December 2015 Newsletter

This newsletter is focused on 79-04 Mustang market place issues.  However, all should find it interesting, and perhaps could learn something from it.

I am asked occasionally to respond to the things our competitors say about our products.  We try to refrain from such because first, we don’t need to help them tune up their product line, and second we don’t pay a lot of attention to what our competitors do.  We know what works best, and we offer what works best to our customers the best way we know how, at the best price we can, and still stay in business.  But recently I have heard so much with which we must take exception that I submit the following to this thread:

Our customers are generally those that seek the very best performance and find us after thorough research.  Often this is after they have been burned, or disappointed in results from prior purchases.  Not a day goes by that we don’t hear “I really wish I had found you guys first before I spent so much on this other stuff.”  So I feel a few points should be brought out about our products and hit the slander head on.

1) New stuff.  We are constantly re-engineering our parts and improving them.  Many have undergone nine or ten upgrades over the years.  Our latest Watts links are lighter yet stronger, and accommodate any differential cover, and mount independent of the TorqueArm so they can be used in classes not allowing a TorqueArm or to assist those building their car in stages.  Our newest versions TorqueArms do not require removal to service/inspect the gears & diff.  The newest have been redesigned once again for today’s modified Mustangs of any year.

Two years of testing and these units have proven capable on 1300+hp drag cars while retaining road course and street functionality and reduced NVH.  Had we not suffered a couple of personal injuries this past summer the market info on these parts would be available.  It will be soon.  We have discontinued production of all older versions.

2) We make a multitude of parts designs to fit multiple purposes and budgets.  As opposed to MM and perhaps others, we don't offer a limited number of chassis products and tell people the few parts work on all applications.  We make many different parts so we can tailor each chassis system to the customer’s specific needs and use.  What is annoying is MM makes such simplistic statements that pretend to know our products or design philosophy.  Yes, we make parts for track use AND we make parts specifically for street use.  All our parts can be run on either street or track, but proper selection of the parts depends on priority of use, track or street.

3) New Website on the horizon.  The above makes it a little harder to profit due to economies of scale, and requires far more personal attention to the customer during the sale process.  But those seeking the best track performance are not concerned with street, and we would be remiss in presenting our street parts to them as the best possible track parts as our competitors do.  With that said we have been investing in a new website that will be far simpler and educational.  It will contain a virtual sales engineer that will ask many questions, narrowing choices, and assemble the chassis parts list based on the answers.  This is a Herculean effort and we expected to be finished with this by now, but again, injuries and other things keep getting in the way.  Hopefully by spring it will be finished.

4) The power of fear in the market: Over 3 decades ago, long before Maximum Motorsports existed we started out making parts like TorqueArms for 225 hp Fox bodies when no R compound DOT tires existed.  Now we have to make parts for track cars making 2000 HP on tires capable of 3 times the grip.  As the Mustang market developed, our early parts were vaunted in the media as the best thing ever.  Every Journalist that drove a Griggs Mustang raved about it saying it does not drive like a Mustang.  This was simply because we addressed geometric weakness in the chassis for the first time.  Some customers then developed their cars beyond the original design capability of the original parts and so there were a few subsequent failures.  However parts like our TorqueArm are on their ninth redesign as market needs and production techniques develop.  And 11 years ago we started offering what I believe is the only lifetime warranty offered on chassis parts.  Such replacements are extremely rare.  Yet MM maintains a Facebook image file of a few broken 20-30 year old chassis parts, ours and others that their sales staff show potential customers, using fear as a motivating sales factor.  Some images are of parts failed due to incorrect installation, and all of these parts are long obsolete in design.  One of our parts they show is one that is a designed in failure point of a larger assembly, designed to break first in advent of overload, or impact to prevent damage to other more expensive components.  At Griggs Racing we kept no such log of MM or other company’s parts that we have removed and discarded when upgrading a car.  We felt it unprofessional and well, trite.  I am finally tired of hearing about it and so I am sending a letter to them asking them to refrain from such practice.

