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| (the trials and tribulations of our STS prepared '89 Civic Si and it's drivers) |
| Blog ==== Drivers ==== Car ==== Video ==== To Do List ==== For Sale |
| This is the ongoing blog for our STS prepared '89 Honda Civic Si.... | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sometime in 2009 :: by Jason
We have stopped updating this website for the time to the recent craze of Facebook, we have started a facebook page for Team Undercoat Racing which allows us to stay connected with everyone in a much more streamline fashion, and it takes way less time! You can find us on facebook at http://www.facebook.com/teamundercoatracing. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 7.24.08 :: by Jason
The brake pads and the brake vacuum valve that we ordered arrived today, boy that was fast shipping. [rolls eyes] We should be able to those in the car for the WAI events next Saturday and Sunday. I forgot to mention that we scrambled around on Friday night to try to bleed the brakes on the car, I left all of my bleeder tubes canisters back at my places, and the fluid got fried from all of the runs Craig took scrubbing in tires. We headed to Autozone to get some stuff to bleed the brakes, and get some fresh brake fluid. Why we buy those large bottles all the time is beyond me, we are always worried that the fluid has been sitting to long and we just buy more. I suppose it would be acceptable for our street cars, but we never put it in the race car despite me writing the date on the bottles. By the time we get the stuff we need and get back to the site it's dark out, so we decided to do it in the morning, which worked out. The brakes on the car didn't feel bad over the weekend (it was wet so who knows), but Monday during the Bridgestone Test they were feeling fine to me. Not sure if we just needed some new fluid or what. I still have a feelign when we replace the master cylinder it is going to feel better. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday evening - Monday :: 7.20.08 - 7.21.08 :: by Jason
Bridgestone Testing Sunday Evening - We scrubbed all but one set of the 15" and 16" tires earlier this weekend, however, all of the 17" tires for the STX and STU sizes were still freshly shaven. Luckily we had access to a Hyundai that had the correct bolt pattern. So we proceeded to scrub in tires on the Hyundia! This might have been the highlight of the weekend, it was a blast, dispite the crappy throttle response, it was still a challenge and it brought some grins to our faces! As the even wore on local competitor Chris Bailey decided to help out by scrubbing in two sets of the wheels on his RSX to speed up the process, and Ryan Kroupa helped by knocking out the last set of 16" tires. We had NASCAR style pit stops going on with the Hyundai, and lots of smiling faces after each run, from both drivers and some leftover tour competitors.
Monday - Today was the Bridgestone Tire Test at Miller Park. We used the Sunday Milwaukee Tour course for the test, which I think had a good mix of manuvers (2 slaloms and 2 faster sweepers). I drove the STS Civic, along with Rick Cone in his STS2 Mazda Miata, Colin Fielder in his STU Subaru WRX Sti, and Peter Cunningham in his EVO6. From my conversation with Peter the car has been parked for at least 3 years, so he hasn't driven it in awhile. I can't really comment much on the test, however, all I can say is that I'm excited not only for this year, but for what the future brings. It was also funny getting a ride from Peter driving around rally style after we finished up. I think he did about 4 rally-style runs in a row, by the time he finished he was looking pretty winded! Thanks to all of the Milwaukee Region members who came out to help run the event!
