Stay tuned

[Jason@SportsCar]

Garm is an evil man... He captured a unicorn and sold it to us - he knew we could not resist. We now have a close-ratio gear set for the C50. Who would have thought such a thing even existed.

In the next week I will be taking our spare trans to be fitted with the new 3rd, 4th and 5th gears, and a fresh OS Giken Super Lock LSD, so we can do a complete swap into the car.

The new ratios are sick, so short in fact we are going to have to use the Yaris FD (3.7), the xB (4.3) is way to short.

The old setup was just not getting it done... The 4.3 FD with the 15" tires was a dog, the car just could not pull out of the tight stuff. The 4.3 FD with the 13" tires was an improvement on tight tracks. But we actually found when looking at our post Runoffs data, that even though the car got up to speed quicker, our top speed was no better - this setup required the use of 5th gear far to much, which is just to much OD for the car to pull.

With the new setup our 5th gear is almost equal to the stock 4th.

OE
1st 3.545
2nd 1.904
3rd 1.310
4th 0.969
5th 0.815

Close-ratio (1st and 2nd go unchanged)
3rd** 1.474
4th** 1.208
5th** 0.961

Our stock trans had a 2300rpm drop from 2nd to 3rd, and 1900rpm from 3rd to 4th. With the new setup we only drop 1500rpm from 2nd to 3rd (this will be huge), and 1300rpm from 3rd to 4th. This makes it much easier to stay on peak power. Additionally, where we typically would only use two to three gears per track in the stock box, we will now use three to four gears. The gear multiplication should make for much better acceleration, and 5th gear at 7300rpm is 122mph, perfect for Road America.

It all looks sweet on paper, now we just need to make it fit and try it.

The rules will hit us with a 50lb weight penalty for alternative trans ratios, but since the car is still overweight we wont have to actually add anything.

Talking to the Honda guys we race against, the Mugen close-ratio they run is worth an average of 2sec a lap at most tracks. If that holds true for this gear set, it will big a bigger improvement in lap times than the engine work was.