BMWCCA event at the Santa Anita Raceway

Wowee, we get to play at a new venue - the Santa Anita Raceway in Arcadia. On top of that, Jason has volunteered to do the course design with the following criteria - straightforward for novices, drivers will probably be in RWD vehicles with about 300+ HP, the course should flow clockwise and have a showcase turn for spectators in the NE corner.

Jason puts together a great course using some simple elements and on paper, it looks like it will be fun. However, without an accurate map that is to scale, we aren't sure of actual spacing and how the elements will actually fit together. After talking about it, we know that adjustments will most likely need to be made the day the course is set up.

The lot is not available for set up the day before and Jason recruits several volunteers from the SCCA to help set up the course. We show up at 6am and it's raining. Where did the rain come from? The forecast doesn't say anything about rain. In fact, it says that there is a 10% chance of precipitation. I think they forgot the extra zero on the end to make it 100% chance of rain.

Anyhow, we've committed to this course and people are showing up as we get to work setting up the course in the rain. The course is not as cone intensive as traditional BMW events and as a result, takes about an hour to set up and tweak. At last, Jason is satisfied that the course looks good and should be straightforward to drive. The course has a mix of high and low speed sweepers, tight elements and fast elements, decreasing radius turns, slaloms and other elements. All in all an interesting course - simple enough for beginners and enough room for experienced drivers to be challenged.

We know that this layout is different from what the regulars are used to seeing. As a result, Randall agrees that we can do a course walk instead of a parade lap. This allows us to explain the nuances of the track to everybody. Steve Abbott who was supposed to do the track walk for the drivers is AWOL and I take everybody around.

The rain is beginning to stop as the first drivers get going. The first part of the morning is spent hopping in students cars to show them the course and how to get around it in one piece. It's fun watching drivers as they get the feel for what their car can do.

Jason took a run when it was partially dry and didn't enjoy it. The tail was hanging out through a lot of turns as a lot of gravel was now on the driving line. Fortunately, as it dried out, the line also cleaned up - so much so that if you went off line, you went for a nice little ride in the wrong direction.

It was challenging driving the course in the morning. With the rain, none of the cones on course were chalked. As a result, workers had no idea where to put the cones back if they were hit. The course evolved quite a bit in the morning - a little like a rallyX.

By lunch time, the students were getting the hang of the course and driving around. The instructors get to play a little in their own cars. Then comes a lunch break and the SCCA volunteers go back out to re-set up the course and course workers come out to chalk the cones. Now we are ready for timed runs.



The timing lights are placed in a spot where you have to turn around to see your time after you cross the finish. I wasn't paying attention at first, but was having a good time running in the 56 second range. On my last timed run, I run a 56.04x and Jack and others are excited. I'm told that I've just laid down a faster raw time than Michael Oest in his GT3 on race tires. I find that hard to believe, but I didn't get to see the times he was running. It's exciting nonetheless.

However, at the end of the day, the results show that Michael did beat me - by 0.03 seconds. I'll take that and I'm happy with the results. Darin wasn't going to run his Civic because of an oil leak, but ends up taking his car out and lays down a smoking 55.3 - we need to race in the same car Darin!

At the end of the day, the event appears to have run smoothly for the most part. Randall takes a quick poll to see if the drivers like the current format for the course and it appears to be positive. They may try this type of course again later in the year. Anyhow, it was a fun time and the course turned out to be really fun to drive too. Nice work Jason - on your first course design!

Thank you to the SCCA volunteers who helped with all aspects of the course from before the event all the way up to event day.

El Toro ProSolo - Day 2

The weather starts out cool, but it's a nice day and it is warming up quickly. Even though we started running an hour earlier, it's already warmer when we run than it was yesterday afternoon.



The morning is very exciting as everybody seems to be going faster and the lead is changing almost every other run. The announcer is adding fuel to the fire announcing what could be as well. It's very easy to get caught up in the moment.