5) Pythagoras rules supreme.  Some years ago MM published an opinion about anti-dive indicating that we at Griggs Racing use too much anti-dive in our front end geometry and they “proved” a car could stop in a shorter distance with Ford OE anti-dive geometry.  I won't be foolish and make statements about what other companies believe when I have no idea what is in their minds, but let me say this:

Based on my experience with Stock Cars and Trans-Am cars, and applied physics models that always seemed to yield best on track results, we were the first to revise geometry in 79 up Mustangs (in 1979 we built the first one for IMSA and that car is still racing).  Anti-dive is one of the foremost components in that revision.  Anti-dive percentage varies depending on ride height and the system employed.  I say anti-dive must be increased over stock in 79-04 Mustangs to allow softer front spring packages.  If you have adequate anti lift in the rear, such as a well-placed TorqueArm usually provides, and allow the nose to dive with front geometry, the cg may drop somewhat under braking producing a slightly shorter stopping distance.  But in a strut car the roll center then drops significantly more than the nose dives, and then during turn in and brake release the roll center rises.  This creates a major change in roll couple distribution occurring just when the car is transitioning into lateral acceleration, and that change is in the wrong direction, inducing understeer.

Most people simply add spring rate to reduce the dive, but then ride quality is hampered; and the braking performance improvement attained by reducing anti-dive is lessened or even negated due to less cg drop, and further, on rough surfaces this can exacerbate traction issues.  These effects can be subtle, or pronounced, but they will be there.  We find high front anti-dive percentage consistently results in better overall performance and behavior, more than making up for the minimal difference in potential braking improvement.  And when I say minimal, this is what our cars do in street trim on the Brakes:

Empirical data is hard to produce, but here is an example of our geometry at work.  In December 2003, Motor Trend Magazine, the organization that has probably tested more cars than anyone in the world, tested on the same afternoon with the same drivers a 2004 Ferrari Stradale factory racer, and a 2004 Porsche GT3 race car and a 2003 Mach 1 Mustang with Vortech supercharger, and fitted with a version of our GR40 Super Street chassis system including our standard K member with revised anti-dive geometry for features in the April 2004 issue.  The GR40 Mach 1 was put together in a rush to be in the Vortech SEMA booth, and never was aligned or chassis set.  It was supposed to return to our shop on a trailer after SEMA for completion, but someone mistakenly sent it to the media pool and the boys at Motor Trend grabbed it to test when they were doing the high buck track car test because they said “they had time.”  All the jam nuts on the control arms and tie rods were left loose, and it was sitting over an inch higher in the front than specified in our instructions and only eyeball aligned with significant toe-in and was not scaled or bump steered.

But my main point here is the GR40 street prepped Mustang beat both the Ferrari and the Porsche factory track prepped race cars stopping from 60 mph and the drivers attributed it to the GR40 Chassis kit.  (Mustang was heavier, had a higher CG than the Ferrari and Porsche, and the Mustang’s brakes were the considerably smaller stock Mustang units.  When tested back to back, the Mustang nearly equaled the two more expensive cars on the skid pad and slalom ( I am confident it would have equaled or beat them with the chassis set properly, and Watts link added), and of course The Mustang blew both European rivals away in the 1/4 mile.

Motor Trend chief editor John Kiewicz called me that night, introduced himself, and stated how he was blown away by the performance, response, handling and especially the Braking.  He told me he could not stop driving the Mustang and it had much better ride quality then either European model.  He had flogged it to death in the mountains on his way home and he absolutely loved it.  (He was also quite surprised to find all the Jam nuts loose when I asked him to look under it and check).  Of course we weren’t paying the advertising toll that the two most prominent sports car manufacturers in the world were paying, so their article was 10 pages long up front, and ours was a single page in the back, but the results can be compared on pages 8 and 9 of this document: Look at braking 60-0.

Geometry is key.  We don't just believe, we KNOW that roll centers and dive & squat factors need to be correct and consistent for each specific car, driver, tires, usage, track or street surface and ambient conditions.  Thus we build geometric adjustability into our kits, and quote systems to customers based on their individual needs.  We don't compromise geometry and rigidity for exhaust fitment, because we know that for true performance the exhaust needs to be routed around the chassis.  Would you build the foundation to your house around the layout of the toilet drain?

When Griggs Racing was still in San Luis Obispo 20 or so years ago I did know what was in the mind of then MM partner Brian Croutcher when he came by my shop with a Fox car and their new prototype Panhard Bar installed.  He was really proud that it cleared all exhaust systems.  It looked to me to be so low it would be useful as a tail hook for aircraft carrier landings.  I don’t believe they have changed it since.  Such a low roll center requires a substantial rear anti-roll bar to achieve any sort of balance.  Our Panhard bar is to maintain a small aspect of inherent understeer for the average street driver, but theirs is really low.  So they get to profit by selling an additional part as a band aid, and sales resistance is low due to public perception that anti-roll bars are good, when in fact they can be detrimental.  Stiff rear anti-roll bars cause other issues, one being hard on differentials and tires.  Our stick axle cars do not require rear anti-roll bars except in rare occasions, and then only as a trimming device.

