Enough about car building, time to have some fun

A lot of hard work has been put into the car to get it where it is today. Big kudos to Jason and Daniel for all the time they have put in. It's time to put the car to the test to see if the changes make any difference to the performance of the car.

Jason goes out of his way to drop the car off at Daniel's house before the practice event so that I don't have a super long drive before the event. Daniel is in a nice quiet residential neighborhood. We find the car outside the house and everything is so neatly packed - Jason style. I've never used a removeable steering wheel before and Jason has given me instructions on how to re-attach the wheel. The first problem to overcome - where is the #$%^ wheel. I finally find it neatly tucked behind the drivers seat.

With the steering wheel attached, I start the car. I get two surprises. Jason has left me a present. The stereo is cranked up jamming Initial D and the exhaust is LOUD. I expected the exhaust to be loud from previous conversations with Jason, but wow! It's early, way too early to be so loud, so I'm short shifting to try to keep the noise down and not wake the neighbors as we leave the neighborhood.

With the recent changes to the car, the expectation is that the exhaust and headers will make a noticeable difference in acceleration. Unfortunately, I can't tell any difference - though it may be because I have spent so little time in the car prior to the change.

In the morning, before I start my work session (before my practice), we find out that the support vehicle has a dead battery. Time to replace an old tired battery that failed without warning. This becomes the priority, so as soon as I'm done with my work assignment, we jump start the CR-V and go off to look for a replacement battery. By the time we get back, I've missed most of the 1st session of practice. No matter, we start going and with each run, we are taking almost a second off each lap until we are in the mid 56's (down from 59's). The car feels good and planted, not tail happy like we would have expected given the suspension settings.

Jason arrives after lunch and gets to try the car out and comments on how 'stable' the car feels. We look at the video footage and I'm surprised by how much I'm missing apexes. We figure out that even though we can't feel it, the car is understeering, so we have some suspension setup to work on.

We are concerned about the loudness of the exhaust, so we borrow a sound meter and find that @ 4000 RPM, we are registering 105 db @ 15 feet and 95 db @ 50 feet. This is way too loud for an exhaust that is claimed to be 89 db @ 50 feet. We'll talk to Chris about this and see how we can get this fixed.

Given that we knew going into this practice that we had a 'bad' upper control arm and questionable suspension setup, I'm still happy with the way the car feels and the speed that we are finding. I think we ended up around 1 second faster than any other STS car at the practice. Unfortunately, Steve Ekstrand wasn't there to serve up a benchmark for us. This time of course does not include Ken Motonishi's time that was 1.1 seconds faster than ours - on old Kumho MX's. We are looking forward to the Championship event on Sunday.

Unfortunately, the event crew decide to cancel the event for various reasons. I don't agree with the way the event was cancelled, but that's water under the bridge. We didn't get to race, which was a shame. Oh well. Until the next time.

Here are a few MakoFoto's from Saturdays Practice: