Pfadt Race Engineering at the Camaro5Fest! - Camaro5 Chevy Camaro Forum / Camaro ZL1, SS and V6 Forums

PfadtRacing · 08-14-2012, 06:41 PM

At Pfadt we knew our early August was going to mean long days and even longer nights. After preparing both our Corvette Z06 and our Camaro ZL1 we hit the road and visited our friends at Katech for the Katech Track Attack and finished up the week at our favorite Camaro event of the year, Camaro5Fest! Needless to say we were really excited to put faces to names, run in the single biggest cruise any of us could remember, and help introduce folks to how a little suspension magic can make their cars way more fun to drive. We definitely got our time and our monies worth and this was maybe the most fun we have had all year long!

For some of us the Thursday morning vendor setup session came just a little bit too early... running on limited sleep and unlimited caffeine we staked out a spot on vendors row right next to East Coast Supercharging and Apex Motorsports.

After a pretty quick setup we spent the afternoon lounging around the host hotel parking lot. We met a lot of great folks from all over North America, swapped stories about events and cars we have seen and worked on, and generally really enjoyed our face to face time. Special thanks to the Utah Camaro group for their warm welcome, Jordan@JDP Motorsports to reserving a spot for us, and everyone else we were able to hang out with for being just generally awesome.

The cruise was awfully impressive. It's pretty rare that you see a lineup of any one particular make that long, and it was especially cool to see a Camaro lineup that long. We would like to take a moment to thank everyone involved in the cruise, from the Indianapolis Police Department to the folks who developed the route... we had a blast.

Finally the actual show began on Friday! We continued to share stories and our suspension expertise with anyone who wanted to stop by the booth. It was a little warm, but it sure did beat the heat we saw earlier in the week in Joliet. Here was our booth after initial setup. Check out the X Pipe for our new Corvette Headers!

We had some of our latest and greatest suspension parts on display at Camaro5... including

Prototype Mag Ride Coilovers
Preproduction units of our Next Generation Camaro V6/V8 Coilovers
Double Adjustable Camaro Coilovers, which are currently powering the Bondurant World Challenge Car driven by Andy Lee.
Corvette Headers... which will soon become V8 Camaro Headers
FE4/FE5/FE6 Specific Sway Bar Package
Trailing Arms and Toe Rods

Overall it was a really nice cross section of parts, and allowed folks to see and touch the latest and greatest hardware available for their Camaro's suspension.

At dinner later that night we happened to pick the right parking garage, next to the right restaurant... and saw Erik from Torq!

The final day was spent holding our tent down against the wind and rain... and trying to catch glimpses of the Fridge working the drag strip like a boss. RPM Transmissions and their EXTREMELY impressive full weight 5th Gen Camaro drag car stole the show from our perspective. 8.943 with a 1.366 60" time was our favorite highlight of the weekends racing. They're using a full complement of Pfadt drag gear, and once the suspension was dialed in they were outrageously fast.

Jordan @ JDP Motorsports also had a very impressive showing at the autox, taking 3rd overall in the autox on a set of our next generation pre-production Camaro coilovers on only 4 runs during the entire 2 day event. Great driving Jordan!

We finally met up with our extremely sweet local girls to make the rounds around the fest! Hopefully you saw them on Saturday morning... here are some final shots from the weekend:

We love the Chevy SSX. If you haven't seen it in person pictures don't do it justice. The flat white with pearl paint is stunning, and the ride height with the Pfadt Coilovers is dialed in perfectly.

Richard Childress Racing/Street Customs fully built Camaro, with the ladies of Pfadt and the always lovely Apex Amanda.

Here is our Pfadt ZL1, equipped with our prototype Mag Ride Coilover package

A shot of the booth, the girls, and our black Z06. This car is riding in our FeatherLight Single Adjustable coilovers, and had recently spent over 100 laps at Autobahn over the previous 2 days. It's still running like a champ even after Johnny O'Connell punished it over the weekend.

We finally got to spend some time at the drag strip staging lanes. Here were some of our favorite photos!

If anyone has photos that you took with our ladies feel free to post em up! There may be a gift certificate in it for you!

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and chatted with us about their Camaro's. We loved hearing all the stories about their drives to the fest, and what they were really looking forward to seeing while attending. We also got a chance to hopefully spread a little knowledge and help people with their future suspension setups!

