gixxerdrew
DSM Wiseman
- 664
- 21
- Oct 5, 2007
-
Yokohama, Japan,
Asia
As many of you know it has been a while since you heard anything from my car.
For those that dont know me or the history, this is my 1997 Eclipse GST Spyder that competed in 2009/2010 US Time Attack events. In our most notable victories we dominated rounds of Redline Time Attack including beating out all the RWD and most AWD cars (except one that later admitted cheating) in street class at Willow Springs and then moving to Limited class where it won back to back Super Lap Battle Championships in 2009/2010. Our practice time of 1:54.0 at RTA 2010 season opener is still the fastest known lap time at button willow for a FWD car on treaded tires.
So first I will tell you that the car is now in Australia where it is preparing to compete at the World Time Attack Challenge 2013 in Sydney.
What has happened with this car to date has been nothing short of amazing and I have to say thank you to everyone who put their heart and soul into making it this far. I never imagined that I would see my shade tree built grass roots race car compete overseas at the highest level of the sport or turn into anything as extreme as it did. I will never forget working on it in the carport of my apartment in Berkeley back in 2001, I knew nothing about cars back then! I have been through everything with this car, spinning at 180mph on the dry lake, it has nearly taken my life and it has given me my life, the work I did on it broke me into a career on professional racing. I've lost girlfriends over it, I've sacrificed too much, I've had sweet victories and bitter defeats. I got married to a girl I would have never met if I hadn't done what I did. It has become a part of me now.
So I am sure everyone is wondering whats happened to the car since you last saw it compete... that is a long story, but I will try to give you the run down.
I made a lot of bad decisions in the management of my team. I chose a lot of the wrong people to work on it and I suffered for it. In my defense I was living back and forth between Japan and the US at the time (now full time in Japan) and I couldn't be near the car. My finances had gotten worse as a result of my personal situation and getting married, so that didn't help either.
What I learned from all of that is that I don't care how long it takes, I want to do the car the right way no matter what and with the right people. I want to involve only people who care about the car, have the skill to do it proerly and want to achieve with it. Anyone in the middle will do the job halfway and that is worse than not doing it at all. Racing takes so much heart, you work 100x harder than you would for anything else. You push yourself harder than you ever thought you could. I guess that is what I love about the sport. To see that kind of camaraderie and to see the most clever and hardest working people rewarded. It is rare to have that kind of justice in this world.
Since we started doing Time Attack the concept was always to go fast by learning. We tried to use the car as a platform to experiment with our ideas and learn from them. So I guess I had a lot to learn on the side of managing the team as well.
What happened in 2010 was that even though we walked away with the 1st place trophy and a back to back title, we knew the car had reached a plateau where it just couldn't go any faster without a major rework. We actually damaged an engine on the winning lap due to oil starvation. We were sustaining 1.9 lateral G forces in one of the corners on our NT01 tires and saw momentary zero oil pres. It was the inevitable time that we could not race again without a Magnus dry sump.
We also knew that we had overrun the limit of the stock gearbox. We DNFd an event we had in the bag because of two broken gearboxes. It was our weakest link. We had also managed somehow to muck up the once beautiful electrical system and that needed to be completely redone now with an upgraded DAQ system to help ensure reliability.
I started plugging away on this monumental task little by little, whenever I was in the US and I really struggled to find good people. Everything I tried felt like just spinning my wheels. The car has tested I think five or six times since then and nothing but failures, I thought I was banging my head against the wall
.
Jeff Jordan from Jordan Innovations came in and rewired the car finally progress! We had found our electrical system reliability. now that was good but with the dry sump development the engine came in and out more times than I can count and small mistakes and learning curve killed two engine builds in the process.
The gearbox was another story, it took quite some time to get the money together and I purchased a Magnus/PAR dog-box gear set. Again learning curve and bad staffing turned this into a struggle, we damaged an input shaft and many many linkages, two axles, shift rails more times than I can count. Same story as the engine, gearbox in, gearbox out, send off for rebuild, get it back, break it again. Sam at RRE really tried to help us out as well and did several rebuilds but it was the way we were using the gearbox that was the problem.
Enter Tim Zimmer from TMZ. Tim will be posting some blog updates here as well so I will let him talk more about what he did to resolve the gearbox and clutch issues.
