Final Car Prep
Annual tech is 2 weeks from today with the first event the next day. It's still dipping down to freezing at night, and I was sicker than a dog yesterday, yuck. I'm working on making final preparations for my first event.My daughter is also taking the Starting Line school that same day so I need to change her oil and give the car a good once over as well.
- Gave the car a good post dyno inspection. No fluid leaks, great!
- Backed up my tune data
- Marked my alignment bolts in case of slippage
- Checked for loose fasteners and adjusted my hood pins to be tighter and stop rattle.
- Routed and secured cables for the phone to monitor MS Shadowdash
- Set initial shock dampening. Wild guess from forum threads. 15 clicks front, 13 clicks rear.
- Re adjusted parking brake and rear brake adjusters.....again. Working good for now.
- Cleaning
- Fix my wide band (time permitting). I'm running open loop, so I don't really need it for now.
- Camera setup. My wife got me a new GoPro Hero 5 Black. I'm waiting on one piece for the Ram mount. I might add Solostorm later in the season now that I have a GoPro. The Replay Prime XD Cam App went haywire again, three years in a row.
- I also want to try out the cheapo Ion Cam I bought. I just haven't decided where to put it yet.
- Trailer prep. The maid cart is a bust, too flimsy. I've got a tool chest, fuel can mounts, and a storage box on the way. Since the first two events are local, I can live without some of this for a while.
- FM brake master cylinder brace still in route from FM, but it'll take about 10 minutes to install.
More Rain...sheeeesh
Here it is Tuesday night and it just keeps coming down. I managed to get some stuff done. The FM brake master cylinder brake arrived. Installation was super easy. I can definitely feel the difference especially if I stomp on the pedal. I'm still not thrilled with the brake pedal feel. Although it feels a lot like my daughters NA pedal, it's still super soft compared to my NB. I'm planing to make the switch to an NB master cylinder and booster and Maybe NB rear sport brakes during the long break between events in April and May.I made a driver view cam mount for the Ion cam. I'll try to sync it in with the GoPro footage if I have the skills. Pretty simple setup. I used some aluminum flat bar with a U-bolt. an wing nut secures the camera by it's 1/2-20 mount .
All of my trailer equipment showed up. I have the tool box and storage box mounted, but all the drawers and liners are in the garage. I don't really want to get them all wet right out of the gate. The fuel can mounts are really nice. I'm actually glad I bought them instead of fabricating them. Materials cost was going to be within $5 and these are very well made. I still need a trailer spare. Pics to follow.
Tomorrow we finish the tool stuff and load up the car. I also need to put the RE-71Rs on my daughter's car for Saturday's starting line school. Weekend forecast Rain Saturday, dry Sunday for event 1. Let's hope the forecast holds.
Ready to Rock!
The rain finally let up enough to get some stuff done. I brought the race tires out from their warm resting place in the house and got the car back on the ground. I did a final weight check. 1998 lbs. I'm carrying about 50 lbs of fuel at the moment which gives me a 24 lb cushion against the 1924 limit. I polled the folks in my region and they've seen as much as a 50 lb swing day to day on event scales. That's pretty dramatic.....ugh. I'll add some ballast before the first tour event just to be safe.I tie wrapped down my weather protection. Naugahyde up front for the wiring and rubber sheet on the ABS computer.The GoPro mount is also ready. I love these Ram mounts.
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| ABS Comp Protection |
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| Wiring protection |
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| Camera Mount |
I spent most of my time getting the trailer ready. Tool box, storage chest, and fuel carriers are ready to go. I'm going to use one of the fuel carriers for my tire sprayer and some extra water. I'm really pleased with this setup. The maid cart was an unusable solution. I had an inventory list I've been building for the trailer for a while now. I did buy some dedicated tools for the trailer to keep from having to constantly move stuff. The boxes are loaded up and ready.
Thanks to mother nature giving us a break, I'm in the trailer! I got the tires swapped out on my daughters car and gave her some shock settings that have worked for me as well. We're both set and ready to go for the weekend.
First Event
As one of my coaches always said, "the hay is in the barn." I'm going to be a bit verbose here. I want to chronicle my first outing with some detail. If you couldn't give a shit less about the weekend, skip down to Run 1.Saturday was another soggy day. My daughter followed me down to Portland International Raceway for her Starting Line School and my annual tech. They ran in off and on drizzle and downpour. Lots of standing water on the course. Basically perfect conditions to learn car control. My annual tech went off without a hitch. I managed to find a small gap in the rain and get the car tech'd without soaking my seat. The Columbia River, just a couple of miles away, was on flood warning through Portland. It's been over 20 years since I've seen the river that high. The rain finally stopped late Sunday afternoon.