As one final note, we want to take a minute and thank all of the moderators and volunteers that made this event possible. Without your help and support this wouldn't have been half the event that it was. Special thanks goes out to DragonEye, Tribone, and The_Stache for hanging out with us at the booth!

Doubleblank · 08-15-2012, 09:36 AM

Great to see your pre-production coilovers for the Camaro. I'm guessing production will start....."soon".

I looked at Andy Lee's car recently and he has the reservoirs for the front coilovers mounted on the strut tower brace. Where would one mount them w/o a strut tower brace installed?

I'm currently running Pfadt race asb's, subrame bushings, trailing arms, etc but went with KW Variant 3 coilovers (Pfadt's not available until ????). Everything is set at full stiff and the car corners like it's on rails with a slight tendency towards oversteer. Overall I like the entire setup with one caveat....adjusting the KW's is a pain in the ass. I didn't get to discuss the ease of adjustment on your new coilovers and the race-ready coilovers ay Indy. Are both rebound and damping easily adjustable or do you have to lift the car to get easy access to the adjustment knobs/etc?

PfadtRacing · 08-15-2012, 01:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doubleblank

Great to see your pre-production coilovers for the Camaro. I'm guessing production will start....."soon".

I looked at Andy Lee's car recently and he has the reservoirs for the front coilovers mounted on the strut tower brace. Where would one mount them w/o a strut tower brace installed?

I'm currently running Pfadt race asb's, subrame bushings, trailing arms, etc but went with KW Variant 3 coilovers (Pfadt's not available until ????). Everything is set at full stiff and the car corners like it's on rails with a slight tendency towards oversteer. Overall I like the entire setup with one caveat....adjusting the KW's is a pain in the ass. I didn't get to discuss the ease of adjustment on your new coilovers and the race-ready coilovers ay Indy. Are both rebound and damping easily adjustable or do you have to lift the car to get easy access to the adjustment knobs/etc?

Great to see you out at Indy, and I hope you don't mind us posting up pictures of your car!

On the single adjustable coilovers the single adjuster for both compression and rebound is at the bottom of the shock. You can make adjustments to the rear shocks without lifting the car by reaching in from behind the car to access the adjuster. It's a tight fit and helps to have skinny fingers, but definitely doable without lifting. The fronts are no big deal, and again the adjuster is placed at the bottom of the shock. As a note the single point of adjustment more aggressively effects the compression than rebound.

On the Double adjustables the rebound adjustment will be at the bottom of the shock, and the compression adjustment will be at the canister. You can mount the canister really anywhere you want... it just happens to be pretty easy and convenient to mount to a strut tower brace if you have one. Otherwise anywhere you want to securely mount the canister with a self tapping screw and cushioned clamp would be just fine so long as neither the canister or the lines interfere with normal suspension articulation. To be honest we don't really expect to see too many folks running the doubles for street cars though due to the aggressive valving and spring rates we designed in for race use.

Let me know if you have any more questions, it was really great to see you and your car at the fest this year!

--
Jarrett

Apex Motorsports · 08-15-2012, 06:41 PM

We had a great time hanging with you guys at the show and after hours.

grocerygetter · 08-15-2012, 09:12 PM

Great talking to you guys...my car was the white one with orange stripes and dark grey nurburgrings in tcaudios booth with the pfadt stage 2 kit. We took the exit same time as you in the ZL1 Friday night. Loved talking with you guys about product! I will be calling sooner or later for some other stuff.

PfadtRacing · 08-16-2012, 06:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Apex Chase

We had a great time hanging with you guys at the show and after hours.

Good times were had by all! Let us know if you're ready to take a field trip to SLC this winter!

Quote:

Originally Posted by grocerygetter

Great talking to you guys...my car was the white one with orange stripes and dark grey nurburgrings in tcaudios booth with the pfadt stage 2 kit. We took the exit same time as you in the ZL1 Friday night. Loved talking with you guys about product! I will be calling sooner or later for some other stuff.

Very cool! I definitely remember that car. Let us know if we can help you out with the other stuff you're looking for!

1FAST SS · 08-19-2012, 11:31 AM

A pic taken with the Pfadt ladies.

