mavisky
DSM Wiseman
- 5,390
- 62
- Sep 13, 2002
-
Atlanta,
Georgia
Race report for 7/22/07
First off let me say sorry for holding this up a little bit but the last few weeks have been rather busy for me to say the least. I'll explain a little more at the end.
Well to start with as most of you know I finally got my new tire setup on the car with Falken RT-615's in 275/40-17 running on Ford Mustang FR500 knockoffs sized at 17x9 with a +24mm offset. (writeup on this to come this week as well) I'm still working with Jason Mertes (Elvenhome21 on this forum) and his company Disturbed Racing in developing some cost effective camber plates, but unfortunately some new components got returned to him via DHL as they apparently couldn't find my house in our housing edition. So I unfortunately had to run this event without any sort of camber or caster adjustment. The car looked to have somewhere around -1 degree or so up front and I set it up with a slight toe-out setup to try to get these tires to bite. Having just mounted my tires up a week or so before and only having a few miles on them, they were anything but grippy as they still had a bit of the mold release compound on them.
The course was setup using two parking lots at a new venue for us. Unfortunately this event site hadn't seen anything other than employee parking so it began to come apart on us in a few spots through the day, and getting to run last, this meant new lovely cracks, crevices, and debris that wasn't there on the course walk. The course had a few quick spots where I was really able to open the vehicle up, but was also very tight and twisty in other spots.
I was back running in the street mod on street tires class which is a regional class created to let those of us with modded street cars play without buying expensive R-compound tires to stay competitive. These truly are street cars as most are daily drivers or at the very least weekend toys. The top of the chart usually has an interesting mix of awd, fwd, and rwd cars thrown into it.
For this weekend I was running in the last and final heat, which means I was able to relax and enjoy the first heat, work the second heat, and finish up by racing the third heat. Now this can be a good thing at some event sites as the cold pavement in the morning means little traction, and letting the guys scrub the course clean means a nice racing line for me. This event didn't go as planned though as the 2nd heat was marred by an overzealous driver (who wasn't anywhere close to being competitive within his class) took out one of our timing light reflectors. After nearly an hour of repairs we were back under way. By the time I'd come to the starting line though it was now 3pm, it was 95 degrees air temp outside, and the course was literally coming up in hand size chunks in spots creating a less than ideal racing line and a surface that was so greasy and loose that without the needed camber I was going to have a hard time getting the car to bite on these fresh tires.
Ok so that lays out my 35 excuses
, but onto the racing.
Knowing full well that the car may not be the most competitive this weekend I allowed my girlfriend to ride along for all 5 runs, figuring if I was close I'd politely ask her to step out for a few runs for me to really make a go at it. We pull to the line and the car is idling well and seems to be running pretty strong today. The times start to roll in and it looks like most people are in the 50's for their first runs. Knowing what the other classes were running that day I know that the times will get faster though. On the starting line I get the wave off onto the course, dial up 4500 rpm and the car lugs off the line thanks to the new taller tires. I floor it trying to get some speed up and she spins them a hair, short shift into second as I make the first little kink from the start line and it plants every ounce of power and rips down the short straight towards the first real turn. I get hard on the brakes expecting it to slide at this speed, but with the fat new tires it just throws me against the belts and I'm having to let off the gas to coast back through the corner as I've slowed down way too much for the first turn. I figure I'll leave it in 2nd this run to see just how bad it's lugging throughout the course.
I clear the turn and the car picks speed back up again just in time for me to let off to snake through the slalom. 2nd gear works good here as it lets me go wot for a bit on another short straight into a set of twisty and tight 180's. I keep it in second gear here but it's dead obvious that this is not the right gear for the corner. The car is in 2nd gear at around 2000rpm and just struggling to build boost as I start to get into the big sweeper. Luckily mid-corner it comes to life so I go part-throttle through it and let her rip back to the crossover. Hard on the brakes to make this tight left hand corner so you can get on the left of the first cone and once again second gear is just fine through this slalom as well. Then you could sneak through the next corner and around the last two 180's and across the finish line.
