ddombrowski

So here's the very overdue report from our New Years Eve 10-hour endurance race in our budget 944.

After Sebring in September, we had a suspected bad right front wheel bearing, a bad left front control arm ball joint, and a bad steering rack.

We swapped out the steering rack from our parts car and then I set out to dismantle the old rack to see if I could determine the cause. As I

wrote up here: , the problem turned out to be that we over-extended the rack. Popping the bushing stop back into the correct place fixed the

issue and we re-assembled. Now we have a good spare manual rack, which is great, because these things are hard to come by.

We also rebuilt the front wheel bearings (Thanks to Van's videos we used as a guide) and rebuilt the bad control arm. In an effort to improve

reliability, I spliced a new connector in place of the factory reference sensor connector which had been turning to dust.

We loaded the car up onto the trailer with no issue and headed out to Sebring. Upon taking the car off of the trailer, it wouldn't start. No

bueno. It was also the emptiest I've ever seen Sebring on a pre-race day.





We suspected that the issue was caused by the connector I put in for the reference sensor, and after taking it apart and putting in a brand new 3

prong generic connector, the car fired right up. Problem solved. We drove it around the paddock a few times so we were confident it would hold

and called it a night.

The morning of the race, it was cold (for Florida). Of course, with 20 minutes to grid - the car won't start again. All of the wiring I just

did the night before comes apart and I try to use jumper leads to check the connections. The tach bounces when we crank, but no start. This has

us perplexed until I realized that when I pulled everything apart I had switched to the two signal leads. This causes the tach to bounce but the

car not to get the correct signal. Switched the leads and the thing fires right up. I said the hell with the connector and threw everything in

the trash and wired the leads straight through. Car is finished 20 minutes late, but fortunately for us the grid was late as well and we started

on time. That was the worst of our stressful situations for this race.




The rest of the day went smoothly. As there were only 53 cars that started this race, the track was much less crowded than normal and all 4 of

our team got plenty of clean laps. If I remember we were the only 944 team out there so there wasn't anyone to compare our position to. I ended

up with a best lap of 4 seconds faster than sebring in september, which I was pretty happy about. All 4 of our drivers put down improvements in

lap times. I'm sure the colder air didn't hurt.




As this was only a 10 hour race, the finish was scheduled for before sundown, meaning we wouldn't need our rally lights. With the start delay,

we were pushed into an hour of running with the lights on, costing us 5-7 minutes of bolting the light bar on in the evening as we usually run

without it during the day to protect the lights. This 7 minutes costs us about 2 laps and after this happened we decided we need to move to a

permanent light solution and get those 2 laps back.




The final stretch was relatively calm as an already slim field had thinned even further as always happens in endurance racing. Even so, we were

within 1-2 laps of the car ahead of us and the car behind us, so we had to push all the way to the end. We had one minor contact incident at

night which fortunately was nothing more than some tire marks and a crinkled front quarter. Our 3rd driver took the checkered flag in 18th place

which is our 3rd complete race in our 944.

Here is our team lined up for the finish




We received our first award from Chumpcar for being the quietest car on the track. At our first sebring race, our exhaust fell off and we

sourced a stock spare from our parts car. Haven't touched it since. Despite having only a muffler (no cat, no resonator), its nearly silent

coming down the front straight.



Overall, we're still learning in this car and still improving with each race. On our short list before our next race at Daytona we'd like to

install some permanent lights and do a lexan hatch for improved aero. We'll also take what we learned on our fuel stops and driver changes and

make some improvements to our strategy that I think should shave some time off in the pits.

ninjacoco

OMG! YES.

Man, I need to fix my crapcan racer so badly.

What did you do to keep the rear end planted? I don't run a hatch on my car and it's a spin monster with less than half a tank of gas. (Admittedly, my suspension is beat and could use new struts, too.)

ddombrowski

You're the one that writes for jalopnik, right? I remember you wrote an article awhile ago about how you were frustrated with your cars tendency to spin and I thought I sent you some notes about what we did to alleviate ours at the time. It was awhile ago, I may have forgotten.

Anyway, the 944 has a tendency to be tail happy if the rear is not set up correctly. We've made many changes to our car to try to reduce this but the biggest and best change we made was getting a quality alignment from a shop that knows Porsches, and even then we had to go back a second time to remind them of the rear ride height/corner weight adjustment and tune it further.

Whats your rear toe setting and what springs/tbars are you running? Front and rear brake pads? IME those have been the biggest dials to turn to get the rear under control.

mel_t_vin

What is your ground-to-fender lip distance, front and rear? When you get the chance, post a side view of your car sitting on level ground.

ddombrowski

We're running Daytona this weekend. Over 130 cars signed up, 8 of which are 944s. Some last minute prep items including new BFG Rivals and a new pit sign.

ddombrowski

As we are prepping for Sebring in a few weeks I am realizing I never wrote up our results from Daytona. I have some good photos and videos I took but haven't picked out the good ones to post yet.

We took the checkered at Daytona, and finishing a 14 hour race in the 944 is always a good feeling. We finished 26th, which is our best placement yet. Our only issues were flat spotting tires (again). We really need to get our corner weight under control so we can get heavier on the brakes without locking up tires. We had one slow pit stop to change the front tires and lost the bearing cap in the process, causing us to have to lift hte car again to put the bearing cap back on. That cost us a few minutes. Otherwise, we ran a pretty clean race and had decent pit stops.

We are preparing for Sebring now with a handful of improvements over last year.

I just finished re-enforcing the rear hatch to keep it from deflecting inwards at high speed. I definitely should have done this when we built the hatch.

