San Diego Solo National Tour - Day 2

Sunday rolls around and it's a nice day. It looks like we will have consistent weather condition for everybody during our heat. That's nice as it hasn't always been that way.

Last night, we talked about how the car was handling and what we could do to change things. I wanted the rear to be more stable to allow us to attack. Based on our available choices, we decided to try something that we hadn't tried at Qualcomm before - we put the full tread RE-11's that we had on the 7" rims on the rear to see if that would have been better than the partial tread tires on 7.5" rims.



However, with the undiagnosed and irritating high rpm stutter, we would need to continue to shift into third when the rpm went up. Where that shift point was going to be was an unknown at this point in time.



This is a tricky course with several locations where it almost feels a little like a WRC event where you had to commit to the turn and a certain amount of throttle upon entry without being able to see the exit of the turn. It would have been really nice to actually try to attack the course with a car that is 100%.

There seems to be a pattern emerging for me as I'm dirty on the first run again (that makes 4 dirty runs in a row). Jason is able to stay clean and puts a good run in the books. Now he can start chipping away at the time. However, we do find the spot where the car stutters and we have to shift to 3rd. It's not a good spot. It's half way up the hill. That leaves us trying to climb the rest of the hill and all the way across the hill in 3rd. Not much we can do about it. We just have to deal with it.

Jason goes faster in his second run and so do I. Amazingly, this is my first clean run the entire weekend - it's fast enough to put me into the trophies in 6th spot.




Nothing is guaranteed in ST. I have a choice to make. Do I put a safe run in the books to stay in the trophies or do I go for it? I decide to go for it. Guess what, I'm dirty again and others are able to go faster. I end up falling out of the trophies. Oh well.

Jason was able to go faster too with his last run being his best. Unfortunately, there is too big a gap to be made up and neither one of us are able to finish in the trophies.

We'll go home, try to figure out what's wrong with the car and come back to race another day.