After the first run my buddy Jeremy with his gutted modded civic had turned in a 49.949 and I was next behind him with a 50.262 second pass. Not bad I figure for being in the wrong gear in a few different spots. I'm soon finding out that the taller tires mixed with the taller fwd turbo gearing in this transmission are leaving me out to dry in about 1/2 the corners where it's either too fast to really bother with going down to 1st and then upshifting to second again but also just a bit too slow to keep it in 2nd gear as I'm dropping out of boost pretty bad. It's evident I'm going to have to learn how to do a little more right foot brake boosting through some of these corners.
Starting off the second heat I drop back to 4th after Mike in his WRX wagon with an sti drivetrain and Thomas in his turbocharged cavalier both drop into the 49 second bracket before I even get to the line. I go out and bog the launch again and overcook the crossover just missing a wall of cones but slowing me way down. Final result is a miniscule improvement to a 50.1 second pass. Not gonna cut it.
Third heat and everyone starts getting fast. Chris Smith in his Version 7 sti swapped 2.5rs leaps into the lead laying down a pass in the 48's with Tyler Ryan and his Stage 3 equipped SRT-4 dropping down as well. Jeremy shaves a second off of his best time to become the third car in the 48's after this heat. Mike turns in a near identical 49 to his last run and now Thomas has shaved a few tenths off of his time to be right on his heels. All told I'm now sitting in 6th place behind these guys when I finally get a hang of that crossover and turn in my first 49 of the day.
On my way back to the pits though I notice that the car is starting to get warm, and I'm beginning to freak out as the car has never overheated once on me at an autox. Everything looks ok under the hood so I let it run with the fans on and proceed to try to get a grip on the car with this new setup.
As I'm waiting on the 4th heat to come around I get word that Eric Lawson in his KA powered 98 240sx just turned in a 49 as well but with one cone. So that's one more person I have to worry about. The girlfriend is eating this up and I don't have the heart to kick her out so I let her ride along and we manage to drop down to a 49.5 on this run which keeps me in 6th place, but I'm still about 3 tenths back of a 2-3 position jump at this point.
Amy steps out of the car for the 5th run and I'm just trying to keep the car cool enough to make this 5th run. I get a decent launch and through the course clean and fast until the first tight 180's where the car misses the shift down to first and in anger I light up the tires while trying to get the car back on boost through the sweeper. The rest of the course goes pretty smooth, but that mis-shift hurt me and drops me back 3 tenths from my previous run. During this 6th heat Eric lays down a monster improved time of 48.125 only to be eeked out by Chris Smith's 2.5rs being the only car to run a 47 all day in our class. With Eric sliding up and me not being able to improve on my 49.5 I end up in a sad and frustrating 7th for the day. But all is not lost as I learned some things about the new setup, the girlfriend loves racing now, and the car came home in one piece (an intermittently overheating piece, but one piece none the less).
The next event should be fun as it's a challenge event up at the Tire Rack facility in South Bend and is a challenge event between us and the South Bend SCCA chapter. Hoping to have the camber plates in the car and aligned as it desperately needs more front end grip, should have those parts as soon as DHL figures out how to operate Google maps.
Now as to why I haven't been able to post this week, I've been attempting to clean out my girlfriends house but we also had a very interesting weekend planned. On Sunday the 29th both Amy and I headed out to Chicagoland Speedway to take part in the Mario Andretti Driving experience. Pictures and a short writeup of it to come, needless to say 148.56mph around the tri-oval at the wheel of one of their Indy-style cars is awfully damn cool.
I'm trying to find some pics, but since I don't have a photography sponsor for the car, my girlfriend was riding with me, and apparently all the photographers were racing in my heat there's not much out there yet that I've found. Here's a few from adding the flares for those who may have not seen the car yet.
