isnt he a member here?
How much of that could be the driver vs. the car?
It's really hard to say honestly. The fastest car in the autoX was Danny Popp's '72 Corvette which turned a 47.939. The Taxi driven by Wesley turned a 48.473. The slowest car on the autoX was a 53.57, which was a fully RideTech suspension equipped '69 Camaro (lots of coin to be that slow!). The drag race winner, an '81 Pontiac TransAm with RideTech coil overs and a 4 link and
1,000 hp turned a 49.081 on the autoX while
very clearly being set up for drag racing. That kind of horsepower is usually NOT an advantage on the autoX, that guy has to know how to drive.
The time gap on an autoX of 5+ seconds for the whole field is A LOT. Clearly some of those cars are not set up for autoX, or their drivers aren't used to doing it, or both. But given the field that makes sense. Danny Popp has won the Optima Ultimate street car challenge twice in his newer Z06 Corvette, so clearly he knows how to set up a car and drive on on road tracks and autoX's. Kevin Wesley drove the Green Brick and has a lot of autoX experience. But the half a second between Danny and Kevin probably has a lot to do with just the size and weight difference between the '72 Corvette and a '70 4 door Satellite, there's a lot of just plain old physics there.
Between a small block '71 Duster and a big block '70 4 door Satellite, the Duster clearly should have the size and weight advantage. Like probably close to 500 lbs lighter. The Satellite has the power advantage though, if you look at the engine builds. So how much is driver? How much is car set up? How much is just tire choice?
Man I don't know. It could literally ALL be driver skill, Kevin Wesley has proven he can drive. But Wracks allegedly has a decent amount of autoX seat time too. Bottom line for me is that it's hard to argue you have the better car if you're lighter
and smaller and, on an autoX course, are still getting beat by a full second.
To me the whole thing makes sense. There's nothing inherently wrong with coil over conversions, they have their advantages and the RMS conversion is a well thought out piece. But there's nothing wrong with a properly set up torsion bar car either, and it has its advantages too. For even the above average driver I don't think there should be much difference in autoX times if you had the same car set up properly with either a torsion bar based or a coil over conversion suspension. It used to be that the parts to properly tune a torsion bar suspension weren't out there vs a coilover set up. But that' just not true anymore, you can get everything you need to tune your torsion bar suspension to do everything a coil over conversion can do except have a rack and additional header clearance. So to me it's just preference. You don't NEED a coil over conversion to have a good handling Mopar, and you just can't slap coil overs on there and expect to be fast, they're not magic. You have to do the tuning and set up for those too! I think if you spend the time setting up and tuning a torsion bar suspension you can be just as fast.
My heartburn is over articles like the one that started this thread on Wrack71's car. More specifically, things like this statement "Although the car was a nice cruiser, Eric decided he wanted improve the handling to hang with the Pro-touring cars he saw." Well, guess what? You don't need a fully RMS converted car to do that. Evidence provided by that really nice pro-touring Hotchkis Taxi that ran faster in every event with torsion bars and leaf springs. If you want to fully convert your Mopar to RMS, well, awesome, it's your car. But you can handle JUST AS WELL with a properly set up torsion bar suspension.