Jason starts out first and is able to go faster on the left side. He has really good times on both sides. Now its a question of how fast the other drivers go.

I'm lined up for my first right side run. The grip is there and I go faster, but I'm dirty again. I go out and make the left side run and come back with a 20 second run. The announcer confirms that I'll be getting a re-run. I stay paired up with my 'buddy' and go back to make my 2nd right side run. This is my last chance to get a right side time and I need to keep it clean. I post a 46.2 clean, which takes me from the middle up into the trophies. I make my 2nd left side run and red light. I continue to run it at speed to try and get a feel for the course.



In the mean time, Jon and Will have upped the ante significantly and they are running away from the field. I doubt that anybody will catch them.

I go back to the staging area to wait to be called up for my re-run. I sit and get ready. When I'm called up, I'm paired against a race-tired Corvette. Jason and the others are yelling at me to take him. I focus on the lights and get off to a good start, making sure not to red light. It's very satisfying to see that I exit the 60ft chute before the Corvette. I wish I had a camera facing him. Oh well. The rest of the run is a joke and to add insult to injury, at the end of my run, the announcer tells me that I have taken too many runs.

We head off to impound and have no idea what the results look like. The others have been doing the math and tell me that it's close. Jason and I will most likely be very close in the trophy spots. Just like yesterday, we spend an eternity waiting for results. I'm not sure what caused the results to take so long and I hope they are able to speed it up in future events.



The results are finally brought out and the final standings show me in third and Jason in fourth. We have a good showing for Bridgestone again. I'm very excited for Jason to see him driving so well.



Dale gets wrapped up in something in his head and ends up going slower this morning and giving up his 5th place spot as everybody started to go faster.

All of us put our names in the infamous 'hat' for a chance to run again. Jason is drawn and gets to play again in the bonus challenge. He advances until he is drawn against George Schilling and loses by 0.022 seconds.



It's still a great weekend for all. Thank you to the local ST family for showing Dale a great time and some SoCal hospitality!

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.

Sunday evening - ProSolo Finale Banquet

It's amazing how quickly time goes by. It is now Thursday and I'm at the airport waiting for my flight back to California. I wanted to update the blog before this, but I was so mentally drained that I couldn't. This event demanded every bit of my attention - and probably a whole lot more that I didn't have.

The flight was peaceful and uneventful. The most interesting part of the flight was having access to wifi while on board. That's when I started my last post when they announced that we were landing shortly and I had to cut the post short. There was no wifi on the second segment of the flight - it was a small commuter plane.

Dale and I met at the Omaha Airport and drove together to Lincoln. We arrived late enough that we checked in and went to join the festivities at the ProSolo banquet - both of us were hungry.

After dinner, we went back to prepare for Monday - the 'off' day.

"Slalom of the Pacific" ~ PSCC Practice & Champ Event ~ El Toro, CA

What a glorious day for the first day in March and this is our first day out to race with the new Bridgestone RE-11 tires. In case you haven't been paying attention, the RE-11 replaces the old RE-01R from 2008 and is now officially available.



Given that we were scheduled to run in the afternoon and with the delays that had taken place, both of us spent a lot of time just standing around, like this:


The fifth run group didn't start running until around 3:45PM. Rather late for normal running with a sixth group still to go before the sun sets.



Today, we drove the 205/50/15. It was a good course for this tire. Many fast sections, some transitions and only 3 slow turnarounds. If you run a Civic like ours, you will notice that the car works harder coming out of the low speed turnarounds - not really any different than the Toyo drivers that may choose to run the 225.

205 vs 195 RE-11

On this grippy asphalt surface, this tire feels like it has almost R compound levels of grip - something that I know I'm not used to being in a street tire class and I will have to make a conscious effort to recalibrate my butt - and my nerve for higher corner entry speeds.

The Civic has been suffering from some braking problems lately (we seized a caliper last week and it sent me on a little loop de loo). However, the tire squeels louder than the RE-01R did (another area to recalibrate), but it does slow down better than the old tire. It just sounds like it doesn't.