The_Stache · 08-19-2012, 05:53 PM

Thanks for being there and educating (not just me but others!). I know I learned a lot more about suspension this time around since that was my goal.

Looking forward to seeing the final Coilovers!

PS.. sending you a PM about the engine mounts I talked to one of you about (sorry I can't remember his name!)

08-14-2012, 06:41 PM	#1
PfadtRacing Drives: 2010 Camaro, 2006 Z06 Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: SLC, UT Posts: 3,370	Pfadt Race Engineering at the Camaro5Fest! At Pfadt we knew our early August was going to mean long days and even longer nights. After preparing both our Corvette Z06 and our Camaro ZL1 we hit the road and visited our friends at Katech for the Katech Track Attack and finished up the week at our favorite Camaro event of the year, Camaro5Fest! Needless to say we were really excited to put faces to names, run in the single biggest cruise any of us could remember, and help introduce folks to how a little suspension magic can make their cars way more fun to drive. We definitely got our time and our monies worth and this was maybe the most fun we have had all year long! For some of us the Thursday morning vendor setup session came just a little bit too early... running on limited sleep and unlimited caffeine we staked out a spot on vendors row right next to East Coast Supercharging and Apex Motorsports. After a pretty quick setup we spent the afternoon lounging around the host hotel parking lot. We met a lot of great folks from all over North America, swapped stories about events and cars we have seen and worked on, and generally really enjoyed our face to face time. Special thanks to the Utah Camaro group for their warm welcome, Jordan@JDP Motorsports to reserving a spot for us, and everyone else we were able to hang out with for being just generally awesome. The cruise was awfully impressive. It's pretty rare that you see a lineup of any one particular make that long, and it was especially cool to see a Camaro lineup that long. We would like to take a moment to thank everyone involved in the cruise, from the Indianapolis Police Department to the folks who developed the route... we had a blast. Finally the actual show began on Friday! We continued to share stories and our suspension expertise with anyone who wanted to stop by the booth. It was a little warm, but it sure did beat the heat we saw earlier in the week in Joliet. Here was our booth after initial setup. Check out the X Pipe for our new Corvette Headers! We had some of our latest and greatest suspension parts on display at Camaro5... including Prototype Mag Ride Coilovers Preproduction units of our Next Generation Camaro V6/V8 Coilovers Double Adjustable Camaro Coilovers, which are currently powering the Bondurant World Challenge Car driven by Andy Lee. Corvette Headers... which will soon become V8 Camaro Headers FE4/FE5/FE6 Specific Sway Bar Package Trailing Arms and Toe Rods Overall it was a really nice cross section of parts, and allowed folks to see and touch the latest and greatest hardware available for their Camaro's suspension. At dinner later that night we happened to pick the right parking garage, next to the right restaurant... and saw Erik from Torq! The final day was spent holding our tent down against the wind and rain... and trying to catch glimpses of the Fridge working the drag strip like a boss. RPM Transmissions and their EXTREMELY impressive full weight 5th Gen Camaro drag car stole the show from our perspective. 8.943 with a 1.366 60" time was our favorite highlight of the weekends racing. They're using a full complement of Pfadt drag gear, and once the suspension was dialed in they were outrageously fast. Jordan @ JDP Motorsports also had a very impressive showing at the autox, taking 3rd overall in the autox on a set of our next generation pre-production Camaro coilovers on only 4 runs during the entire 2 day event. Great driving Jordan! We finally met up with our extremely sweet local girls to make the rounds around the fest! Hopefully you saw them on Saturday morning... here are some final shots from the weekend: We love the Chevy SSX. If you haven't seen it in person pictures don't do it justice. The flat white with pearl paint is stunning, and the ride height with the Pfadt Coilovers is dialed in perfectly. Richard Childress Racing/Street Customs fully built Camaro, with the ladies of Pfadt and the always lovely Apex Amanda. Here is our Pfadt ZL1, equipped with our prototype Mag Ride Coilover package A shot of the booth, the girls, and our black Z06. This car is riding in our FeatherLight Single Adjustable coilovers, and had recently spent over 100 laps at Autobahn over the previous 2 days. It's still running like a champ even after Johnny O'Connell punished it over the weekend. We finally got to spend some time at the drag strip staging lanes. Here were some of our favorite photos! If anyone has photos that you took with our ladies feel free to post em up! There may be a gift certificate in it for you! Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and chatted with us about their Camaro's. We loved hearing all the stories about their drives to the fest, and what they were really looking forward to seeing while attending. We also got a chance to hopefully spread a little knowledge and help people with their future suspension setups! As one final note, we want to take a minute and thank all of the moderators and volunteers that made this event possible. Without your help and support this wouldn't have been half the event that it was. Special thanks goes out to DragonEye, Tribone, and The_Stache for hanging out with us at the booth!

