I just beat the Pants off TWO 350 Z's
Vegas, I too enjoy mobbing around with other cars enthusiasts whether they are Z drivers or not. As a matter of fact, I was going down Crenshaw Blvd in Cali and a ta stop sight got surrounded by 14 Mustangs (help!) They were froma car club called "Rare Breed" They had a mix of the newer GT's, the older rounder bodystyles and a few of the vintage 65-65's. After one punched it and I ran him down the President pulled-up next to me and asked why I was messing with his members. Before I had a chance to respond, he said, "Hey, I recognise you." Turns out we went to H.S. together (graduated in 2000) I later spent the next 4 hours with them as they cruised around and then stopped at an In-n'-Out Burger to chill and convene. Cool people. I'd be down to cruise with some XFires too.
P.S. Do they make them in manual?
P.S. Do they make them in manual?
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Originally Posted by Sam
Originally Posted by AZ Outlaws
Originally Posted by Sam
Its fun, over at the forum I moderate we have a section called Other <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=cars&v=56">cars</a>, debates like this are common, and pretty fun, its nice to have a good sampling of different <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=car&v=56">car</a> owners. 
As for the forums, well since I was there at the onset, and I have a ridiculous amount of useless knowledge about the Eclipse, I stayed on with that forum, and add in a few things from here to there.
Ok, here is the article on the 1G skidpad Z.
Originally Posted by Sport Compact Car
Project 350Z has just become our second project car in a year to reach the once fanciful goal of 1.0g on street tires. Like making 100 hp per liter on pump gas, pulling a street g is slowly working its way from theoretical fantasy to everyday reality. Doing this with a Z turns out to be relatively simple in terms of raw parts count. We changed only four parts to bring the Z from 0.88g to 1.0, and only three of them were probably strictly necessary. The only real trick was to ignore what everyone else was doing with the Z and look at the car's strengths and weaknesses on their own.
Everyone else is putting on huge rear tires with relatively skinny fronts. This looks mean as hell and gives the illusion that the car has so much power it would vaporize lesser rubber. This is an illusion.
Everyone else is lowering the Z, throwing multi-adjustable coil-overs at it as we are wont to do on nearly every car we touch. But the Z is already low. It's so low, in fact, that Nissan had to modify the loading ramps it has been using on its ships for 30 years. The stock springs and shocks are also tuned quite well, so we're in no hurry to change them.
We've driven several Zs that were done this way. Some of them worked brilliantly, but none rode as well or managed to feel as balanced and easy to drive as ours does. And none of the good ones did it on real street tires.
Stumbling into our setup meant stepping back and taking a fresh look at the Z.
A neutral, rear-drive car should be easily balanced mid-corner with the throttle. Lift off the gas and the tail should step out slightly. Ease onto the gas and the front tires should slowly start to slide. In a properly balanced car, the transition to oversteer is so gradual and predictable you can hang the car right on that transition point as long as you want. The Sport Package Miata, the third-generation RX-7, and, surprisingly, the current Mustang Cobra all exhibit this outstanding balance.
With powerslides on demand, it's easy to be fooled into calling the 350Z's handling neutral. It isn't. Unless you're spinning the rear tires, it's difficult to get anything but the fronts to do any work. Smooth driving is almost always rewarded with understeer, and if you can coax the rear out at high speed, it usually goes with a snap. Driving a Z at 7/10 is rewarding and, frankly, too fast for most roads. But on that rare road where you have the visibility, the flow and the sparse traffic to really flog it, a stock Z can be frustrating. Throttle inputs have minimal effect on the car's attitude and the front tires take all the punishment. Many a twisty road attack has ended with us wishing for that elusive neutral balance.
Here's how we found it: Look closely at the 350Z's suspension and there's only one obvious reason why it shouldn't be balanced--the front tires are smaller than the rears. This may seem a laughably naive question, but why? Two reasons: It looks tough and it makes the lawyers happy.
Screw the lawyers.
