Ran My Car On The Track Today... Not Happy!

Noobz347 said:

This is what I'm referring to:



I saw no mention that his tires were DRs before posting that.

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Doesn't matter. I like your 6-7 year old illustration though. Stiff sidewalls will still benefit from a lower psi on a sticky track.

Noobz347 said:

What difference does it make how old the photo is? Fact is people the make mistake all the time of deflating radial tires to the point where 60 foot time suffer as a result. Granted, I didn't see mention that OP was running DRs initially and yeah, I get it that they're tires designed for that sort of thing. The point is that every redneck with 100 HP seems to go out and try to run street tires like they're a set of Mickey Thompsons. Deflate a set of street radials to the point of the second image in the pic above and you're ****ing in the wind.

You'd get more traction from an all season tire by siping the tire than you would from letting half the pressure out of it.

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Meh, I guess our 2 extensive racing backgrounds on both street tires and also drag radials differs. I know what works for me and what I have done setting ET records, so to each their own.

I always have to jump into a thread where the car didn't run what they thought it should. Yup, that's the real world. Running quick at the track takes a LOT of practice and a well sorted combination.

My first comment: Most of the mods mentioned in the linked are appearance or have little to no effect on power. You may have gained a few horses from the o/r x pipe and upper plenum, otherwise you dang near stock power wise.

My second comment: lowering springs will do a great job of killing your launch, no matter what tires you are running. They screw up the rear suspension geometry, lower your center of gravity and reduce weight transfer on launch. You can blame the track prep, but how many places do they really prep the track well for test n tunes? My GT would do 2.1 60' times with a poorly prepped track, on 3.27 gears, with ALL SEASON tires (245 width btw). Bottom line, lowering the car will hurt the 60' times.

Last comment: What rpm are you shifting at? You said that you are shifting to 4th just before the 1/4 ends, but yet you have 3.73 or 4.10 gears. That doesn't make sense at all unless you shifting WAY to high. On the 1-2, you should rev it out to 6200 if it actually hooked up. On the 2-3 and 3-4, most PI owners find ~5700rpm works well. Beyond that, you are hurting yourself. In your other post, you said the car has a 6500-6700rpm rev limiter, but that is much higher than you'd really want to shift. In fact, I wouldn't even spin it that high on the stock rods. I bet you'll pick up mph when you start shifting lower. Also, power shifting helps, but compared to a good speed shift, it will only make about a tenth of difference.

As a reference, my NPI ran 14.2 on street tires, and 14.0 on a nitto DR. I couldn't get it to run faster than a 2.0 60' time on 3.27 gears, no matter how much I abused the clutch.

Every car and combination is different.
FWIW though, this works for me:
Nearly bald general altimax street tires, at 20 psi. 4-5 second burnout, just enough to see a little smoke
Launch at 4000rpm, quickly slipping the clutch.
That technique gets me 1.80-1.82 60fts everytime
Im on bone stock suspension, mods are in my sig. The car makes 274rwhp, was running 13.3s @ 102 pretty consistently.
Found out that i was having fuel pressure issues though, so hopefully the car has enough in it to crack into the 12s

Reality sucks OP. Don't judge your car on what you see on YouTube and forums, everyone has a 10sec bench racing street car. Just ask the guys on LS1tech. Learn to drive like Winters and save some cash, you'll see those numbers sooner or later.