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:: Friday - Sunday :: 7.18.08 thru 7.20.08 :: by Jason
SCCA Milwaukee Milwaukee Tour Weekend
We are testing some tires for Bridgestone on Monday, so there are stacks of shaved tires on the support trailer, however, they aren't scrubbbed in yet. So Craig is the lucky dog that gets to run most of these tires today to get them ready for Monday. They don't want either Rick Cone or I to run more than one tires today so we can't compare tires, since the test on Monday is going to be blind. We both scrub in one set of tires, Craig does most of the tires, and local competitor Ryan Kroupa slaps one set on his car to help out. We finish up scrubbing in all of the tires just as practice ends, except for one set that got there late. That was a long practice session. After the practice session I catch some rest in the Brdigestone support trailer before I have to work registration of the event. I'm Cheif of Registration for the weekend, but thanks to a well organized registration crew there isn't much work for me to do onsite. Finish up registration at 7pm, then we head over to get some food and drinks provided by the region... pizza, breadsticks, wings, Sprecher beer and soda, mmmm, that was good! The forecast is looking like rain for tomorrow, we might luck out and get some dry conditions since we run oin 1st heat, but just incase I have the Bridgestone guys (thanks Rod, Josh, and Jeff) mount up some full tread depth tires on an extra set of wheels I brought with. We get a couple course walks in, another great looking course by Jeff Cashmore. Looks like we are ready to go, time to head home to get some sleep. Saturday - We get onsite to work registration from 7-8am for people who couldn't make it into town yesterday, it's still dry, however, we have some fresh, un-scrubbed, "rain" tires on the car. So I go buzz it around on the street for about 20 minutes to try and knock the glaze off the tire. Wish we would have thought ahead and did this during the practice session, oh well, live and learn. Despite numerous off ramps and Alonso style weaving the tires don't see to be scrubbing in. Not sure what else to do at this point, time is getting close to us running (heat 1), so we are going to have to "dance with the girl we brought" because our dry tires have about 1/32" on them and aren't going to dissipate much water. About 15 minutes before our heat starts it's still dry, so we decide to slap the dry tires on the car and get to grid hoping to get one dry run in since it sounds like the rain is coming. About 5 minutes before the heat starts the rain starts to fall. It's not that bad at first, just sprinkling, so we hang with the dries. I unload the rains from the Excursion and get them to grid because it's not looking good for me as the 2nd driver. I ask Craig if he wants to swap tires now as the rain is continuing to come down and appears to be affecting the timing lights, causing a delay in the action, again he replies that he is going to hang with the dries. Another 5 minutes passes and there are puddles forming now, I ask him again, and mention that I'm going to change them for my run if he doesn't change tires. That must have been enough to push over the edge and decided that it was time for rains. At least the conditions were equal for everyone in the class. Craig goes out and puts down a clean STS class leading time on his first run (66.199), he comes back and mentions that his run wasn't great, he was just trying to get a feel for the surface, which is basically what I was going to have to do next. I think I went out for my first run a little to cautious though, I broke to early at the end of the two long staights on the course and really paid the price with a 67.359, I had a good idea of braking feel for the next run though. Second runs go quicker since timing seems to be up and going now, and grid has a good handle on the amount of cars in grid so Craig and I are getting pretty even amounts of time between runs (not always the case). Craig lays down a 65.670 on this second run, which put him in 1st in STS with Larry Bereuter in a Subura 2.5 RS right on his heels, 0.202 behind. On my 2nd run I put down a 65.500, which would have been a class leading time, but I hit the finish cone as the car got loose. It would have been nice to go into the 3rd runs having that run be clean. I'm going to have to run a good clean time on my 3rd run if I want to have a shot to win, and I don't want to have repeat of the Peru Tour today! Craig takes his third run, he looks good on course as we watch of the sidelines, and comes in with a clean 65.003, extending his lead over Larry to 0.869. Larry was unabale to improve on his 3rd run. It has continued to rain throughout the heat and there is still standing water at this point in the day. I got out on my 3rd run wanting to get ahead of Craig, but I can't get crazy and cone the run. I put together a good run, which included hanging out the rear on the way though the finish in a controlled manner. The timing display throws up the good news, a 64.699 second run and a 0.304 lead over Craig going into Day 2. Next up is Megan driving STSL in Heat 3, it has dried up since heat 1 and the line is close to being completely dry. Megan went out and put down a clean 67.118 on her first run, good thing, becuase she cones her 2nd and 3rd runs, however, it was enough to head into Day 2 with a 5.753 second lead driving the Bridgestone/Redshift/Datatoys.com Honda Civic Si. After Megan is done we hang around the Bridgestone support trailer most of the day in the shake of the canopy, or in the air conditioned lounge and watch the rest of the classes for the day. We hang around until about 7:45pm, just long enough to get a couple course walks in before heading home. I really wanted to go home earlier since I have to bartend tonight, but I figured I should hang around and get a couple walks in since I probably will be tired in the morning.
