Discovery at practice

A lot of changes have happened in the last few weeks to our car. I'm sure Jason will provide the specifics about what's changed to the car. Moe has been hard at work fixing the car (not upgrading).

Given Jason's feedback from driving the car on the street, I was looking forward to a car that would feel and drive very differently. The anticipation was killing me. I was so excited.

We get to the practice nice and early to get ready, walk the course and go to work on course. After our work assignment, it's time to take the first run. Moe has come by to check out the scene and plans to stay till around lunch time. Jason gets ready to go out and we put on the tires that were freshly mounted since we corded the last set. These were used tires from a friend that had nearly full tread on them.

On the very first turn of the first run, the car was pushing and it was not how the car felt on the street with the 'old' tires. The car continued to push the rest of the way around the course. Maybe it's just the old 'new' tires that have oxidized and just need to be scrubbed. I take my run and it's pushing very badly. When Jason goes out again, we try spinning the wheels to burn off some of the oxidized rubber. It doesn't seem to help at all. The good news is that the car feels like it has enough power to pull the car off line in a turn when you get back on the gas.

We have to figure out what's wrong with the car and why it's behaving this way. With the changes that have been made in the last few weeks, we expected the car to feel great. We suspected the tires but weren't sure. We talked about it and Daniel came to the rescue with the suggestion to try the old tires and see how the car feels before we make any other changes, so we did. The car felt better with the old tires, so it wasn't anything else that has been done. Now for the tough decision. It's almost 11:30 on Saturday and what tires are we going to run tomorrow and what do we do with the rest of the practice? If we stay on these tires, we'll be creamed tomorrow and we aren't sure if we'll be able to get another set of tires mounted in time.

Jason makes a few calls and JLB Motorsports comes to the rescue. They are open and will mount tires for us immediately, so we start the trek from California Speedway to Jason's house, pick up the wheels and tires, go over to JLB, get the tires mounted and head back to Fontana. All in all, not too bad. We did the round trip in about 2 hours. When we arrive, no cars are running. We see the super fast Berry-mobile on stopped on course with a bunch of people around it. It turns out that shortly after we left, they stopped for lunch and the Berry Evo was the 2nd car out in the afternoon, so nobody else had run either.

We put the replacement tires on and get in line to take our first runs in the afternoon. The car feels way better. It now turns in. The car still gets pulled off line in a turn when you accelerate, however, not as much as when we were on the shitty tires. We have made a little progress. However, the tail is still absolutely buttoned down, so something is still not set right. We try playing with the rear tire pressures, going down into the mid 20's and up as high as 50 to try things. The tail is starting to rotate at 50 psi in the rear - a little more progress. It's still not right and we are still off the pace, so after further discussion, Jason suggests that we raise the rear to put more weight on the front. Now we make a little more progress. the tail is now rotating a little more. It's the end of the day before we get to this point, so it's too late to try and make more changes, so we try to get a little seat time in with this setting to get ready for tomorrow's points event.

Moe had such a good time that he decided to stay until almost the very end of the day. He took lots of photos and went for a couple of rides with other people. I think he's hooked and he will be back.