Thread: The Spyder Slays a Dragon

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Nolan, I've had that same sensation riding in C2 and C3 Corvettes. Felt like I was just before sliding on the road.

On a side note, I think the car needs more roll stiffness. There is a little more body roll than I would like. It’s pretty obvious in the pictures, although I will say the camber gain in the front appears to be mostly keeping up with the body roll. The outside front tire looks to be pretty much vertical to the road. It might help if I added a little more static camber, but that might cause tire wear. As it is now, the car “feels” pretty neutral to me. There are times when it has a tiny amount of understeer and other times when it feels like a little oversteer. Mostly though, it seemed to go where I pointed it without any drama.



I want to experiment with a rear bar, since the one I had built during construction interfered with the body and I had to ditch it. I could increase the front roll stiffness, but that would probably induce understeer. I’ll wait until I can build a new rear bar before tinkering with the front. The car is definitely driving good now. I just want to make it better. That, to me, is what hot rodding is all about.

I had an issue with one of the Mickey Thompson SR’s that were on the car right before we left on this trip. The right front developed a bad flat spot and refused to “round out” again. MT’s are kind of hard to get and pricey. I previously had trouble with one of the rear tires not wanting to seal on the rim and had another one that had developed a slow rim leak. Nope, ain’t starting on a long trip like that.

The only tires I could get locally on short notice were Cooper Cobra’s. I was leery of them since the Cobra guys generally don’t say good things about them, but I guess the extra weight of this car, compared to a Cobra, helped. They performed good for me, and I definitely put them to the test on the Dragon as to handling.

We made 3 one way passes that day. I had to wait for the oil to cool off before the last pass. It was up to 240 before we made it back to the store at Deal’s Gap. That tells me that an oil cooler will be required if I ever do a track day with the car. Most of the time during normal driving the oil temp runs about 10 degrees over water temp or less. That is exactly what my Hemi powered Ram truck does. In fact, on cold days, the car struggles to get the oil up to water temp. An oil cooler would probably have to either have a thermostat or be covered most of the time. Not sure one would be worth the trouble for the limited number of times I would actually need it.