So here we are today. On the last test of the car it was somewhat successful, everyone worked hard and I had gotten back to people who cared about the car working on it the test was well managed and went smoothly. KBR my oldest sponsor tried and true was there a long with Beau who you all know well from this board. We found a lot of small problems and one major one. I think we are getting close to the better part of the reliability curve. But we were out of time, the car shipped to Australia.
The car is now in the hands of GT Auto Garage, they are reputed as one of the top shops in Australia (something not easily done) and I have full faith in their ability to put the car together. But they are up against the remainder of the bugs to try and fix them in no time.
Our driver has been selected, Tom Sutherland. A top shelf driver I worked with in American Le Mans, the last race I saw from him he took out second place at ALMS Laguna Seca in an LMP car.
We are expecting big things from him.
This year will be no doubt a challenge for the team, when I delivered the car to Australia the guys discovered problems inside the engine left over from the bad staffing days and they are putting it back together and TEM Machine is helping ou t to get us back on track as well.
The biggest problem we discovered at the last test was that the improved aero that I designed and David Park built was making so much downforce it was causing large deflections in the chassis. GT Auto have cut the nose of the car off and rebuilt a tubular structure to support the aero. The front aero was totally reworked, the new design makes nearly double the downforce and looks sharp to boot. To give you some idea, we tested these parts by two guys standing on the splitter and David ran over the front diffuser with his nissan frontier, it was fine. At 120mph ... it bent the car. I designed a new dual element wing to balance it out which is produced by APR and the prototype of this wing is now installed as well. We are hoping to see a major jump in performance but we have a lot of things working against us at the moment.
The competition is stiff this year, the Mighty Mouse car is possibly the fastest FWD car in the world right now. Having run just five seconds off of Sierra Sierra's lap time they are right in the ballpark with Chris Rado's Scions of fame and he will likely get faster this year. The BYP Integra and many others are digging in, set for a dogfight to take this title. We are starting on our back foot for sure after the troubled history and with very little time to put the car together. We will likely not see a test day before the event. We are also bringing in an international driver who has never been to the track before and getting him up to speed with the team. All of these factors weigh heavily against us but we are determined to fight to the end. We have a history of coming from behind to win so there is reason to have faith in us.
Thank you for reading. Please follow our updates and root for us this year. Thank you so much
-Andrew Brilliant
For those that dont know me or the history, this is my 1997 Eclipse GST Spyder that competed in 2009/2010 US Time Attack events. In our most notable victories we dominated rounds of Redline Time Attack including beating out all the RWD and most AWD cars (except one that later admitted cheating) in street class at Willow Springs and then moving to Limited class where it won back to back Super Lap Battle Championships in 2009/2010. Our practice time of 1:54.0 at RTA 2010 season opener is still the fastest known lap time at button willow for a FWD car on treaded tires.
So first I will tell you that the car is now in Australia where it is preparing to compete at the World Time Attack Challenge 2013 in Sydney.
What has happened with this car to date has been nothing short of amazing and I have to say thank you to everyone who put their heart and soul into making it this far. I never imagined that I would see my shade tree built grass roots race car compete overseas at the highest level of the sport or turn into anything as extreme as it did. I will never forget working on it in the carport of my apartment in Berkeley back in 2001, I knew nothing about cars back then! I have been through everything with this car, spinning at 180mph on the dry lake, it has nearly taken my life and it has given me my life, the work I did on it broke me into a career on professional racing. I've lost girlfriends over it, I've sacrificed too much, I've had sweet victories and bitter defeats. I got married to a girl I would have never met if I hadn't done what I did. It has become a part of me now.
So I am sure everyone is wondering whats happened to the car since you last saw it compete... that is a long story, but I will try to give you the run down.
I made a lot of bad decisions in the management of my team. I chose a lot of the wrong people to work on it and I suffered for it. In my defense I was living back and forth between Japan and the US at the time (now full time in Japan) and I couldn't be near the car. My finances had gotten worse as a result of my personal situation and getting married, so that didn't help either.
What I learned from all of that is that I don't care how long it takes, I want to do the car the right way no matter what and with the right people. I want to involve only people who care about the car, have the skill to do it proerly and want to achieve with it. Anyone in the middle will do the job halfway and that is worse than not doing it at all. Racing takes so much heart, you work 100x harder than you would for anything else. You push yourself harder than you ever thought you could. I guess that is what I love about the sport. To see that kind of camaraderie and to see the most clever and hardest working people rewarded. It is rare to have that kind of justice in this world.