Nissan engineers left an insane amount of room for wide tires and, naturally, there's more room in the back than up front. This has led most people to continue this ludicrous staggered tire setup by trying to stuff the rear wheel wells with as much tire as possible. We went the opposite way, stuffing as much tire as possible under the front fenders and then using that size at both ends.
You can measure and calculate all you want, but the only way to really be sure what size tire and what wheel offset you need to completely fill a wheel well is trial and error. We found, conveniently, that the rear tires Nismo uses on the Z--275/40ZR-18 BFGoodrich g-Force KDs mounted on 18x9.5-inch wheels with a 30mm offset--actually fit the front perfectly.
Picking the tire was easy then. Much of the approachable handling limits that define the balance we want comes from the tires themselves, and experience has shown that the g-Force KD combines massive grip with the most driver-friendly behavior you could hope for from a tire. Wheel choice wasn't so easy.
Knowing exactly what you want is the worst curse for a wheel shopper. We knew the size and offset we needed. We knew we wanted light weight, high strength and enough lip to fill the Z's wide haunches with rear-drive manliness. It didn't take long for us to decide that we absolutely had to have BBS's forged one-piece RG-R wheels. In 18 x 9.5-inch, they weigh about 19 pounds. That's quite light for such a wide wheel, but not so light we're afraid of bending it.
The classic BBS cross-spoke design has remained basically the same for 30 years because it's pure function. The way the spokes efficiently distribute load across the rim, and the way their slight angle allows them to transmit acceleration and braking torque with a thinner, lighter spoke is pure geek ecstacy. That, and their diamond black paint would be the ***** on our silver Z.
Too bad they don't come in the right size.
BBS, like everyone else, recommends a staggered tire setup for the Z with 18x9.5-inch 25mm-offset rears and 18x8.5-inch 23mm offset in front. First we tried simply using the rear size at both ends, thinking a 5mm difference from our ideal offset wasn't enough to worry about. Turns out it was. With a 25mm offset, the front tires bug out of the wheel wells like some kind of autocross freakshow and rub on the fenders on big bumps. The deep dish of that particular wheel size also puts the spokes too close to the brakes, leaving too little room for a Brembo or StopTech upgrade.
After much searching, BBS found an 18x9-inch 42mm offset wheel and a 12mm spacer that, together, would add up to the wheel we needed. It's a half-inch narrower than the rear wheels, but the 275s fit fine. The 42mm offset wheel also has the spokes much closer to the outer edge of the wheel, leaving--with the spacer--plenty of brake room.
Using a spacer this thick is not something that should be taken lightly. Luckily, this spacer is made by BBS specifically for putting this wheel on a Nissan. Most wheels are made with a relatively large center bore, and centering rings of various thicknesses are set in this hole to reduce the size to whatever center bore is needed for the car. The 12mm BBS spacer, then, is machined with a Nissan center bore on the car side and the BBS bore on the wheel side, ensuring a perfectly concentric fit.
The next concern is the wheel studs, which are simply too short to reach all the way through that 12mm spacer to the lug nuts. Nismo long wheel studs are the solution here. Any Nissan dealer can get these studs, but many don't realize it. We even had one dealer try to sell us stock studs, since they'd never heard of Nismo. Superior Nissan in Puente Hills, Calif., has heard of Nismo. In fact, the dealership had about 30 sets of long studs hanging on the walls when we ran in frantically trying to mount our wheels the day before our skidpad test was scheduled. The folks at Superior Nissan also had an SR20DET and Silvia parts galore all over the parts department, so they're our kind of people.
It should be mentioned that our tire selection will most likely disable or at least really **** off the Vehicle Dynamic Control system if you have one. VDC observes the world through wheel speed sensors and assumes the rears are slightly taller than the fronts. With all four the same size, it will always think the rear tires are spinning slightly. Our Performance Package Z is, thankfully, free from such electronic ninnary.
