That is the steepest gear-set for the SR3! Hill climb with lots of turns? I’m tempted because I autocross my SR3 and with my 3.07 it’s sometimes hard to get out of first. With this ratio it will pull like hell at the sacrifice of top speed. GLWS
Hi Russ, I have autocrossed the car a few times and what I've discovered is there is just not enough of a warm up or cool down for the SR3. The tires never get warm enough so I'm not able to push the car as hard as I want and at the end of The run I have to shut the engine down and wait about 15 minutes for the next run, there is no air running past the oil cooler or radiator. The car and the oil heat up pretty quick and I've never gotten out of 2nd gear in autocross as speeds are low and RPM is high. These SR3s need a decent amount of cooling through movement at speed which it's not really obtaining it in autocross. I'm likely just going to be doing road courses with the car and the 3.59's are a bit too steep.
If you decide to do more autocrossing, it should be fairly easy to add an electric fan, mounted on the radiator (heat exchanger).
I haven't researched that for your particular application, but generally speaking, that should work. There are plenty of purpose built road racing cars converted to racing in parking lots and airport runways (and it can be quite exciting).
on edit: Oh, and gumball, sticky compound tires made for autocrossing. 🙂
Just wanted to say I totally agree with Russ. I bought my care a few months ago and was frustrated at the first couple of track events because it was almost impossible to warm the car up and then not overheat waiting for others to come on and off the track. As I'm in Wisconsin temps were in the lower 40's to upper 30's which didn't help.
I hit team Stradale up for an electric fan was really reasonable and plugged right into my current wiring harness so is also controlled by the ECU. Made a HUGE difference. No more stressing over warming the car up or worrying about getting to hot coming back off the track. This alone made it workable for me and doable in autocross too.
Going to install an oil preheater next to shorten up the warm up time and time spent just idling.
Someone like Hoosier should make a softer compound tire that doesn't need to be warmed as much to help you out too. That being said the car really comes into it's own around 65-70 when the aero starts working. So track events are much preferred over autocross to really enjoy the cars potential.
Charley sent me some pics and directions for removing the side pod to install the fan. Wasn't bad to do at all. Total time spent was a couple hours?
Wow, can't wait to see the finished product! He needs a thread dedicated to this so we can follow it. That's really going to turn some heads at the track.
