SCCA F-Street Setup. What's Everyone Done so Far?

SgtRauksauff said:

My personal opinion is that so much rules-lawyering and nitpickiness and building a car specifically to the top of a class takes a lot of the fun out of it. (it's also sad that the rules have to be enforced so much because people are so petty as to cheat.) I drive and compete for the fun of it, and winning is a bonus. If I'm not at the bleeding edge of modifications for whatever class I'm in, oh well, I just tighten the loose nut behind the wheel a little more. (granted, I usually end up doing pretty well, so don't have anything to grumble about, and it gives me a good excuse to not have won, lol...)

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The thing is that "prepping to the max" in FS is really easy to do. The amount of things to do is tiny. Choosing between a front or rear swaybar, slotting the front struts, getting on the right tires and new wheels if you want to and then picking a catback exhaust. That's really about it and even the wheels and exhaust are diminishing returns for the investment.

If there were two rule changes I think the SCCA should enact it'd be:
1.) Allowing camber plates on strut cars
2.) Allowing cars with staggered wheel setups to chose the SMALLER WIDTH of the two staggered wheels and run them square.

I can deal with the "balance" from having to chose between only a front or rear bar, but not being able to rotate tires on these cars without dismounting and remounting tires (an $80-$120 adventure depending on the shop) while having horrifying levels of outer shoulder wear due to lack of camber up front is one of the biggest reasons I'm not sad to be leaving FS.

Whiskey11 said:

The thing is that "prepping to the max" in FS is really easy to do. The amount of things to do is tiny. Choosing between a front or rear swaybar, slotting the front struts, getting on the right tires and new wheels if you want to and then picking a catback exhaust. That's really about it and even the wheels and exhaust are diminishing returns for the investment.

If there were two rule changes I think the SCCA should enact it'd be:
1.) Allowing camber plates on strut cars
2.) Allowing cars with staggered wheel setups to chose the SMALLER WIDTH of the two staggered wheels and run them square.

I can deal with the "balance" from having to chose between only a front or rear bar, but not being able to rotate tires on these cars without dismounting and remounting tires (an $80-$120 adventure depending on the shop) while having horrifying levels of outer shoulder wear due to lack of camber up front is one of the biggest reasons I'm not sad to be leaving FS.

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Exact reason I'm leaving FS mostly the shoulder wear issue and I'm not fond of how under dampened this chassis even the PP is. The front gets destroyed.

jdub.csu said:

Exact reason I'm leaving FS mostly the shoulder wear issue and I'm not found of how under dampened this chassis even the PP is. The front gets destroyed.

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I'm leaving because the car has dubious competitiveness Nationally compared to the BMW's and new Camaro. Locally it's been fun and fantastic, but Nationally, I don't hold my breath unless a course is really dig intensive, of ever having a chance at catching those other two. To add insult to injury, Ford is going out of their way to "fix" at least one of my issues with the car on the 2018's which is the absurd 7,000 RPM redline. It never sat well with me that Ford did all this valvetrain work on this engine and kept the same fuel cut and redline as the first gen coyote engine. It is especially confusing because this motor pulls like a freight train all the way to fuel cut and feels like it could pull hard for another 500 RPM without even falling off much.

These cars do wake up A LOT with a good set of shocks/struts. My Koni Yellows were the best investment I made in this car from a driver confidence standpoint. I don't think even the time spent testing swaybar choice had quite the same impact as just installing the Koni's and ditching the horrible stock dampers.

A part of me REALLY wants to throw a set of camber plates on, and swap my 285 RE71R's over to my 19x9.5 SVE Drifts, and throw a tune at the thing to raise the redline and run in CAM until I get my foxbody done.

Whiskey11 said:

I'm leaving because the car has dubious competitiveness Nationally compared to the BMW's and new Camaro. Locally it's been fun and fantastic, but Nationally, I don't hold my breath unless a course is really dig intensive, of ever having a chance at catching those other two. To add insult to injury, Ford is going out of their way to "fix" at least one of my issues with the car on the 2018's which is the absurd 7,000 RPM redline. It never sat well with me that Ford did all this valvetrain work on this engine and kept the same fuel cut and redline as the first gen coyote engine. It is especially confusing because this motor pulls like a freight train all the way to fuel cut and feels like it could pull hard for another 500 RPM without even falling off much.

These cars do wake up A LOT with a good set of shocks/struts. My Koni Yellows were the best investment I made in this car from a driver confidence standpoint. I don't think even the time spent testing swaybar choice had quite the same impact as just installing the Koni's and ditching the horrible stock dampers.

A part of me REALLY wants to throw a set of camber plates on, and swap my 285 RE71R's over to my 19x9.5 SVE Drifts, and throw a tune at the thing to raise the redline and run in CAM until I get my foxbody done.

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That would be plenty fun locally. I put koni's on mine and while it helped a lot this vehicle still just doesn't have enough spring in it. I can't wait to see what my full suspension build does to the chassis. Engine wise I'm just going to do a tune and headers for now until I have enough money saved up for a beefy engine build to buy a new engine when/if it blows up.

When doing the camber mod, do you remove the strut from the car or just unbolt it from the spindle? Does the spindle need to be supported after it is unbolted from the strut, will the lower arm and tie rod hold it in place without damage?

MrMagnetic said:

When doing the camber mod, do you remove the strut from the car or just unbolt it from the spindle? Does the spindle need to be supported after it is unbolted from the strut, will the lower arm and tie rod hold it in place without damage?

