PCA event was a success

More changes have been done to the car in preparation for this event and the upcoming ProSolo. Nothing major, some suspension adjustments and an insert into the exhaust to reduce the volume of the exhaust noise. The original sound check told us that the Civic with the original Red Shift exhaust was not going to be legal. Chris provided us with an insert that Jason can describe, that we tested at El Toro with our own sound meter. We are peaking now at 80 dB. Hooray. One major concern out of the way.

Today, we are playing with the Porsche Club at El Toro. We are just one of maybe 5 cars that are not Porsches running. The course is about 1 mile in length with some fast sweepers and offsets, 3 slaloms, a slow tight one, a fast one on the crossover and an even faster one coming in to the finish. There was one critical very slow right and then left turn that we had to get right in order to do well. My best run was the one where I did this turn the best - not right, but better than the other runs.

The times both of us were running were pretty good overall. I'm not sure that there was any other car on street tires that beat our time. The results are not up yet, so I'm not positive on that. I didn't see anybody on street tires go faster, so we'll keep our fingers crossed.

In the timed runs at the end of the day, I ran first, right at the beginning of the timed sessions and ran a 70.3, which held up as the fastest time of the day for quite a while - until Steve Eguina and sons ran in their race tired ESP winning Camaro and some other race tired Porsches ran. Jason followed up with a very nice 71.0 at the end of the day. We were getting some looks from some of the other drivers. Hehe.

The weather was cool, somewhere in the mid 60's and cloudy. I was concerned about the tires heating up with such a long course, but after the first two runs, I figured out that we wouldn't even need the water to cool the tires down. Amazing.

Jason tried a couple of drag style launches to simulate the ProSolo. The clutch ended up slipping until almost half way down the course. It turns out that our clutch won't take those launches given it's age, so I guess we'll just take it easy at the ProSolo (sshh, don't tell anybody).

We have video for today too. The end result is some interesting video that has been very interesting to watch (at least for me). I seem to be reasonably close to the apex cone in slaloms, but missing the other apex cones in sweepers and other places. Watch the videos and see for yourself

http://www.yeohbaby.com/g2/main.php/v/Autocross/PCA_El_Toro_March2007/