Sunday - I arrive on site just early enough to get 2 course walks in, Craig and Megan are already there ready to go. I'm running on 2 hours of sleep, so I look like a walking zombie at this point. I get a second wind as we get the car unloaded and ready to go. It rained overnight so the surface is still wet, it isn't standing water like yesterday, but it sure isn't dry. We decide to start with the wet setup from yesterday with the shock rebound stiffer. Craig goes out on his first run and spins the car in the first slalom, maybe we went too far! I guess we'll take the rebound back out of the car. Craig states that it was looser than it was yesterday when there was standing water. The course is starting to slowly dry with each run now. I go out on my first run of the day and Craig wasn't kinding, that car is a handful for sure, and the fact that there was 2 slaloms on this course didn't help much. I come with a clean 61.571, which is second on the day about 0.4's behind Larry (61.187) for the fast time of the day. Larry would stil have to beat me by another 0.8's to catch me after day 1, at this point in my eyes my competition is Craig. It's becoming very apparent that this is going to come down to the last runs of the day due to drying conditions, everyones times just keep dropping. Craig goes out on his second run and puts down a cone-free 58.852 second run, which ups the bar some. On my second run I can only muster a 59.031, but it is enough to stay ahead of Craig because of my 0.304 lead after day 1. However, as I mentioned it's getting drier. At this point we are still running our rain setup, and I think that it's getting close to the dry setup, or at least stiffen up the car somewhat. We talk it over and Craig decides he wants to stick with the current setup because of some wet areas on the course, I'm not going to argue because I'm tired anyways! Craig goes out on the third run and it looks like the car is pushing through some corners, it's not terrible, but it's not good like it was during practice on Friday. He stays clean and improves his time by over a second to a 57.534, which puts the pressure back on me. I decide that I'm going to stiffen up the rear rebound, but in heinsight I think I should have just went back to the dry setup (tires and sway bar). I put together another good third run and cross the line with a 57.755. Not as fast as Craig, but my quick math tells me that I got him, however, no one in the crowd looks like I did anything to cheer about, then I see Dan Werzer cheering as he hands me my timeslip, followed by the crowd, the announcer must have been a little behind announcing the times. =) I got him by 0.083 overall, which was enough to take the win. So Team Undercoat Racing goes 1st and 2nd in STS. Craig got me today in the dry though, so congrats to him. After talking while in impound we both argeed that we should have made changes to the car for the last run, if this were nationals I don't think we would have hesitated to change the car. However, we need to make those decisions at all of our events so when we do change at nationals we have a better idea of the setup change.
Drying conditions continue and by the time Megan runs in heat 3 it's dry. Megan coned all of her runs for the day, but had a nice lead after day 1 to fall back on if needed and took the win in STSL. Maybe she was just coning all of her runs like I did at the Peru Tour so I wouldn't feel so bad, or maybe are car just likes the cones, or maybe the cones are scared of the new orange vinyl on the car! Again, I spend the rest of the day relaxing and sleeping at the Bridgestone support trailer, watch the F1 and IndyCar races, and hang out with most of the Milwaukee Region crew. I needed the nap since we still had tires to scrub in for the STX and STU cars (see next blog). It was a great tour weekend for Team Undercoat Racing, we won both of our classes and Craig got a 2nd. Bridgestone support was excellent as normal, the effort they are putting forth for us autocrossers is leaps and bounds over any other tire manufacture in the Street Touring classes.
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:: Thursday :: 7.17.08 :: by Jason
The Bridgestone support trailer is supposed to roll into Milwaukee this afternoon, I'm hoping to stop up there and get them settled in and help setup if needed. I also need to pickup some cameras from Roy at datatoys.com, however, before I head up there I want to get the Bridgestone vinyl installed on the car. Craig has stuff to do at work, but he's semi-free while some tests are being completed, so I pack up the Excursion & the Civic and head over to his work so he can help me install the vinyl. I estimated it would take us about an hour to install the vinyl, the plan was to put the new 15" wide "strip" over the top of the current Bridgestone sticker, then trim it around the edge of the existing sticker with a razor blade. It was all going well until we started to trim it, the orange around the Bridgestone logo was faded somewhat from the sun and didn't match the new orange background strip now. If we continued to trim it up in this manner we would be in the same boated with an orange border around the black Bridgestone logo. So we decide to jsut cut out the individual black Bridgestone letters out instead of following the edge of the original sticker. This took a decent amount of time, it's kind of tedious work if you want it to look good. The first side of the car takes about 90 minutes, the second side went a little smoother and only took about 75 minutes. This messed up my plans for the evening since it's about 8pm, Roy was busy at Road America, so I decided to not drive up to Miller Park (45 minutes drive) and we worked it out to met up tomorrow. The car looks good, but it has this in your face look now, in the past it was a little more subtle, but now you sure can't miss it! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 7.16.08 :: by Jason
We got a little break last weekend after being out of town racing for the two previous weekends, however, the upcoming weekend is the SCCA National Tour stop in Milwaukee, WI in our home lot at Miller Park. Bridgestone is bring the support trailer up to Milwaukee for a long weekend and we need change our Bridgestone logo a little bit to meet their standards, at this point the logo looks orange, which isn't one of their colors, so we are going to add an orange strip along the side of the car to make the Bridgestone logo look black on an orange background. I head over to Sign Shop of Racine, and they get me what I need as I wait, great service from them all of the time. Our new brake pads haven't arrived, not sure what is taking so long, but we aren't going to have them for the weekend. We are still on the same pads that got tore up at the Peru Tour when the axle sheared. We didn't have a new backup set, and the old pads that were in my garage have been taken over with rust, so here we are, I ordered two sets this time though so we have a backup pair now. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday, 4th of July thru the 6th by Craig!!!!!