Is it not true that what you are searching for is either better lap times, safety, forgiveness when at the limit of adhesion, and the exhilaration/joy of driving? This means maintaining proper chassis compliance while also maintaining chassis balance, and at the same time maximizing tire contact.  Geometry is number one priority to this end.

6) The problem in a nutshell: Most auto performance chassis parts manufacturers take the sophomoric approach to product design, seldom understanding all of vehicle dynamics, and then further compromise design to overcome sales resistance and meet economies of scale for maximum profitability.  They hype their deficiencies as assets, such as when automakers made buzzwords about of “Macpherson strut suspension” when it was really only a cost cutting step, and one that was backwards in vehicle development.  This is parallel to MM hyping low roll centers and OE anti-dive as a superior feature or that you can go just as fast on struts as an SLA as we have had related to us by many customers seeking truth.

Instead, we choose to produce based on many decades of experience with priority of design being to maximize individual customer performance results.  We do this through a more custom approach to each individual driver’s needs.  One size does not fit all.  So if you are going to spend thousands of dollars optimizing your chassis, why limit yourself and your car’s performance potential? We make chassis systems to perfect the platform for every purpose and work to accommodate any reasonable budget that will get it done, from a simple Panhard bar and TorqueArm with Struts set up, to systems with  Watts Links and Unequal Length Non-parallel Wishbone front systems, informally known as Short Long Arm or “SLA”.  Such is how exotic world class cars are built.

We can do this for any car with an 8.8’ or 9” rear axle or IRS:

• 60-70 Mustang, Cougar, Falcon, Comet
• 79-04 Fox Capri & T Bird, Fairmont, Fairmont Wagon, Mustang, SVO Mustang, SN95, Cobra
• 05-14 Mustang, all, V6, & V8 Including Boss 302 & GT500.
• 2015 SLA race systems are currently available, and street SLA and Strut systems are coming soon.
• We offer versions for all the above to accommodate Coyote or Big block or Chevy LS engine swaps.

Who else offers all this with so many decades of experience to support the customer after the sale?

7) Regarding recent statements floating around about our legality when we raced AI, we were only directly involved in AI competition 2001-2004 at a time when we ran in fields large enough to actually call it a race.  And we won each championship with a perfect season in 2002 for one of the cars (40 wins out of 40 races.  Our team cars were so much faster than the competition; we were always accused of cheating and taken to the Dyno.  With Guy’s car, and then Keith’s car, at every race where there was a dyno within an hour’s driving distance we got taken there.  At VIR when AI/X ran with GrandAm, they nearly wore out Guy’s AI car on the dyno because he was faster than all the AIX cars but two, and finished second overall.  At times I was accused of running special parts not available.  We don’t remember MM car ever being on the dyno.  To me this is the ultimate honor, when no one can believe it’s legal, but it is.  It wasn’t the motors that made us fast, it was the chassis, which we always tuned the cross weight, roll center height, tilt, body angle and tire pressures for each session on track.  Every part was available for sale on the cars, I personally read tire temps and advised all our customers we raced against as to how to tune their chassis, and we never hid the cars so everyone could come into our tent and see them inside and out.  In our position we cannot afford to cheat, if we got caught it would have killed business.  We did our best to get our customers up to speed to challenge us.  Some eventually did.

I would think those reading this are most interested in finding the best and fastest combinations, not be brand loyal.  We were run over in the market place by marketing hype from other companies that took large portions of our market share by spending big on ads and sales hype, instead of spending on R&D and new product development.  We prefer the later, and so we do have a strong, loyal core of clients that understand and appreciate what we do, and we try to stay loyal to them.  We are still here, and  continue to advise our customers.

Of that loyal core, you may not know that we have some unsung heroes that run and win with fox bodies on dirt tracks, and lately we have Scot Beutte, a Livonia, Michigan based client that built his 93 GR40 Fox body street/open track car back in the 90s.  It is still running the same parts and he is now doing quite well in SCCA rally cross events.  He recently replaced a couple of service parts n his chassis for the first time in nearly 2 decades.  He says, the import contingent that dominates the sport cannot believe what his car can do, and he says he is having more fun than anyone out there.

If you are of that loyal core, we both commend and thank you.

8) One more thing.  If everything goes right Old Blue will be on track again soon with some upgrades.  We’ll see if this old man (me) can still peddle, and if not, we’ll find someone that can.

See you at the track.