day in Afghanistan (and there were some shitty ones) was still way better than every day spent trying to help spoiled rich kids drive faster.

Not that everybody I encountered racing was a spoiled rich kid; far from it. But enough of them were that it was a real soul crusher. Far better that I spend the rest of my life accomplishing something meaningful.

In the meantime, I opened up my specs for those suspensions: http://farnorthracing.com/autocross/konis.html

DG

For a while I was selling race car / high performance street car suspension systems.

I had discovered that 90% of the aftermarket shocks being sold as performance upgrades were actually crap. The customer is really not qualified to properly evaluate a shock valving and so it is very difficult for them to differentiate between a proper performance shock and a juiced-up pogo stick.

I started putting shocks on a device called a "shock dyno" (which measures the forces produced by the shock at different shaft speeds) and discovered an absolute parade of horror. Details can be read at http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html

To get the good stuff you needed to be paying upwards of $3000 per corner (so $12000 per car) which is far, far out of the price range of most customers.

So I was building packages based on a brand of shock that was pretty decent and much cheaper. Even though the base design was solid, it still suffered from manufacturing variations. To get around this, I would buy batches and then dyno the lot. Shocks that were close to each other became matched sets, and I'd tweak the adjusters on the shock to ensure each pair was as closely matched as possible. On top of that, I designed some hardware to resolve some other tricky problems typical of the off-the-shelf aftermarket designs, and only used the best bang for the buck components to build them.

When done, I provided a race-quality suspension system, dyno-matched (and it came with the data sheets to prove it) that was very nearly the equal of the $3000/corner systems, for about $500/corner. I say "nearly" the equal because the adjusters on my shocks worked nowhere near as well as the adjusters on the expensive shocks, but in terms of absolute performance, they were effectively identical.

There was almost no markup in these parts; I was hoping to make it up on volume and I knew the customer base was price-sensitive.

These suspensions were INCREDIBLE deals. There was nothing else like it anywhere for anything less than 5 times the price, and unlike all the cheaper stuff, I could prove that it worked. What's more, I could run the cheaper stuff on my dyno and prove that it DIDN'T work; that it was categorically JUNK.

I sold almost none of them, and the universal complaint was "too expensive".

Even when I opened up the books, showed what I was paying for the components, explained why *this* part instead of *that* part, explained every single design decision and proved why it could not be made any cheaper without compromising the functionality, over and over again potential customers would choose to buy non-functional (but shiny) JUNK over functional parts based solely on price.

It was mind-boggling, and eventually I just said to hell with it and found something else to do.

The chip manufacturers are right on the ball here. If I were them, I'd be encouraging the creation of these kinds of motherboards and rather than down-rating the high end parts to make mid/low end, I'd be cherry-picking the best ones for the high end and defaulting the output of my fab runs right to the mid/low end SKUs. In fact, I'd be tempted to DESTROY any chip with a bad core and ensure that all the low-end chips were fully functional - specifically to build a reputation for being "overclocker-friendly".

You can't make money off what you DON'T sell. Believe me, I know.

DG

My current stats for March on http://farnorthracing.com/

Firefox: 50%
IE: 32%
Chrome:9%
Safari: 8%
Opera: 2%

Numbers accurate to 1% due to rounding.

DG

I did a ton of shock development as part of my race car engineering job.

We had sensors on the suspension to directly measure suspension travel, with a view towards measuring suspension velocity as part of shock development.

Even on what feels like a perfectly smooth track, there's still a lot of humping and bumping going on.

See http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html for example graphs of suspension velocity pulled right off the car.

DG

Oscoda CENDIV 1999, I'm coming out of the "big corner" onto the "long straight" hard on the cas when the car suddenly starts shaking and stops pulling. Puzzled, I drop my eyes to the dash and see the tach sitting at 7700.

The shaking was the rev limiter.

On the next run, I shifted. The following week, I installed a sequential shift light http://farnorthracing.com/seat.html and never had the problem again.

I found that when I was really rocking and rolling that I got auditory exclusion. A gun could go off next to me and I wouldn't notice. Most of my data while driving came through my eyes, my inner ear, and my hands and ass.