First off let me say sorry for holding this up a little bit but the last few weeks have been rather busy for me to say the least. I'll explain a little more at the end.
Well to start with as most of you know I finally got my new tire setup on the car with Falken RT-615's in 275/40-17 running on Ford Mustang FR500 knockoffs sized at 17x9 with a +24mm offset. (writeup on this to come this week as well) I'm still working with Jason Mertes (Elvenhome21 on this forum) and his company Disturbed Racing in developing some cost effective camber plates, but unfortunately some new components got returned to him via DHL as they apparently couldn't find my house in our housing edition. So I unfortunately had to run this event without any sort of camber or caster adjustment. The car looked to have somewhere around -1 degree or so up front and I set it up with a slight toe-out setup to try to get these tires to bite. Having just mounted my tires up a week or so before and only having a few miles on them, they were anything but grippy as they still had a bit of the mold release compound on them.
The course was setup using two parking lots at a new venue for us. Unfortunately this event site hadn't seen anything other than employee parking so it began to come apart on us in a few spots through the day, and getting to run last, this meant new lovely cracks, crevices, and debris that wasn't there on the course walk. The course had a few quick spots where I was really able to open the vehicle up, but was also very tight and twisty in other spots.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
I was back running in the street mod on street tires class which is a regional class created to let those of us with modded street cars play without buying expensive R-compound tires to stay competitive. These truly are street cars as most are daily drivers or at the very least weekend toys. The top of the chart usually has an interesting mix of awd, fwd, and rwd cars thrown into it.
For this weekend I was running in the last and final heat, which means I was able to relax and enjoy the first heat, work the second heat, and finish up by racing the third heat. Now this can be a good thing at some event sites as the cold pavement in the morning means little traction, and letting the guys scrub the course clean means a nice racing line for me. This event didn't go as planned though as the 2nd heat was marred by an overzealous driver (who wasn't anywhere close to being competitive within his class) took out one of our timing light reflectors. After nearly an hour of repairs we were back under way. By the time I'd come to the starting line though it was now 3pm, it was 95 degrees air temp outside, and the course was literally coming up in hand size chunks in spots creating a less than ideal racing line and a surface that was so greasy and loose that without the needed camber I was going to have a hard time getting the car to bite on these fresh tires.
Ok so that lays out my 35 excuses
, but onto the racing. Knowing full well that the car may not be the most competitive this weekend I allowed my girlfriend to ride along for all 5 runs, figuring if I was close I'd politely ask her to step out for a few runs for me to really make a go at it. We pull to the line and the car is idling well and seems to be running pretty strong today. The times start to roll in and it looks like most people are in the 50's for their first runs. Knowing what the other classes were running that day I know that the times will get faster though. On the starting line I get the wave off onto the course, dial up 4500 rpm and the car lugs off the line thanks to the new taller tires. I floor it trying to get some speed up and she spins them a hair, short shift into second as I make the first little kink from the start line and it plants every ounce of power and rips down the short straight towards the first real turn. I get hard on the brakes expecting it to slide at this speed, but with the fat new tires it just throws me against the belts and I'm having to let off the gas to coast back through the corner as I've slowed down way too much for the first turn. I figure I'll leave it in 2nd this run to see just how bad it's lugging throughout the course.
I clear the turn and the car picks speed back up again just in time for me to let off to snake through the slalom. 2nd gear works good here as it lets me go wot for a bit on another short straight into a set of twisty and tight 180's. I keep it in second gear here but it's dead obvious that this is not the right gear for the corner. The car is in 2nd gear at around 2000rpm and just struggling to build boost as I start to get into the big sweeper. Luckily mid-corner it comes to life so I go part-throttle through it and let her rip back to the crossover. Hard on the brakes to make this tight left hand corner so you can get on the left of the first cone and once again second gear is just fine through this slalom as well. Then you could sneak through the next corner and around the last two 180's and across the finish line.