Sunday, for Event 1, we were blessed by the autocross gods. Partly Sunny with a high in the upper 50s. It was cold in the morning, just above freezing. Due to low attendance last year which led to a lack of course workers, my region went to a single event format vs. having morning and afternoon groups. The awesome weather and the combined groups led to what could have been disaster. We had about 55 cars pre-registered. About 95 cars showed up, mostly first timers! Needless to say, registration ran way past normal time and we got a late start. That being said, our people did a fantastic job and the event went quite smoothly. It was nice to see so many new faces. Lots of people in the Challenge (novice) class. We had some spins and people lost on course, but the new folks did a pretty good job. Working course was so much better actually having enough people to shag cones.
Race tire classes were in group 2, thank god, which allowed the street classes to mostly clear the couple of puddles remaining on course and the pavement warmed up a bit as well. To say I was nervous as hell would be an understatement. What's going to break? Will I bottom out all over the place? Will my tires rub? Will my brakes work? Will I drive terribly and look like an idiot in this awesome little car? We had 40ish cars in the 2nd group. I'm not quite ready to let a co-driver into the car at this point, so my tires were never going to be warm.
Run 1 I went out easy. I ran the course at about 80%. When I came down the finish chute my fears were realized, no brakes. Well, not no brakes, just really weak compared to my NB. The chute was really long so I still had gobs of time to get stopped. Other than the car and the brand new unscuffed tires, all was well. The car handled pretty nicely.I still managed to take out a slalom cone. Cone rashed the front of my right rear flare. Ok, the car is wider than I'm use to and 6 months since my last run.....ehhh.
Run 2 90%. Still coned it in a slalom, but this time on the right rear bumper. Finish chute, brakes are much better this time.
Run 3, gotta get it done. This is the last one that counts for points standing. 100% ,3000 RPM launch, let's do this. Lesson 1 learned, this car can do WAY more than my ES car and it likes to be thrashed through the course. We had a cross over with a full loop at the far end of the course. I came in a bit hot and lost some front grip. With the ES car you're screwed. I instantly decided to try and bring the back end around to line up my exit point since I'm already losing time to the understeer. Squeezed the throttle and and it drifted right into my line. Not ideal, lost a few tenths, but none the less how awesome is that?!?! Slalom, slalom, slalom and balls out to the finish gate, brake and still better than the time before. Plenty of stopping room. Clean and pretty fast. a couple of seconds faster in fact. I still left a lot of time on course. Seriously, maybe a full 1.5 seconds. I didn't even use the brakes except in the finish.
Lesson 2, read the damn instructions. I had 2 cameras running. The GoPro Hero 5 looking down course and my $35 Ion cam driver view. I was planning to do a nifty PiP video, but I ended up putting the GoPro in time lapse photo mode on every run. Dumb! Dumb! Dumb! Anyway, the Ion cam on my DIY mount worked great. Here's the in-car driver view from my fast run.
Post Event 1
We had a total of 5 runs. Absolutely no issues with the car. The driver sucks. It did get a bit warm. I need to remember to run both the fans after each trip out. I had some power steering fluid burp out of the filler neck. I guess it was overfilled. I never even had it open during the entire project. The dipstick is still at the full mark. I inspected my tires. No cuts scrapes or obvious rubs. 24 hours later, no drips under the car. I'm just plain pleased.The brakes are still soft, but the bite improved on each run. I'm assuming the bedding process is still ongoing with the Hawk pads. I'll probably go back to OE ceramics if I do rear sport brakes. I'm still planing to do the NB2 booster and master cylinder between the April and June events. Still gotta fix the wideband.
I reviewed my ECU data for issues. Nothing significant. Here's some data for RPMs, throttle position, G- force, etc.
Event results posted Monday night. As part of our region's 2017 changes, we combined a bunch of classes to form larger PAX'd classes. My class is NS3 which includes all SCCA full prepared classes. We had nine cars in NS3, all DP and FP cars. I wasn't really paying attention to results during the day. I was too busy fussing around making sure the car wasn't going to implode. I pulled the results and holy shit! I took first! 2nd was about 0.6 raw back and a bit more in PAX in an FP RX3.
20th of 100 in PAX
6th of 100 in raw time.
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