Using a different offset wheel at each end means we can't easily rotate the tires, but the visual advantage of the deep-dish 25mm-offset rear wheel seems worth it. If you're really into rotating your tires, you can use our front setup at both ends. BBS now says it intends to build a 30mm offset version of this wheel to make this setup possible without the spacer and wheel studs.
With our Z stuffed full of tires, we next wanted some way to adjust handling balance. When you're aiming for that delicate edge just before the car gets nasty and tail happy, you need some quick, easy way to adjust balance. Adjustable anti-roll bars are almost always the best way to do this. The function of anti-roll bars is quite simple. They just connect the left and right wheels with a torsion bar. When one wheel goes up and the other goes down--which is what happens when the body rolls--the bar twists. A bigger bar will resist the twisting more, so the car will roll less. Big deal.
Now here's the magic: Put a larger bar on the rear and the bar will push down harder on the outside rear tire as it resists roll. This extra load will cause the rear tire to lose grip sooner, so a bigger rear bar promotes oversteer. Put the big bar in front and you get more understeer. Now, with front and rear bars sized to get really close to neutral, you can fine-tune the stiffness of each bar by changing how long the lever arm is between the suspension and the bar. That's accomplished by simply drilling a few extra mounting holes in the end of the bar so the end link that connects the bar to the suspension can mount in a few different positions.
Anti-roll bars are relatively simple things. All that really matters is that they're the right stiffness, the end links and all the mounting points are strong enough to handle the extra forces from the stronger bars, and that the ends of the bars sit at the same height so the bar doesn't push to one side on level ground. The Hotchkis adjustable anti-roll bars we installed nail all three of those criteria, plus some more.
Being the right stiffness comes from the combination of John Hotchkis' driving talent and stubborn perfectionism. He knows what right is, and he's not happy until he's there. Strong mounting points are easy in the case of the Z. The stock mounts are plenty strong and the stock ball-joint-style end links handle the extra load without complaint. In cases where the stock pieces aren't up to the task, Hotchkis Tuning has its own, stronger ball-joint links. As for the bar sitting level, all Hotchkis bars are built with a fancy-pants CNC bending machine, so they're always the right shape.
For a bonus, the Hotchkis bars are also hollow. It turns out that if you drill the middle out of a torsion bar you don't lose much in the way of stiffness, but you do lose a lot of weight. The massive 35mm (1 3/8-in.) Hotchkis front bar weighs just over 13 pounds. In its three positions, the front bar is 9-, 32-, or 63-percent stiffer than stock. The 24mm (15/16-in.) hollow rear bar is either 45-, 92-, or 146-percent stiffer than stock. Amazingly, we found perfect balance with both bars in their middle setting.
The final bonus feature, of course, is that they're red. Everybody knows that red is the fastest color.
After battling understeer for so long, we didn't really expect wheels, tires, anti-roll bars and a differential to be a complete handling solution. We expected to need stiffer bushings, more camber and possibly even coil-overs. Thankfully, we were wrong. The Z's handling behavior is now exactly what we had hoped for. Turn-in is crisp and immediate, the steering is precise and predictable, and the limit is approachable, controllable and perfectly neutral. With the front and rear bars set on their middle settings, our Z snakes through the slalom at 71.8 mph. That's 1 mph faster than a stock track-package Z and 1.6 mph faster than our Z was stock. Several of the more understeer-biased modified Zs we've tested are faster through the slalom, since the slalom test tends to favor understeer. Balance on the skidpad, though was superb, with a two-way average of an even 1.0g.
The beauty of this setup is that it's adjustable. If you favor tight, twisty roads with corners as tight or tighter than a typical entrance ramp and a little bit of countersteer doesn't intimidate you, do exactly as we did. If you prefer faster roads or tracks or have nightmares about going off the road backward, use the stiffer front bar setting and you can be confident you'll go off the road forward.
Everyone else is putting on huge rear tires with relatively skinny fronts. This looks mean as hell and gives the illusion that the car has so much power it would vaporize lesser rubber. This is an illusion.