After the first run my buddy Jeremy with his gutted modded civic had turned in a 49.949 and I was next behind him with a 50.262 second pass. Not bad I figure for being in the wrong gear in a few different spots. I'm soon finding out that the taller tires mixed with the taller fwd turbo gearing in this transmission are leaving me out to dry in about 1/2 the corners where it's either too fast to really bother with going down to 1st and then upshifting to second again but also just a bit too slow to keep it in 2nd gear as I'm dropping out of boost pretty bad. It's evident I'm going to have to learn how to do a little more right foot brake boosting through some of these corners.
Starting off the second heat I drop back to 4th after Mike in his WRX wagon with an sti drivetrain and Thomas in his turbocharged cavalier both drop into the 49 second bracket before I even get to the line. I go out and bog the launch again and overcook the crossover just missing a wall of cones but slowing me way down. Final result is a miniscule improvement to a 50.1 second pass. Not gonna cut it.
Third heat and everyone starts getting fast. Chris Smith in his Version 7 sti swapped 2.5rs leaps into the lead laying down a pass in the 48's with Tyler Ryan and his Stage 3 equipped SRT-4 dropping down as well. Jeremy shaves a second off of his best time to become the third car in the 48's after this heat. Mike turns in a near identical 49 to his last run and now Thomas has shaved a few tenths off of his time to be right on his heels. All told I'm now sitting in 6th place behind these guys when I finally get a hang of that crossover and turn in my first 49 of the day.
On my way back to the pits though I notice that the car is starting to get warm, and I'm beginning to freak out as the car has never overheated once on me at an autox. Everything looks ok under the hood so I let it run with the fans on and proceed to try to get a grip on the car with this new setup.
As I'm waiting on the 4th heat to come around I get word that Eric Lawson in his KA powered 98 240sx just turned in a 49 as well but with one cone. So that's one more person I have to worry about. The girlfriend is eating this up and I don't have the heart to kick her out so I let her ride along and we manage to drop down to a 49.5 on this run which keeps me in 6th place, but I'm still about 3 tenths back of a 2-3 position jump at this point.
Amy steps out of the car for the 5th run and I'm just trying to keep the car cool enough to make this 5th run. I get a decent launch and through the course clean and fast until the first tight 180's where the car misses the shift down to first and in anger I light up the tires while trying to get the car back on boost through the sweeper. The rest of the course goes pretty smooth, but that mis-shift hurt me and drops me back 3 tenths from my previous run. During this 6th heat Eric lays down a monster improved time of 48.125 only to be eeked out by Chris Smith's 2.5rs being the only car to run a 47 all day in our class. With Eric sliding up and me not being able to improve on my 49.5 I end up in a sad and frustrating 7th for the day. But all is not lost as I learned some things about the new setup, the girlfriend loves racing now, and the car came home in one piece (an intermittently overheating piece, but one piece none the less).
The next event should be fun as it's a challenge event up at the Tire Rack facility in South Bend and is a challenge event between us and the South Bend SCCA chapter. Hoping to have the camber plates in the car and aligned as it desperately needs more front end grip, should have those parts as soon as DHL figures out how to operate Google maps.
Now as to why I haven't been able to post this week, I've been attempting to clean out my girlfriends house but we also had a very interesting weekend planned. On Sunday the 29th both Amy and I headed out to Chicagoland Speedway to take part in the Mario Andretti Driving experience. Pictures and a short writeup of it to come, needless to say 148.56mph around the tri-oval at the wheel of one of their Indy-style cars is awfully damn cool.
I'm trying to find some pics, but since I don't have a photography sponsor for the car, my girlfriend was riding with me, and apparently all the photographers were racing in my heat there's not much out there yet that I've found. Here's a few from adding the flares for those who may have not seen the car yet.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
You must be logged in to view this image or video.
