Big expectations go south

This post is coming out late, but I'm going to date it for the evening of the event.

Championship day comes around after a fairly successful practice. Both of us are feeling good about the car and feel confident that we'll be competitive against the other STS drivers.

We do our walks, taking time analyze the possible lines on this wonderful course that was designed by Guy Ankeny. It was a course that had wide open lanes, allowing many choices of lines, so while it looked like it was more of a road race course rather than an autocross course, I felt that it was in fact a fairly technical course. Lot's of high speed entry turns that pinched you on exit but then opened out onto a long section of full throttle acceleration.

The first group gets ready to run and Jason and I report for work. After our work assignment, we return to the car to find Moe under the hood. He has all the plugs out and is doing a compression test on all the cylinders. Kinda funny to see this happening on race day. All is well with the car. We have Moe's blessing.

We go out and have a terrible first run, coming in about 2 seconds slower than Jason. Towards the end of a fast and bumpy slalom, I feel like the tail gets bounced off line and I find myself facing the wrong direction and have to correct. Here's a classic picture that you may not see very often. I'm steering left, but the right rear wheel is in the air.



Anyhow, Paul Whitehead seems to come from nowhere and puts 8/10th on the me. By the end of the day, I end up with only 1 good run as the back end bounced me off line in the slalom for the other two runs. Maybe it's something I did, but right now I have no idea what that might be.

We check out Paul's car and chat for a while. Our basic components are virtually the same since his car was built by Chris Shenefield also. The only visible difference besides ride height was the use of the new 16" Bridgestone RE01R tires. It looks like it may be the tire to have. We'll have to wait and see.

I finish 3rd and Jason finishes 8th for this event. Need to find more speed...

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/

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:

Goodies have shipped from Red Shift

I spoke to Chris today. Apparently they made a mistake and the items were not ordered. Chris was honest enough to admit the mistake and I can respect that.

I was under the impression that everything was coming 2 day, but from the tracking, it looks like some items are actually coming via express saver and won't be here until Friday.

At least we should have stuff to do this weekend.

The Mugen trailing arm bushings are on back order and it may be a few more weeks before we can get those. At least we can do without those for a little while.

Nothing, nothing, nothing...

Nothing arrived today. I'm so bummed.

Based on my conversation with Chris last Thursday, I was expecting tracking numbers from Chris last week with parts due to arrive this week, starting today. Nothing arrived today. Chris is out of the office, so I can't even find out what the order status is.

I tried calling Edge Racing to see when the rims would be here and their phone lines are closed until January 3. No answer from them either.

Dale is recommending that we go with the Porterfeld RS4 brake pads instead of the Hawk HPS. Slightly more linear feel, so that is what we will try. I don't see a Porterfeld web site to buy the pads from, so I'll have to do a little digging.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that lots of parts arrive tomorrow. Saturday is fast approaching.

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.