2NR: What's often overlooked when building a track car?
DH: Um, everything? Seriously, we look at some of the pro racers out there and there's always something that's missing out of their program. You'd be amazed that some of these pro road racers out there don't have a clue. The ones who are consistently fast have a good chassis setup and engine but generally a lot of guys don't have good engines or don't have a clue about how to set up their suspension. For example I'll use a DC2 road race Integra. Club Racers will set up the suspension and spring rates with 400lb in front and 500lb in the rear but compare that to a competitive World Challenge Integra which would use 500-700lb front and 900-1200lb in the rear. You're talking approximately 700 pounds more than the average club racer.
2NR: So what's the reason behind such a drastic difference in spring rates between a Club Racer and a World Challenge competitor?
DH: Well on an FWD car you can't steer the car while on the throttle. Anytime you go into a turn you need the car to start rotating when on the brakes. So in order to do that you need to lock down the rear with either a lot more spring rate or use larger diameter sway bars. It's interesting because Japan sets up their race cars completely different from American road race vehicles. Typically on a street car you would go heavy on the front because of the engine and lighter on the rear. The same theory is applied on Japanese race cars but the way they get the car to rotate is they use different wheel offsets on front and rear while using a softer compound tire on the front and harder in the rear. In the U.S. they tend to lock down the suspension tuning a lot more, using the big sway bar in the rear and stiffer spring rates. An example would be the Mugen EG6 which used a 30mm front and a 24mm rear sway bar setup while our newly completed Skunk2 Civic is using a stock front and 38mm in the rear. So basically you want the front end to plant using a smaller sway bar while using a larger sway bar in the rear, enabling the back end to rotate around more freely.
2NR: Skunk2 products have been used in a number of top road race cars throughout the years. How has Skunk2 been successful in SCCA and IMSA sanctioned races?
DH: Whether people like to admit it or not, there are many of our parts floating around on front running Hondas and Acuras at numerous track events. I believe we have a good reputation in the Honda racing world, within the touring car level. We know of a Japanese company has actually copied our camshaft profiles which I will leave anonymous to minimize drama. Believe it or not the same camshaft that was copied from us is currently the number one camshafts begin used in Formula 3 racing in Japan. (At this point I think to myself damn if a Japanese company such as _ _ _ _ has to copy Skunk2's camshaft profiles, then you know Skunk2 has their shit together). I'm not worried that our cams have been copied because we will continually come out with new designs that will eclipse any previous designs we introduced over the years.
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