Everyone else is lowering the Z, throwing multi-adjustable coil-overs at it as we are wont to do on nearly every car we touch. But the Z is already low. It's so low, in fact, that Nissan had to modify the loading ramps it has been using on its ships for 30 years. The stock springs and shocks are also tuned quite well, so we're in no hurry to change them.
We've driven several Zs that were done this way. Some of them worked brilliantly, but none rode as well or managed to feel as balanced and easy to drive as ours does. And none of the good ones did it on real street tires.
Stumbling into our setup meant stepping back and taking a fresh look at the Z.
A neutral, rear-drive car should be easily balanced mid-corner with the throttle. Lift off the gas and the tail should step out slightly. Ease onto the gas and the front tires should slowly start to slide. In a properly balanced car, the transition to oversteer is so gradual and predictable you can hang the car right on that transition point as long as you want. The Sport Package Miata, the third-generation RX-7, and, surprisingly, the current Mustang Cobra all exhibit this outstanding balance.
With powerslides on demand, it's easy to be fooled into calling the 350Z's handling neutral. It isn't. Unless you're spinning the rear tires, it's difficult to get anything but the fronts to do any work. Smooth driving is almost always rewarded with understeer, and if you can coax the rear out at high speed, it usually goes with a snap. Driving a Z at 7/10 is rewarding and, frankly, too fast for most roads. But on that rare road where you have the visibility, the flow and the sparse traffic to really flog it, a stock Z can be frustrating. Throttle inputs have minimal effect on the car's attitude and the front tires take all the punishment. Many a twisty road attack has ended with us wishing for that elusive neutral balance.
Here's how we found it: Look closely at the 350Z's suspension and there's only one obvious reason why it shouldn't be balanced--the front tires are smaller than the rears. This may seem a laughably naive question, but why? Two reasons: It looks tough and it makes the lawyers happy.
Screw the lawyers.
Nissan engineers left an insane amount of room for wide tires and, naturally, there's more room in the back than up front. This has led most people to continue this ludicrous staggered tire setup by trying to stuff the rear wheel wells with as much tire as possible. We went the opposite way, stuffing as much tire as possible under the front fenders and then using that size at both ends.
You can measure and calculate all you want, but the only way to really be sure what size tire and what wheel offset you need to completely fill a wheel well is trial and error. We found, conveniently, that the rear tires Nismo uses on the Z--275/40ZR-18 BFGoodrich g-Force KDs mounted on 18x9.5-inch wheels with a 30mm offset--actually fit the front perfectly.
Picking the tire was easy then. Much of the approachable handling limits that define the balance we want comes from the tires themselves, and experience has shown that the g-Force KD combines massive grip with the most driver-friendly behavior you could hope for from a tire. Wheel choice wasn't so easy.
Knowing exactly what you want is the worst curse for a wheel shopper. We knew the size and offset we needed. We knew we wanted light weight, high strength and enough lip to fill the Z's wide haunches with rear-drive manliness. It didn't take long for us to decide that we absolutely had to have BBS's forged one-piece RG-R wheels. In 18 x 9.5-inch, they weigh about 19 pounds. That's quite light for such a wide wheel, but not so light we're afraid of bending it.
The classic BBS cross-spoke design has remained basically the same for 30 years because it's pure function. The way the spokes efficiently distribute load across the rim, and the way their slight angle allows them to transmit acceleration and braking torque with a thinner, lighter spoke is pure geek ecstacy. That, and their diamond black paint would be the ***** on our silver Z.
Too bad they don't come in the right size.
BBS, like everyone else, recommends a staggered tire setup for the Z with 18x9.5-inch 25mm-offset rears and 18x8.5-inch 23mm offset in front. First we tried simply using the rear size at both ends, thinking a 5mm difference from our ideal offset wasn't enough to worry about. Turns out it was. With a 25mm offset, the front tires bug out of the wheel wells like some kind of autocross freakshow and rub on the fenders on big bumps. The deep dish of that particular wheel size also puts the spokes too close to the brakes, leaving too little room for a Brembo or StopTech upgrade.