The course had a big right handed sweeper that was wide and I'd slow down to turn in and find out that I had slowed down too much. I'm beginning to think that I should have just attacked the turn without hitting the brakes. If I had just tried it... Being familiar with this site, both of us agree that there is no way we would have been able to take this turn at the same speed on the RE-01R.

Being in a two driver car, we were concerned about heat (today was in the mid-70's and sunny). The RE-01R heated up and started to get greasy very quickly. This new tire is so much better in this aspect. It will heat up during the run, but it will also have cooled off significantly by the time the next driver was up to drive. This is a huge improvement from the RE-01R. We didn't start watering until the end of the 2nd runs for both drivers.




The tire is also showing signs of comparable durability to the RE-01R. Time will tell just how good these tires are as we get more seat time on these tires. Given what we have just seen, my expectation is very high and this tire is definitely better than the outgoing tire.

As for us, we need to work on going faster.

Jason Flores - Co-Driver / Service Mech. / Marketing Director for STS Civic

Well ill start off with introducing myself. My name is Jason Flores and I am 28 years old and currently live in Riverside in California.

I have been AutoX ing for 2 Years now in an STS 2.5RS Subaru, and last year I was able to place in the top 10 in the CSCC (Southern California) Region. In addition to AutoXing I also RallyX which is very similar but on the dirt.

I also come from a background of building show cars for import shows like Import Showoff and Hot Import Nights. I also have been the marketing and sales director at Rally Inovations for 2 years, their I helped to build both full-on race cars that are also car show worthy. I also have had cars that have been fortunate to have some of my work on display at SEMA.

I am very excited for this coming year for the chance to prep and co-drive a fully prepped STS car. Ill be taking the blog through the build process over the next few weeks so stay tuned the next 2 weeks should prove to be very exciting...

Please join us on our journey toward STS contingency....

Going parts shopping

This was a fun day. Jason and I started parts shopping. Thank goodness for Internet access.

By the end of the day, we had the following items ordered:
From Edge Racing: A set of 4 Falken Hanabi 15x7 4x100 rims that weigh 11 pounds each. Unfortunately, I forgot to ask when these rims will be delivered.

From Red Shift Motorsports:
DC Sports 2 piece header.
Koni SPSS shocks
Energy Suspension Master kit
Mugen rear trailing arm bushings
Moog inner and outer tie rods
Red Shift 2.5" race exhaust
Unorthodox R Pulley

Other sources:
Odyssey 545MT 12 lb battery
Replacement wiper blades

Most of the parts should be here by the end of next week. The exhaust will take a little longer.

STS here I (we) come!

I haven't been happy with the handling of the 2006 VW GTI that I have. It is a pretty fast car in the class that I am racing in, but the handling characteristics are not what I wanted. So I started looking for either a co-drive or a 1989 Honda Civic Si that I could race in STS. I started to spread the word and lo and behold, my buddy Dale saw a post for a stock 1989 Honda Civic Si available for sale in Boulder, CO.

After a little negotiation, I ended up buying the Civic and had it transported from Boulder, CO to my home in California. The car arrived around 7:45 AM on December 20, 2006. I couldn't wait. The car was filthy, covered in dirty from the ride down from Boulder. The windows were so dirty that I couldn't see out of them to drive the car from the main street into our parking area.

The car would not start and had to be jumped. There is something wrong in the car, but it starts every time if it is jumped. We'll have to look into what is causing this problem.

On the 21st, I load some photos on my web site to show my friends the race car that I have just purchased. Santa has arrived early.

Since I'm not mechanically inclined and this is very much a project car, I started asking around, looking for some help. Steve Ferrari, Dan Shaw and Jason Flores all jumped up and offered to help, so I'm all set. In fact, I think the stars have all lined up for me. Jason is also interested in a co-drive and I think this relationship is going to be great. I can't wait until the car is ready.