JustinL

How did you guys do the hatch? We tried to bend a big piece of lexan and just made a mess of it with torches. Since they let us run with glass with the film on it, we've gone that route instead... but that glass is heavy!

jderimig

Great thread. How many points is your car? Have you done anything to improve the oiling or harden up the #2 rod bearing issue?

JustinL

Here's the low points way we did our oil pan baffle. Aluminium piece cut with a jigsaw with a door hinge riveted to it. The Lindsey version is what we used as inspiration.

ddombrowski

We bought the pre-shaped piece from Five Star. They make a lot of Nascar body pieces. When we made our hatch, we investigated a few companies that make lexan hatches for the 944 over the years and 2 out of 3 of them had discontinued production and werent interested in making more unless we did a large batch.

If I were to do one myself, I had given thought to bringing the lexan to a machine shop with a waterjet machine and cutting the flat pattern, then hot-rolling the sides down, but that would have been a lot more man-hours than the price that five star charged us for the pre-cut and formed lexan.

If I REALLY had to do one on the cheap, I'd get sheet and cut out the rectangular section and re-enforce it heavily and just skip the wrap around sections.

For our first 5 races we ran with no extra points, which I think for an early 944 is 325? This coming race in September we added the coilover conversion kit for our OEM struts which is either 40 points or 40 per corner, I don't recall the rulebook. So either +40 or +80. Bilstein shocks in the rear are no additional points, nor is the lexan hatch.

We ran a few races with the stock oil/water cooler but I felt that was too much for the car and we added on a factory turbo oil cooler (from a seller here on rennlist). That did a good job at bringing down our water temps and oil temps.

As for the #2 bearing, it hasn't been an issue for us yet. Our car was purchased having already been raced with a cage and we haven't opened up the engine. Its possible the previous builder already added in an oil pan baffle but I don't know for sure.

We run Mobil 1 15W50 and keep track of our oil pressure. Since we've added the oil cooler, the idle pressure has never dropped below 2.5bar.

ddombrowski

We just finished running the 14 hours of Sebring this past weekend, so you know what that means - time to update with the results from Daytona earlier in the year that I never got to.

Prepping for Daytona included building a lexan hatch for improved aero, installing a permanent LED bar (so we don't need to spend extra time in the bits bolding our light bar on), a new set of tires and brakes and we modified the rear ride height to try to shift some weight around, as our corner weights are terrible. There was some improvement in corner weight, but our adjustment is maxed out and we still have a long way to go, so we're going to need to do something else.

The race started smoothly for us with the exception that we flat spotted the tires out of the gate coming in too hot to the bus stop, and had to live with that for the rest of the day.

The short 5th gear and the lexan hatch made the car much faster on the banking. Daytona 2016 our max speed we picked up by GPS was 118, this year we topped 130! This translated into several seconds shaved off of our laptimes. I don't recall exactly the laptime improvement, but it was around 4-5 seconds/lap.

We ran consistently the entire day. Towards the end, our 4th driver said that the flat spotting on the front tires was getting severe and didn't feel comfortable in the car. We decided to change out the front two tires on the second to last pit stop and that improved things a good amount. We took the checkered flag after 14 hours and no down time, finishing 26th out of around 125-ish cars and our 4th (of 5) completed race.







[IMG]https://i.imgur.com/Knvn80Q.jpg[/IMG

T&T Racing

Why do you believe the lexan rear deck window improved the aerodynamics of the 944? The increase in speed at Daytona indicated that there was an aerodynamics change. Please provide photos of lean rear deck window. Thank you

ddombrowski

As opposed to not running a rear hatch, the lexan hatch reduces the area of the rear of the car under low pressure from the airstream leaving the top of the car.

The daytona speed increase was from both the hatch and the short 5th gear.

ddombrowski

As usual, I'm still an event behind on the results. Our team ran the Chumpcar (now Champcar, I guess) 14 hour race at Sebring back in September. We took the checkered flag in 34th place (of 67 cars that started the race). Fair result, but not great. We lost about an hour due to a ball joint breaking in turn 17. We were very fortunate that when it failed we didn't go off course or take any damage. Fortunately, we had a junkyard spare in the parts pile and were able to swap it out quickly and get the car back on track to close out the race. We were in around 24th place before the ball joint failed. So far, thats 5 completed races out of 6.



Attachment 1352093





Now I'm prepping the car for our second Sebring race of the year at the end of December. For this race our list of improvements is rather short, but I expect to see some improvement in lap times.

Transmission mounts were replaced with good spaces and filled with window-weld for good measure. I suspect the sagging trans mounts were causing a CV axle vibration at full extension (when the car is leaned over hard).
Failed ball joint rebuilt, obviously.
We still had a misfire on hard left turns that we couldn't find. I finally tracked down an exposed portion of the negative coil wire, which I am hoping was the cause. That shorted wire was the motivation I needed to go through some of the forward wiring harness and cleaned it up a bit, removing unnecessary parts.
A little weight savings here and there, probably about 10 lbs.
We were able to give the front tires a bit more negative camber. I'm expecting this to contribute the lions share of any potential lap time improvements.

Still have to clean up a few loose pieces on the car and then get the truck and trailer packed before Christmas. Lots to do.

Nowanker

Love the pix, especially the first one with the girl in the background holding her nose!
I ran my 944T for years with the P/S removed. Linked the inlet and outlet hoses at the rack to just circulate the remaining fluid around in a loop.
A little firm in the paddock, but perfectly fine out on the track (275 tires too).
Good luck with the races!