Friday, July 9, 2010

Midseason Summary

Ok so I've been a bit delinquent. But given that I have an official follower and a couple people have admitted to lurking here, I should possibly resume posting. The last post was about cold weather and tires. The good news is that my tires were undamaged. Now the season is half over, so lets go for a summary.

I did the NER school and the Evo School this year, both were very helpful. One of the most helpful bits was learning about trail breaking from Grant R . at the NER school. Secondly, I felt a bit better after the EVO school in that the second day in the Challenge school, I was mostly able to hang with people who were far more experienced. It was clear however that I had some consistency issues. My instructor however is a national level competitor in my class and she did say that my car seemed to have potential to be competitive with proper driving and modifications.

Competition wise, We've now had 4 SCCA events and my results are:
  • 4th of 5 on 4/11/2010 (47% SS pax)
  • 4th of 6 on 4/25/2010 (47% SS pax)
  • 3rd of 3 on 5/2/2010 (64% SS pax)
  • 2nd of 5 on 6/6/2010 (46% SS pax) - Trophy
So I'm solidly in the middle of the pack when one uses a pax that is reasonable for the actual level of preparation for my car. The 64% pax is an anomaly probably due to the fact the event was at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, and drew a different crowd. The 2nd place finish in the last event is facilitated by the fact that the Blue CRX sheared an axle the day before and Brian was competing in an RX-8 he never drove before. He made it close and forced me to have a good last run which shows that he's really quite a good driver.

In other entertainment, I've been daydreaming about working the car into a state where it could be competitive. Right now, it's simply outgunned by the 340hp 8lbs/hp CRX with the 275 front tires and full suspension etc. I don't have to go crazy to become competitive, but for fun I started a thread on the SCCA forums about the ballast rules for my class and how they make it ridiculously hard to apply forced induction without bumping up to XP class. The resulting thread basically convinced me that it might be fun to try to build up a lightweight contender instead.

I certainly don't have the money right now, but I may have some fun phantom building it on paper, and figuring out what order to do stuff in to move that direction. There are some basic things that need to be done before one even thinks about working over the engine/transmission and changing the wheels as mentioned in that thread. More speed can be gained for less expense, but it would be kinda fun to know how many $$ I am from the dream lightweight normally aspirated lotus SSM Autocross setup.

I'll post some thoughts on my upgrade path a future post.

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