I know that a stock R is capable of around .92g's on the skidpad. With a upgraded street suspension such as the Mugen lowdown, Tein, Konig yellows with springs,how many g's is the R capable of pulling. With good street tires such as SO-3's or RE010's is it possible to get close to a full G or more? I know this is something that is not often tested, but I fiqure alot of you have driven other high performance cars for comparison. Thanks in advance.

 

Lap time comparisons might also shed some light as to how beneficial (or detrimental) different setups are.

Regards,

 

isnt stock R skidpad .85?

 

I think that 1) we can't really measure Lateral Gs very easily (at least not with much accuracy), and 2) it doesn't really matter. It's a buzzword from magazine racing with stats from R&T, C&D, etc.

The suggestion of lap times would be far better, such as running the same car on the same course with diff suspensions or different cars with diff suspensions running the same course. Clearly, it's fairly difficult to come up with quantifiable comparisons...

One thing I used to do which I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND, is that I would check what max speed I could hit on an exit ramp. Obviously, this should only be done when NO other traffic is around and visibility is good. Actually, it shouldn't really be done, but I bet a lot of enthusiasts enjoy pushing the car to 8/10 or so on exit ramps... Get to practice rev matching and braking techniques...

With better shocks (Koni yellow), springs (Neuspeed Race), sway bars (Neuspeed 19 mm), and additional strut braces (Neuspeed front/rear upper, rear lower tie bar), my car has considerably less body roll, better transient response, and better steady state cornering. I have no idea how many g's I'm pulling... I can hit an exit speed of 80 mph on my favorite exit ramp without pushing the car to 10./10 too

FB

 

Skidpad numbers are pretty subjective, depends on the the surface you're on, the tires on the car, etc all make a big difference. A guy we race with in an S2000 running in stock class has an accelerometer, and it shows that he pulls 1.5 Gs on the concrete with his hoosier road race tires, but only 1.0 on a fairly slippery lot in Steubenville. Most street-tired Rs can probably approach 1.0 Gs. Magazines use the same patch of land, so their numbers are more comprable, but still, just becuase a particular car pulled .87 Gs on a particular lot doesn't mean that the same car won't pull 1.0 somewhere else. Like Dyno numbers, it's the kind of thing that's only useful at a moment in time for comparing changes etc.

 

Motortrend tested it at .92 and sport compact car got a .89.

 

I hope not, 'cause I can almost pull that (I hit .83) in my '95 GS-R on crappy hard tires. I would think the R could pull more than .02 g's on my GS-R. And on a side note, I wonder what I can do with some GOOD tires...hmmm...time to go do some burnouts and doughnuts!

 

Read my post and try to stop quoting magazines about specific numbers. Those are just numbers on a given day in a given place with given conditinos. Comparing Gs is pretty useless since it will vary greatly on atmospheric conditions, tires, and road surface with no real correction factors... Tires are probably the single biggest factor, and almost any sporty car with Race compound tires could probably pull close to 1G. R&T did an article on this a long time ago and a Neon was pulling a 1G or something like that compared to like .8G stock (details escape me) Yes I realize I just quoted a magazine, but I'm just referring to the fact that the article showed that a given car greatly improved it's skidpad with only a tire change, not saying that Neons pull .817 Gs.

Also it's KONI shocks, not Konig the wheelmaker or whatever...

FB

 

i thought the skid pad is how many g's the car can hold in a 60 ft circle. our car "claims c&d" can hold a consistant .92 g's or something to that light without slipping out of the corner. If we were to just turn the steering wheel hard our cars will hit over 1 g, but just for a split second. like the s2k mentioned above. holding a constant 1 g would be pretty hard. The mugen s2k only improved its skidpad by .4 g's and thats with a mugen suspension and i'm not sure what else.

 

I think you meant .04 lateral g improvement over stock.

 

Best thing you can porbably do to test is like a dyno test, get it done in the most similar conditions possible on the same place.

Get the Gtech thingy or a Geez cube and go in a circle in a lot...record temp, humid, ground temp and what not

get the suspension done, and go back when all the conditions are very close....and try it again, that could be as close as it can get....

geting a modded car's side pad test and comparing it with the magazines wont do anything...cause it doesnt show improvement on that specific pavement on that specific set up...

 

My thoughts...

Since a cars suspension does so much more then just hold the car in constant radius corners I think it is pretty much pointless to just measure lateral acceleration while running around on "smooth" asphalt.

So many other variables come into play during 10/10th track driving. As has been suggested already it is the tires that push against the ground. It is the job of the suspension to insure that the tires can do their job. If we lived in a perfect world with perfectly flat surfaces then we could run without shocks and springs. It's when we start rolling over imperfections that we rely on our suspension to come into action. What's my point? Well a skid pad is an attempt to take a machine designed for an imperfect world and test it in a perfect environment. Little meaningful info can come from such a test.

Running a car on the track I believe is the only way to truly measure the effectiveness of a specific suspension set-up. Of course this assumes that the driver is capable of running consistent enough times to gain anything meaningful. Running through a slalom course is the next best thing.

Of course on top of all this is the fact that it is still the tires that push against the asphalt.

Regards,

 

Don't forget the weight of the car!!