I used GT3/GT4 and a force-feedback wheel as a training aid, and found it made a real difference in my driving. Not as good as the real thing, but close enough to practice skills more than could be done with just seat time.

More details at http://farnorthracing.com/ and http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets.html

DG

Oscoda CENDIV 1999, I'm coming out of the "big corner" onto the "long straight" hard on the cas when the car suddenly starts shaking and stops pulling. Puzzled, I drop my eyes to the dash and see the tach sitting at 7700.

The shaking was the rev limiter.

On the next run, I shifted. The following week, I installed a sequential shift light http://farnorthracing.com/seat.html and never had the problem again.

I found that when I was really rocking and rolling that I got auditory exclusion. A gun could go off next to me and I wouldn't notice. Most of my data while driving came through my eyes, my inner ear, and my hands and ass.

I used GT3/GT4 and a force-feedback wheel as a training aid, and found it made a real difference in my driving. Not as good as the real thing, but close enough to practice skills more than could be done with just seat time.

More details at http://farnorthracing.com/ and http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets.html

DG

Oscoda CENDIV 1999, I'm coming out of the "big corner" onto the "long straight" hard on the cas when the car suddenly starts shaking and stops pulling. Puzzled, I drop my eyes to the dash and see the tach sitting at 7700.

The shaking was the rev limiter.

On the next run, I shifted. The following week, I installed a sequential shift light http://farnorthracing.com/seat.html and never had the problem again.

I found that when I was really rocking and rolling that I got auditory exclusion. A gun could go off next to me and I wouldn't notice. Most of my data while driving came through my eyes, my inner ear, and my hands and ass.

I used GT3/GT4 and a force-feedback wheel as a training aid, and found it made a real difference in my driving. Not as good as the real thing, but close enough to practice skills more than could be done with just seat time.

More details at http://farnorthracing.com/ and http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets.html

DG

Thanks - although this is a race car, I got those wheels because they were the best tradeoff in strength, weight, size (offset mostly) and price at the time. Looks never really entered into it.

Since those pictures, I switched tire size from 275/17 to 285/18 ad so had to sell the wheels. The new wheels are Enkei RPF1 18X10

See http://farnorthracing.com/newimages/2005_setup.jpg

The car, BTW, is for sale. $22k USD takes it, the trailer, and ALL the spares (rain tires/wheels, tons of spare parts, etc)

DG

Disclaimer: I build and race turbocharged race cars http://farnorthracing.com/

OT, but i have to say i've loved TE-37s for the longest time, especially in bronze. great choice, and nice car you have there.

Disclaimer: I build and race turbocharged race cars http://farnorthracing.com/

To oversimplify a complex subject, when you burn fuels in a spark-ignited engine, it is possible to get a kind of explosive combustion called "detonation" instead of a nice smooth rapid burn.

Detonation is also sometimes called "knock" and it is an engine killer. Detonation is Not Your Friend.

The things that tend to increase the liklihood of experiencing detonation are a lean fuel/air mixture, excessive ignition advance, localized hotspots in the combustion chamber, excessive static compression ratio, excessive intake temperature, or excessive intake boost pressure.

The measure of a fuel's ability to resist detonation is its "octane" rating. The derivation of the term is an article in of itself... bottom line is the higher the octane, the lower the probability of detonation.

My race car drinks 118 octane, because it uses a ton of turbo boost and a lot of ignition advance to make power. Most regular pump gasses are 87-89 octane, and premium runs about 91-94 octane.

Ethenol is an octane booster (Sunoco's 94 octane fuel has a lot of it) so all else being equal, it is safer to run higher boost levels when there is ethenol present in the fuel.

DG

A little bit of self promotion here. :)

Amongst my other racing-oriented duties, I maintain a web page full of links to books on Amazon that will teach you a LOT about race car engineeering

Yes, I make a little kickback from Amazon on this, but that helps to offset the bandwidth costs. It's main purpose is to educate.

See The Street Modified Engineering Resources page for more info. I've also got a smattering of techical articles on the team home page at Far North Racing

Have fun!