Jason is lazy. So I have to do the write up, which is good because there won't be as many inaccuracies.
Toledo ProSolo Weekend A few months ago we spent some time figuring out what events we were going to run. Wanting to do a few more "big" events this year we eyed up the Toledo Pro. Seemed like a great idea then, but after the Peru weekend we were feeling a little beat down. Money, energy, ego (Jason again) had taken a hit and we contemplated skipping the event. It wouldn't have been a bad idea, but we decided to go for it anyway. Friday morning we leave and thanks to the holiday we are good to go for traffic. We might even be the first ones to the event site for a change! I hope Jason will let me sleep in the truck. I am feeling a bit tired, as I am on about 2-3 hours of sleep. Since I am actually a Pro Solo rookie, I take the "hole shot" instruction. Jason takes it too, since he hasn't done a Pro in like 4 years. Then we get some practice starts and try to compare 60' and 200' times to the other STS civics. We are right there with the others. Hollis is a bit faster but his car (and Andy) is lighter than ours. Maybe he is better at launching his car? Nah that can't be it. We get the stickers on our car from our newest sponsor DATATOYS.COM We got five cameras in the car. Easy to use. And the stickers look good on the car!
...Note to Salty Milwaukee competitors... Our car, 60 ft-ish times... 2.3 seconds with a best of the weekend being 2.23 by Jason. NO 1.9s, sorry! We pack it up for the day and get ready for tomorrow. Saturday we get to the event site get everything together for the day. We run in the "d" or fourth run group and work in the "a". Prosolo works nicely and has a good cadence to it. We get a chance to scope out the best lines by watching the great drivers in ES, GS and FS. Maybe GS will provide us with the best clues, since the cars are closest to ours?
At 9 o'clock we are going to see the UFC fight at the local BW3s. Is that still the name? Good times were had. Everybody we know is in bed, but we are out drinking 'til 1:30am!
The hotel sucks.
Sunday, no hangover. I am feeling like we can move up. Maybe the setup change will help? I watch the second run group closely (for cones of course) and notice some lines I like. It gets to our run group and I am a bit nervous, but good nervous. Right about optimal. Make the call to my Mom (insert Jason laughing here). She is good luck, what can I say? Ann Hollis tells us (she is always super nice to us even though we are sucking) that Andy is not going to sandbag since he expects us to be right there despite our poor showing yesterday. We'll see.
Wynveen has cautioned us to not rest on our laurels, and to continue to develop the car. We aren't. I can say even though we like to talk trash we are humbled by the level of competition in this class. The drivers are top notch and the car preparation is fantastic too. This is the first season we haven't been working and spending our asses off on the car. Which is nice... I am out of money. We are committed to B-stones. And will more than likely only be tweaking what we already have. So I hope factors we can't control become big ones. (faster tires... better shocks...$1200 headers) Personally, I am committed to losing weight... one of the biggest changes I can make.