After much searching, BBS found an 18x9-inch 42mm offset wheel and a 12mm spacer that, together, would add up to the wheel we needed. It's a half-inch narrower than the rear wheels, but the 275s fit fine. The 42mm offset wheel also has the spokes much closer to the outer edge of the wheel, leaving--with the spacer--plenty of brake room.
Using a spacer this thick is not something that should be taken lightly. Luckily, this spacer is made by BBS specifically for putting this wheel on a Nissan. Most wheels are made with a relatively large center bore, and centering rings of various thicknesses are set in this hole to reduce the size to whatever center bore is needed for the car. The 12mm BBS spacer, then, is machined with a Nissan center bore on the car side and the BBS bore on the wheel side, ensuring a perfectly concentric fit.
The next concern is the wheel studs, which are simply too short to reach all the way through that 12mm spacer to the lug nuts. Nismo long wheel studs are the solution here. Any Nissan dealer can get these studs, but many don't realize it. We even had one dealer try to sell us stock studs, since they'd never heard of Nismo. Superior Nissan in Puente Hills, Calif., has heard of Nismo. In fact, the dealership had about 30 sets of long studs hanging on the walls when we ran in frantically trying to mount our wheels the day before our skidpad test was scheduled. The folks at Superior Nissan also had an SR20DET and Silvia parts galore all over the parts department, so they're our kind of people.
It should be mentioned that our tire selection will most likely disable or at least really **** off the Vehicle Dynamic Control system if you have one. VDC observes the world through wheel speed sensors and assumes the rears are slightly taller than the fronts. With all four the same size, it will always think the rear tires are spinning slightly. Our Performance Package Z is, thankfully, free from such electronic ninnary.
Using a different offset wheel at each end means we can't easily rotate the tires, but the visual advantage of the deep-dish 25mm-offset rear wheel seems worth it. If you're really into rotating your tires, you can use our front setup at both ends. BBS now says it intends to build a 30mm offset version of this wheel to make this setup possible without the spacer and wheel studs.
With our Z stuffed full of tires, we next wanted some way to adjust handling balance. When you're aiming for that delicate edge just before the car gets nasty and tail happy, you need some quick, easy way to adjust balance. Adjustable anti-roll bars are almost always the best way to do this. The function of anti-roll bars is quite simple. They just connect the left and right wheels with a torsion bar. When one wheel goes up and the other goes down--which is what happens when the body rolls--the bar twists. A bigger bar will resist the twisting more, so the car will roll less. Big deal.
Now here's the magic: Put a larger bar on the rear and the bar will push down harder on the outside rear tire as it resists roll. This extra load will cause the rear tire to lose grip sooner, so a bigger rear bar promotes oversteer. Put the big bar in front and you get more understeer. Now, with front and rear bars sized to get really close to neutral, you can fine-tune the stiffness of each bar by changing how long the lever arm is between the suspension and the bar. That's accomplished by simply drilling a few extra mounting holes in the end of the bar so the end link that connects the bar to the suspension can mount in a few different positions.
Anti-roll bars are relatively simple things. All that really matters is that they're the right stiffness, the end links and all the mounting points are strong enough to handle the extra forces from the stronger bars, and that the ends of the bars sit at the same height so the bar doesn't push to one side on level ground. The Hotchkis adjustable anti-roll bars we installed nail all three of those criteria, plus some more.
Being the right stiffness comes from the combination of John Hotchkis' driving talent and stubborn perfectionism. He knows what right is, and he's not happy until he's there. Strong mounting points are easy in the case of the Z. The stock mounts are plenty strong and the stock ball-joint-style end links handle the extra load without complaint. In cases where the stock pieces aren't up to the task, Hotchkis Tuning has its own, stronger ball-joint links. As for the bar sitting level, all Hotchkis bars are built with a fancy-pants CNC bending machine, so they're always the right shape.