Since we started doing Time Attack the concept was always to go fast by learning. We tried to use the car as a platform to experiment with our ideas and learn from them. So I guess I had a lot to learn on the side of managing the team as well.
What happened in 2010 was that even though we walked away with the 1st place trophy and a back to back title, we knew the car had reached a plateau where it just couldn't go any faster without a major rework. We actually damaged an engine on the winning lap due to oil starvation. We were sustaining 1.9 lateral G forces in one of the corners on our NT01 tires and saw momentary zero oil pres. It was the inevitable time that we could not race again without a Magnus dry sump.
We also knew that we had overrun the limit of the stock gearbox. We DNFd an event we had in the bag because of two broken gearboxes. It was our weakest link. We had also managed somehow to muck up the once beautiful electrical system and that needed to be completely redone now with an upgraded DAQ system to help ensure reliability.
I started plugging away on this monumental task little by little, whenever I was in the US and I really struggled to find good people. Everything I tried felt like just spinning my wheels. The car has tested I think five or six times since then and nothing but failures, I thought I was banging my head against the wall
.Jeff Jordan from Jordan Innovations came in and rewired the car finally progress! We had found our electrical system reliability. now that was good but with the dry sump development the engine came in and out more times than I can count and small mistakes and learning curve killed two engine builds in the process
. The gearbox was another story, it took quite some time to get the money together and I purchased a Magnus/PAR dog-box gear set. Again learning curve and bad staffing turned this into a struggle, we damaged an input shaft and many many linkages, two axles, shift rails more times than I can count. Same story as the engine, gearbox in, gearbox out, send off for rebuild, get it back, break it again. Sam at RRE really tried to help us out as well and did several rebuilds but it was the way we were using the gearbox that was the problem.
Enter Tim Zimmer from TMZ. Tim will be posting some blog updates here as well so I will let him talk more about what he did to resolve the gearbox and clutch issues.
So here we are today. On the last test of the car it was somewhat successful, everyone worked hard and I had gotten back to people who cared about the car working on it the test was well managed and went smoothly. KBR my oldest sponsor tried and true was there a long with Beau who you all know well from this board. We found a lot of small problems and one major one. I think we are getting close to the better part of the reliability curve. But we were out of time, the car shipped to Australia.
The car is now in the hands of GT Auto Garage, they are reputed as one of the top shops in Australia (something not easily done) and I have full faith in their ability to put the car together. But they are up against the remainder of the bugs to try and fix them in no time.
Our driver has been selected, Tom Sutherland. A top shelf driver I worked with in American Le Mans, the last race I saw from him he took out second place at ALMS Laguna Seca in an LMP car.
We are expecting big things from him.This year will be no doubt a challenge for the team, when I delivered the car to Australia the guys discovered problems inside the engine left over from the bad staffing days and they are putting it back together and TEM Machine is helping ou t to get us back on track as well.
The biggest problem we discovered at the last test was that the improved aero that I designed and David Park built was making so much downforce it was causing large deflections in the chassis. GT Auto have cut the nose of the car off and rebuilt a tubular structure to support the aero. The front aero was totally reworked, the new design makes nearly double the downforce and looks sharp to boot. To give you some idea, we tested these parts by two guys standing on the splitter and David ran over the front diffuser with his nissan frontier, it was fine. At 120mph ... it bent the car. I designed a new dual element wing to balance it out which is produced by APR and the prototype of this wing is now installed as well. We are hoping to see a major jump in performance but we have a lot of things working against us at the moment.
The competition is stiff this year, the Mighty Mouse car is possibly the fastest FWD car in the world right now. Having run just five seconds off of Sierra Sierra's lap time they are right in the ballpark with Chris Rado's Scions of fame and he will likely get faster this year. The BYP Integra and many others are digging in, set for a dogfight to take this title. We are starting on our back foot for sure after the troubled history and with very little time to put the car together. We will likely not see a test day before the event. We are also bringing in an international driver who has never been to the track before and getting him up to speed with the team. All of these factors weigh heavily against us but we are determined to fight to the end. We have a history of coming from behind to win so there is reason to have faith in us.
Thank you for reading. Please follow our updates and root for us this year. Thank you so much
-Andrew Brilliant