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:: Sunday :: 6.29.08 :: by Jason
We get to the site in time to get a couple course walks in, yep it looks the same as yesterday. Today is feeling much more laid back, I feel like we should be rushing around fixing something! We hang around watching the Heat 1 battle in ES, congrats to Sam Karp on his first Tour trophy, nice driving! We work heat 2 and it rains again, this time more toward the end of the heat, BS guys are flying though the wallom. The rain catches out Neal Tovson on his 3rd run, sucks for him, he was looking good but this first two runs were dirty. =( We get into grid and get ready to run, as we are getting ready we fell some light sprinkles. I head to the truck to get the tires we scrubbed in on Friday since they have the most tread of any tires we have. The one tire doesn't have any air in it again, so something is amiss there. I head over to the generator and compressor to air it up while Craig pulls all of the gear out of the car in grid. The rain is on/off, but is pretty light, not enough to effect the surface to this point. Temperatures are in the 70's and the wind is blowing pretty good, so the course is dry. Craig needs to put down a clean run while it's dry, and if the run is good it might apply a little pressure. Craig goes out for his first run and attempts to take the wallom flat but got behind toward the end and had to lift, but got back on it for the right hander after, the car rotated nice, except he missed the cone on the outside and DNF'd. So much for putting down a good clean run to start, LOL. He comes back to grid, tires aren't really that warm so no cooling/changing required. As I approach the line the sky starts to open up, it's not too back, but bad enough that I have problems seeing without the wipers going, as I'm taking the run all I'm thinking is that I have to be clean because this might be the only semi-dry chance I get. The surface is semi-slick that this point and I have to really give it up a couple places to not hit cones. My first run is a 46.997... clean!!! Woohoooooo. Hollis comes in behind me with a 49.852, errrrr. As I get the car back to grid the rain subsides, WTH. The weather holds off and Craig goes out for his second run. He runs the wallom on the throttle the entire way through, it sounded like he was only the brakes a little bit through the last cone, regardless it looked fast. He keeps it clean and come back in with a 46.698, the fastest time in class to this point. I go out for my second run, the skies are being nice this time. There is more grip than the first run, I lift going into the second cone of the wallom, but I'm flat the rest of the way though, I finish up with a 46.588. Hollis follows me in with a 46.379, got me again! For the 3rd run decides to take some rebound out of the rear shocks to try and stop the rear of the car from bouncing around a couple places, mainly in the dip in the wallom. He heads out for his final run needing to run about 0.9 faster to catch Hollis for 1st. He makes it through the wallom with a little braking again, but said he probably could have made it, he goes faster and posts a clean 46.372, but only 0.007 faster than Hollis's run, not enough for 1st Place, he has a firm grip on 2nd though. Based on Craig comments about the wallom I decide to leave the rebound alone and drop the rear pressure to get more rotation. At this point I'm in the same 0.1 of a second as Brian Davis for 3rd place, I don't know who is ahead and don't care, whoever runs best on this run is going to take it. As we approach the line it starts to sprinkle again, not a lot of rain, but enough to need the wipers! Brian is just ahead of me at the line, so he is in similar conditions. I go out on my 3rd run and keep it clean, but I had to give it up at place like the first run to stay clean, I improve a little to a 46.538. Hollis was basically on a parade run and came in with a 46.773, slower than his second run, but the ground was a little wet. Brian dropped just over 0.2 seconds on his run, taking 3rd place. It was a good run to get back to 4th place and a trophy, it was still a "would of, could of" type of weekend though. Craig posted the fastest run of the day, so congrats to him.
We had thoughts of not running the Toledo Pro next weekend to save some money after having the car break this weekend, however, we decided that we are going to go ahead and run though. I feel like I need some seat time to get some rhythem going, Craig still hasn't been to a ProSolos, and there is plenty of contingency money that could be won, so what the hell... Toledo here we come. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Saturday :: 6.28.08 :: by Jason
We wake up early and get to the site at 6:35am, it opened up at 6:30am. We head right over to the car and start thrashing on it. A couple SCCA people come over and ask us why we decided to park our car there, LOL, we had to explain to them that it broke yesterday and has been there since. We got a good laugh out of that. We finished up everything and got the other tires mounted up on the car, we didn't want to chance the new tires not being scrubbed in enough. We didn't have a socket big enough for the axle nut, so we just tightened it down as much as we could just to get the car moving and off course. If we can't find someone with the socket we'll head to Autozone after our course walks and buy one. We drive the car back to paddock, woohoo, it drives! Only took us about 45-60 minutes total in the morning. Now that the car is together we need to get a walk or two in before the course is closed. We get three walks in and feel confident enough to go back to finish up the car, there is also time to walk after heat 2 and we don't run until heat 4, so we'll be able to get one more refresher walk in, and we work course during heat 2, so we'll see it then too. I track down Hollis and he has the axle nut socket, thankfully. Steve comes over and uses his fancy Snap-on beeping torque wrench to secure the axle nut. We jack the car up to feel what the junkyard ball joint feels like on the car, Craig wiggles that tire and I can hear it making noise! After some investigative work we find that the nut that holds the rear upper control arm mount is loose. We tighten it down and wonder how long it has been loose. Maybe the car will be better now! With some time to burn we decide to change the spark plugs. All is going well until we find that the little caps that screw onto the top spark plugs are missing on two of the old plugs! Where the hell did they go? We find one of them still in one of the spark plug wires, but it isn't coming out easy. Craig, Steve, and I all take turns trying to get it out, after about 20 minutes Steve finally gets it out! Then Steve brings over his fancy Snap-on DOHC spark plug socket, Craig gets to fondle it which putting the new spark plugs in, it's really sexy looking actually!. Wynveen also brings his micro torque wrench over and we get to properly torque our spark plugs to 13 ft/lbs. With the car all buttoned up we head to our work assignment with our rain gear on. After working we get one more course walk in before we need to get the car into grid. As we are walking course I see Hubert Borowski walking course all by himself, what the hell is he doing here, he isn't even racing! Come to find out the Borowski sister were jonesing so bad they drove down to Peru just to hang out, and they brought Mic-a-nic with them! Now that is dedication, or just weird, you decide. Wynveen got to use all sorts of tools this weekend that he wouldn't have got to use if it wasn't got our broken Civic, he seemed to enjoy it! We really owe him a big thanks for all of the help. Also need to thank Andy for the use for the socket for the axle nut.