08-15-2012, 09:36 AM	#2
Doubleblank Drives: 2010 Camaro SS, 2014 Z28 Join Date: Jan 2012 Location: Houston Posts: 414	Great to see your pre-production coilovers for the Camaro. I'm guessing production will start....."soon". I looked at Andy Lee's car recently and he has the reservoirs for the front coilovers mounted on the strut tower brace. Where would one mount them w/o a strut tower brace installed? I'm currently running Pfadt race asb's, subrame bushings, trailing arms, etc but went with KW Variant 3 coilovers (Pfadt's not available until ????). Everything is set at full stiff and the car corners like it's on rails with a slight tendency towards oversteer. Overall I like the entire setup with one caveat....adjusting the KW's is a pain in the ass. I didn't get to discuss the ease of adjustment on your new coilovers and the race-ready coilovers ay Indy. Are both rebound and damping easily adjustable or do you have to lift the car to get easy access to the adjustment knobs/etc? __________________ ERL 500 ci Short Block, 2in ARH Headers, TSP LS7 Heads, LSXR/NW 102, Forgeline, MGW Shifter, StopTech BBK, Pfadt C/O's, Pfadt ASB's, etc, PowerFab Dynotune

08-15-2012, 09:12 PM	#5
grocerygetter instigator Drives: 2020 6.2 Trail Boss, 2022 XC90 Join Date: Jan 2010 Location: 72034 Posts: 3,979 View My Garage	Great talking to you guys...my car was the white one with orange stripes and dark grey nurburgrings in tcaudios booth with the pfadt stage 2 kit. We took the exit same time as you in the ZL1 Friday night. Loved talking with you guys about product! I will be calling sooner or later for some other stuff. __________________ -John S.

08-19-2012, 11:31 AM	#7
1FAST SS Drives: 2011 Camaro SS Join Date: Nov 2010 Location: Greeley, CO Posts: 769	A pic taken with the Pfadt ladies. Attached Images __________________ 2011 Camaro SS Synergy Green CAI Cold Air Induction, ADM Race Scoop, Apex Washer Bottle Kit, Vengeance Racing Kaotic Cam, DOD/VVT delete and LS3 conversion, American Racing LT Headers, American Racing Headers Off Road pipes, Borla S-Type Catback, FTI Billet Triple Disk 3600 rpm Torque Converter, DSS Aluminium Drive Shaft, AAC Plasma DRL's, Showstopper LED Sidemarkers,Carbon FIber Bow Ties, 35% Window Tint, Llyod's Floor Mats, JBL MS-8 Sound Processor, 2 Alpine PDX-1.600, Alpine PDX-4.100, JL Audio C5-650, JL Audio C5-650x, Alpine T10 Type R Shallow Mount, Stinger Dry Cell Battery Last edited by 1FAST SS; 08-19-2012 at 12:14 PM. Reason: Resize pic

08-19-2012, 05:53 PM	#8
The_Stache SoCal Race Team #13 Drives: 2010 1SS:RS:LS3:SW Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Gilbert, AZ Posts: 1,803 View My Garage	Thanks for being there and educating (not just me but others!). I know I learned a lot more about suspension this time around since that was my goal. Looking forward to seeing the final Coilovers! PS.. sending you a PM about the engine mounts I talked to one of you about (sorry I can't remember his name!) __________________ A.K.A - Diarmadhi (old handle) - So much to do.. So little money Owner : Fast-Stache Industries LLC

08-15-2012, 06:41 PM	#4
Apex Motorsports Drives: 2000 Camaro SS Join Date: Feb 2010 Location: Louisville, Ky. Posts: 25,179	We had a great time hanging with you guys at the show and after hours.