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I had the dealer do my stock struts because I couldn't drive the oem bolts out at home on jackstands with whimpy muscles and/or whimpy impact gun. I think the tech left the struts in the car. I did the Konis before they went in the car.

I leave the spindle "hanging" but am careful regarding the position. The brake caliper NEEDS to be supported. As I recall in order to get the struts in and out the sway bar links need to be disconnected from both sides.

I pounded out the OEM bolts and did the grinding on the car. I stuck the OEM service bolt in the lower hole and wedged the knuckle out from the strut with a beat up old screwdriver (aka rounded off and blunt)

I wedged the brake caliper up on the subframe and did the griding with the shock out of the car, but the above doesn't look so bad.

If you do it on the car like I did, stuff the back of the knuckle with paper towels or you can cover the tone ring on the hub with metal shavings. The tone ring is magnetic and will hold the shavings in place, as a FYI

There is always great advice here. Thanks for the pic Doc, that looks easy enough.

FWIW, some FS legal struts already have the upper mount slotted. You just can't exceed the adjustment allowance permitted by Ford. On mine, I got a full -2.5* which turned out to be too much given the front suspension design (dual ball joints). I'm moving to STP next season. Can run a tune, C/C plates, 11" wide wheels, CAI, springs, sways. Not much more than FS but changes where it counts on these s550s. With Ohlins coming out with struts/shocks for these cars, could be a game changer. I know the KWv3s made a huge difference on my car.

I found that if you put just a slight amount of jack lift at full droop under the spindle, the strut bolts come out very easy. Finding that sweet-spot may take some T&E, but it works when you find it.

By the way, an s550 came in 4th at nationals. Still a second off 1st (BMW) and 2nd (Camaro), but in the hunt for 3rd (Camaro).

For those of you who would like the 2018 GT MT82-D4 to have a taller second gear here is some gearing info that has a very good chance of being correct since it is directly from Ford's Techline.

According to someone (I forgot his name ) at Ford Performance Techline who looked up the specs the MT82-D4 used in the 2018 5.0 Mustang gear ratios are:

3.24, 2.10, 1.42, 1, .81, and .62

Per my spreadsheet using RE-71R 285/35x19 tires, 7300 rpm rev limiter, and PP rear gear ratio of 3.73:1 the 6M speeds are about

47, 72, 107, 151, 187, and 244 (Previous MT82 transmission speeds would be 41, 62, 89, 114, 151, and 233)


10A speed but with 3.55:1 are about

34, 53, 74, 90, 105, 125, 159, 187, 234, and 253

72 would be a massive improvement

qtrracer said:

FWIW, some FS legal struts already have the upper mount slotted. You just can't exceed the adjustment allowance permitted by Ford. On mine, I got a full -2.5* which turned out to be too much given the front suspension design (dual ball joints). I'm moving to STP next season. Can run a tune, C/C plates, 11" wide wheels, CAI, springs, sways. Not much more than FS but changes where it counts on these s550s. With Ohlins coming out with struts/shocks for these cars, could be a game changer. I know the KWv3s made a huge difference on my car.

I found that if you put just a slight amount of jack lift at full droop under the spindle, the strut bolts come out very easy. Finding that sweet-spot may take some T&E, but it works when you find it.

By the way, an s550 came in 4th at nationals. Still a second off 1st (BMW) and 2nd (Camaro), but in the hunt for 3rd (Camaro).

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I guess I don't see how -2.5º is too much camber up front for the suspension (unless you are talking per the OEM slotting procedure) when we are still seeing gobs of wear at about 2º or more taper from inside to outside edge. I'm pretty sure if you slotted the struts until the spindle bottomed out on the strut and the bottom came out as far as reasonable that you'd have enough at factory ride height to matter. These cars just are really softly sprung with pretty low roll centers for the camber numbers we are running. Ahh the joys of strut life.

Mr. Paulson (the #4 S550) is here on these boards, as am I, the #6 S550 . While my co-driver and I are making a return to FS for next year, the prospects beyond next year are pretty slim. I think the new S550's are going to be hard to beat with the gearing advantage. I could be wrong since they'll have different thrust curves due to taller gearing and power/torque differences. That said, I think the courses at Nationals this year negated a lot of advantages some of the clearly better cars had by giving some pretty big and important digs going into important fast, but not too fast, bits. I don't think there is a car in FS right now that has a better thrust curve than the S550 does. It's... potent... for lack of a better phrase, and I think what Paulson, my codriver, and I showed was that there was merit to having the ability to utilize that thrust through our swaybar choice on those courses. Where some where struggling to put down power, we were lifting the front inside coming out of the corner and putting our 435 hp and 400 lb*ft to work. We'll see how next year goes, but I think we are more likely to see a return of the very opposite courses that strongly favor cars aside from ours.

I'll be hoping the 2018's do well. Not because I plan on buying one (HELL NO!) but because I want to see Ford's win FS again. Me, after this year I'm hoping to have a CAM car built and ready to go for a shakedown season.

I can hardly wait to see how well the 10A behaves in regard to autocross relevant shifting control and speed. I'm particularly interested in whether this statement in the owner manual means what the words "seem" to say.

in sport (S) mode SelectShift does not automatically upshift, even if the engine is approaching the RPM limit, unless the accelerator pedal is at full travel.

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