Miscellaneous changes

Suspension Tuning

When we built the car, we knew that "bypass shocks" were the current state of the art in off-road suspension technology so we carefully shopped for the best we could find.  We settled on King shocks for many reasons including design, quality, support and price.  We have never regretted that choice.  We completed construction of the car just a week before our first race, the 2008 San Felipe 250 and as a result had no opportunity to properly "tune" the suspension beforehand.  We were very happy with how our first race went, even with sub-optimal suspension tuning.  Following the race, we contacted King to get some help with an initial tuning and were connected with "Iribe".  We met Iribe in Barstow a few weeks later and spent the day getting the suspension properly tuned.  I have to admit, at the beginning of the day, I was skeptical that there were any significant gains to be found.......  By the end of the day, however, I was a true believer!  Through adjustment of the multiple compression and rebound bypass valves and in combination with torsion bar pre-load adjustments, we gained over 10 mph in large "whoops"!  Best of all, the car was under much better control at the higher speed! 

Tuning of the suspension is as much an art as a science, Iribe spent a fair amount of time "teaching" and that has helped us refine his original tune since.  Now, our car is at least 15 mph faster "in the rough" than it was during our first race; that makes our car one of the faster 5/1600's when the terrain is really rough.  The goal is to keep the tires on the ground as much as possible while minimizing movement of the body - we want to use all the suspension travel available to achieve that goal and the individual compression/rebound zone adjustments allow us the control we need to do so.    As I said earlier, suspension tuning is an art - no amount of descriptive text can teach the finer points.... The only sure way to learn it is by practice - jump in and start making adjustments when you think they are necessary.  Remember to record the bypass valve settings before you start so you can go "back to the beginning" if things don't improve or get worse.......  We find that we are now much better able to sense what the suspension is doing when we run the car but even so, a little HD video of the car from outside is a huge help!  Video allows us to actually see what's going on; we can slow the playback to see where and under what circumstances we need adjustments.