For a bonus, the Hotchkis bars are also hollow. It turns out that if you drill the middle out of a torsion bar you don't lose much in the way of stiffness, but you do lose a lot of weight. The massive 35mm (1 3/8-in.) Hotchkis front bar weighs just over 13 pounds. In its three positions, the front bar is 9-, 32-, or 63-percent stiffer than stock. The 24mm (15/16-in.) hollow rear bar is either 45-, 92-, or 146-percent stiffer than stock. Amazingly, we found perfect balance with both bars in their middle setting.
The final bonus feature, of course, is that they're red. Everybody knows that red is the fastest color.
After battling understeer for so long, we didn't really expect wheels, tires, anti-roll bars and a differential to be a complete handling solution. We expected to need stiffer bushings, more camber and possibly even coil-overs. Thankfully, we were wrong. The Z's handling behavior is now exactly what we had hoped for. Turn-in is crisp and immediate, the steering is precise and predictable, and the limit is approachable, controllable and perfectly neutral. With the front and rear bars set on their middle settings, our Z snakes through the slalom at 71.8 mph. That's 1 mph faster than a stock track-package Z and 1.6 mph faster than our Z was stock. Several of the more understeer-biased modified Zs we've tested are faster through the slalom, since the slalom test tends to favor understeer. Balance on the skidpad, though was superb, with a two-way average of an even 1.0g.
The beauty of this setup is that it's adjustable. If you favor tight, twisty roads with corners as tight or tighter than a typical entrance ramp and a little bit of countersteer doesn't intimidate you, do exactly as we did. If you prefer faster roads or tracks or have nightmares about going off the road backward, use the stiffer front bar setting and you can be confident you'll go off the road forward.
Originally Posted by Bullseye
Originally Posted by Sam
Originally Posted by AZ Outlaws
Originally Posted by Sam
Its fun, over at the forum I moderate we have a section called Other <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=cars&v=56">cars</a>, debates like this are common, and pretty fun, its nice to have a good sampling of different <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=car&v=56">car</a> owners.
As for the forums, well since I was there at the onset, and I have a ridiculous amount of useless knowledge about the Eclipse, I stayed on with that forum, and add in a few things from here to there.
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Originally Posted by AZ Outlaws
Sam... what is it with all the HTML or whatever it is in your posts??? The <a href=> tag is used to make something "hot" so you can click on it and go somewhere. Whatever you're trying to do isn't working.... <> doesn't work here.
Oh p.s. to the guys bashing the 03 cobras handling in that article it said it was quite good
Originally Posted by AZ Outlaws
Sam... what is it with all the HTML or whatever it is in your posts??? The <a href=> tag is used to make something "hot" so you can click on it and go somewhere. Whatever you're trying to do isn't working.... <> doesn't work here.
Originally Posted by Bullseye
Oh p.s. to the guys bashing the 03 cobras handling in that article it said it was quite good
Never bashed the Cobra (if you go back a couple of pages I inserted the mag specs for the 03 Cobra and the 350Z) but on the whole, its just not my cup-o-tea.
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Originally Posted by Bullseye
Originally Posted by AZ Outlaws
Sam... what is it with all the HTML or whatever it is in your posts??? The <a href=> tag is used to make something "hot" so you can click on it and go somewhere. Whatever you're trying to do isn't working.... <> doesn't work here.
Oh p.s. to the guys bashing the 03 cobras handling in that article it said it was quite good
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Originally Posted by Sam
Originally Posted by Bullseye
Oh p.s. to the guys bashing the 03 cobras handling in that article it said it was quite good
Never bashed the Cobra (if you go back a couple of pages I inserted the mag specs for the 03 Cobra and the 350Z) but on the whole, its just not my cup-o-tea.
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Originally Posted by Sam
In my opinion, for the <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=money&v=56">money</a>, the most ridiculous <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=car&v=56">car</a> with the best handling/power combination is the Z06.
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