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2012 SCCA Nationals

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ACM

20+ Year Contributor
679
56
Dec 11, 2002
Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
OK, since a certain person seems determined to hide his light under a bushel, I guess I'm going to have to do this for him :

Please welcome your 2012 SCCA ProSolo Series ESP champion, Sam Krauss !


Sam beat everyone on both days, finishing first in each heat to not only win the Finale itself, but to score sufficient points - on top of his DC and Toledo Pro wins - to take the series championship. To underscore how impressive this was, the BRAND NEW turbo fitted to the car was smoking terribly and the car started overheating badly - we were hosing down the radiator as well as the intercooler, and had the heater on full blast just to complete Saturday and Sunday. Sam was not allowed to run the Gumout Shootout on Sunday because the car was shunting coolant out of the reservoir all over the concrete as it headed to Impound - the car was not happy...

The car was actually incredible ! The grip, the balance, just phenomenal ! The courses really suited the car I thought - lots of big sweepers, where the car just was so planted - full throttle after initial entry and the car just steered on the throttle all way around -just killer. I cannot describe what it was like to drive the car, it was just amazing, the car was so much faster than me it was just silly.

A huge piece of this performance is down to the rear MaxLock diff from TRE. This is not a sponsorship push, I paid full price for this thing, even though Jon did used to sponsor me. I have driven plenty of rear LSDs, and like all parts, there are upsides and downsides to everything. Take the Quaife front LSD, the upside is when you get in the throttle it pulls the front in tighter - the downside is that if you lift, understeer city - the front pushes horribly. So you learn to drive around it - but god help you if you do have to lift in a turn, your run is destroyed. There are no downsides to the MaxLock - none ! It has no initial preload - or if it does it's so small it's irrelevant. I have no idea what goes on inside a MaxLock - black magic or pixie dust for all I know - what I do know is the thing works unbelievably well, so much better than my previous clutch LSD, so much better than a stock Evo rear LSD, so much better than ANY rear LSD I've ever experienced. How Jon does it I don't know, but I am SO glad he does :) If you're autocrossing and not running Jon's MaxLock, you'd better hope none of your competitors are running one - if they are, you're second at best, and there's not a d*mn thing you can do about it.

As for me, I did not finish dead last, and that was my only goal, so as far as I'm concerned I got a little bit of a win as well, and proves to me that my rehab is progressing positively.


Unfortunately our Solo Nationals did not go as well at all !

We had been testing BFG R1-S tyres prior to Nats and they had been performing incredibly well - quite a bit faster than Hoosier A6s; BFG only offers contingency for Nats, not for Pros, so we ran Hoosiers for the Pro and R1-Ss for Nats. After the Pro we pulled the A6s off the 10.5" wheels and mounted the R1-Ss in their place - we had tested the R1-S on 9" rims which we knew were too narrow, so the fact they were clearly quicker was even more impressive. So we started out day 1 on the R1-S. What a DISASTER !! It was like driving with flat rear tyres - any time we touched the throttle the car went sideways - you'd think we were running an inch and a half of toe-out in the rear. It was horrible, I played with every adjustment available and nothing would bring the car back, it was a complete disaster. We ended Day 1 somewhere down at the bottom - I don't know exactly where, we didn't dare look, but it was clear our day was done, there was no way we could recover from this. So, we swapped back to the Hoosiers and pulled off the BFG stickers. The car was transformed - it was almost as great as it had been during the Pro, and Sam actually posted a run within a couple of hundredths of the class FTD. I discovered afterwards that I had not set everything back exactly to the Pro settings, so my guess is that Sam would have been even faster had I not screwed up. Not that it really matters, since Day 1 was already in the books and there was nothing we could do about that, but it added insult to injury for Sam at least. At least the car didn't overheat...

We switched the R1-Ss back to the wheels we had been testing them on and ran the test course to see if we could understand what the problem was. Marcus Meredith opined we were running far too low tyre pressures, he had been running low 40s and that was where they were happiest. When we tested, we started at BFG's recommended pressure - 42 - and the car skated everywhere with no grip. We steadily lowered the pressures and grip improved dramatically, we got to 28 all around, and the car was incredible. So we started back at 42 on the test course, and the car was awful; we only had 4 runs so we couldn't try loads of pressure combinations, but the car "improved" as the pressures dropped, but was still awful. We have NO idea what happened, the tyres worked great in New England, on tarmac and what little concrete we have, so all I can guess is that it was temperature related, since we don't get 110*F days in Taxachussetts. Baffled, who knows - we certainly don't...
 
Congrats to both of you! And I note that, without the cones on Day 1, Sam still would have been something like 4th at Nationals; or did I read that wrong?
 
Not sure - we were too pi$$ed to look. I remember a 60 second run on Tuesday, but that's' all. Well, maybe...
 
thanks for the report, how frustrating about the picky tires!
 
Good luck this year Sam! Both Charles and Sam go their names in September's Sportscar Magazine on page 42!

When making predictions for the winner of ESP's National Champion, the author states, "...if conditions are ugly, Samuel Kruass might benefit in the Charles Moss Talon,..."

Clean em up boys!
 
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