Goodguys time! Time to race! and find out how those two brand new coolers worked. First thing was to get tech'd. Woohoo! Got my sticker!
So I did things kinda backwards between Friday and Saturday. Not by design, but more driven by fun. Friday I spent the day getting the feel of how things worked since this was my first Goodguys Autocross and also getting a feel for the truck on a longer course compared to the C10 Nats. I started off my first run with a 44.444 sec run. Right away I was in 3rd. I then just drove on Friday and didn't change anything. Practiced driving. Got down to a 42.134. Then I went home and decided, I'm going to make some changes. I had the camber set about -1 deg and caster around 6 deg and toe in (I'm not 100% sure on the amount, somewhere between 1/16 and 1/8").
So what'd I change? Bumped the camber to -2 deg Friday night. Make a difference? You bet. Shaved 1 second off my times. First run Sat morning was a 41.03. Yeah! Made a few runs here, ping ponging between 2nd and 3rd. Then, decided to make a Rob change. I went one turn out on the tie rods. Yep, I did. Just keep count of the turns. My best guess is 1 turn got me close to 0 toe. BAM! 1 more second off my time, down in to the 40.somethings. Ran a 40.198 as my quickest.
I then really started playing with suspension and having a blast chasing the guy in first place. I wound up testing -2.2 and -2.5 deg camber. Then talked to one of the pro racers. He said I really needed -3 deg camber. He's got a lot more experience than I do, so I tried it. He also said run some toe out. So I went another turn on the tie rods, so 2 turns out total. I definitely had toe out now. The turn in became very aggressive. Maybe a little too aggressive for my skill as the truck was much less forgiving on entrance speed but would run the hairpins on rails if I got the speed right. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the setup to work well for me. But I had a ton of fun going through all the trials. And Rob's stuff is so easy to adjust at the track. I did not play with caster though as I need to get the weight off the wheels to do that and I didn't have a jack, but 6 is a good number so I stuck with it. All in all, I had a blast, and met some awesome racers in the process.
Then on Sunday, the All American Sunday, I chose to just hang out in the show and shine area. Found some other C10s to hang out with for the day. Good times!
Now, you're probably going, well, what about the coolers? How'd they work? So they both worked very well. The power steering cooler kept the fluid cool and when I checked the fluid there was no foaming or evidence of fluid being pushed out of the reservoir like at the C10 Nats, and this course had way more steering with 5 hairpins, mini slalom, and a chicane. The Derale trans cooler worked very well. I had no issues during the runs and the trans temps (hot line coming out of the trans is where I measure) stayed below 200 F for the racing. In some stop and go traffic it would creep up to 210-220 F but I just force the converter to lock in 2nd and that pulls the fluid temps down. That's purely a function of the super high stall speeds I'm running. Running down the highway the cooler was keeping the temp around 190 F and that was with no fans as I found a bug in the ECU SW (Holley is aware and working a fix) causing my custom input temps to be wrong in the ECU so it wasn't turning the trans fan on at 190 like I thought it was. So I'd say in the short term that's a success. I'm still contemplating putting the trans cooler in the areas I mentioned earlier, like under the cab or bed floor, but tucked behind the front bumper may be the spot for a while.