HDK Suspension update. Yesterday was my first autocross since adding the 2" taller than stock upper ball joint. I knew the course would be a good one to test my changes since it had a 5 cone slalom followed by a faster entry 3 cone slalom. Course layout below.
It was 34 degrees when I left my house so I knew going into the day I'd have to take my first run easy so I could get some heat in the tires and brakes. I had a couple friends meet me there, one was my passenger on my first run and when I came back in, the other said people were making comments about how fast my time was. Up until this point I wasn't even paying attention to peoples times because I was working the course and couldn't see the clock. My second run was slightly better and when I returned to grid a couple people came over to comment on how much better the car looked on course. This trend continued as the day went on. I guess if it was catching the eye of people, it had to be good, right?
As previously mentioned in this thread, there's a veteran driver with a 99 mustang in CAMT, 315s square, and rear IRS. I had never beat him and he knew it. Going into our last run of the day, I only had .056 seconds on him. I knew I had to not screw up! Finally on my last run I made a huge improvement moving my lead to .368 seconds. I watch his last run, which looked good, but not good enough. I finally won the CAMT class when a legit driver was present. I'm setting my sights on closing the gap on the guy with the C10 race truck next. Although he doesn't come out as much.
The car is much flatter, I'm not having to brace myself as much in the car and overall feels very predictable. I'm extremely pleased with it right now. Tire wear seems better. I need to get or borrow a tire pyrometer to check it again, but based on the way it looks, it has to be even.
I'm extremely happy with the car right now. I'm going to leave the setup as is and get some more miles and laps on it.
Side note, I just turned over 1000 miles on the HDK and approximately 50 autocross runs. No signs of problems and everything working as it did the day I installed it.
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