After all of that we get to do what we came here to do, DRIVE! The Saturday course has the familar steps going out to a turn around and a couple steps on the way back. The temperature is in the mid-70's. Craig is first out and runs a 50.684 +1, the time looks good besides the cone. He comes back and the tires aren't really that hot so we hardly even cool them. I go out for my first run and put down a 50.683, which I think is clean. Hollis came in behind me with a 50.491, clean from what I hear. The car felt good during the first runs, no unusual noises or feelings going on, we could use less understeer, but we can work on that. Craig goes out for run number 2 looking for something clean, however, he runs a 51.406 +3 with what he said was a bad turnaround. I'm looking to put down a decent second run since I'm good after my first run. We swap the tires to some that are cooler and I go out. The run is going good for me, it wasn't great by any means, but it was better than the first run, as I'm coming through the finish I see a corner working running, crap I must have hit one, yep, I see a cone done. Crap, that was a better time too, a 50.218 +1. As I approach the trailer I hear them say that I have 3 cones, WTH, wait make that 4 cones! Hollis comes in behind me with a 50.604 (slower). Holy crap how did I hit 4 cones, I talk to Craig on the way back to grid and he said I'm just hitting them with the back of the car. Peru has more grip than we usually have and the car is just turning in too much, I didn't even know I hit one cone let alone four! We get back to grid and prepare the car for Craig to run, as we are there Brian Davis mentions that both of my runs are dirty, what! I ride up toward the line with Craig on his third run to check the preliminary results. Brian was right, I had a cone on my first run, crap, wish I would have known that before I went for it on my second run. And to add insult, I see that I actually had 5 cones on my second run! I only know of that one cone by the finish, I must have hit half of the apex cones on course, so for the record my second run was 50.218 +5! Craig is going out for his third run and he needs to put done a clean run to have a chance tomorrow. He plays it safe and comes in with a clean 50.959, slower than his other runs, but clean none the less. Craig is clean, but he is regretting not pushing it more to get a better time, I think he played it right. Now I need to do the same thing, get a clean run in. We go back to grid and prepare the car for my run, I decide to drop the rear tire pressure to try to induce some oversteer into the car, I didn't go too crazy though because I know I need to get a clean run in and I don't want to be fighting the rear of the car at some of the really bumpy parts of the course. I tell myself on the way to the line, just get a clean run in! On my way through one of the steps I give too much steering input trying to stay clean and proceed to smack a cone and lock up the inside front wheel pretty bad, no doubt that I hit that one, damn it. I push it though the rest of the run except at the finish were it was pretty bumpy, I matched my first run time-wise and hit a cones somewhere else on the course, so 50.653 +2. That wasn't very smart, oh well live and learn. In hen sight I should have pushed it through the finish too, because I could still improve from my first run if I hadn't have hit the second cone. So two lessons learned. The day ends with Hollis (50.491) in 1st, Craig (50.959) in 2nd, Brian Davis (51.312) in 3rd, and me way back in 11th based on my first dirty run (52.683). Time for some drinks! We got the car packed up, hang around for a little while in paddock for about an hour before heading to Ruby Tuesday to check out their drink menu. Looks like Craig is going to have to be the one to bring home the win for Team Undercoat Racing. We come back to the site to walk the course a couple times before we call it a night. Day 2's course runs in the same direction with most of the steps removed. It has a fast slalom which has a line of cones before the apex cone, referred to as a wallom in other parts of the country we're told, along with two other slaloms after the turnaround. Craig loves slaloms, because he's good at them, so he likes his chances with the course. My goal is to try to get back to 3rd place to get some Bridgestone contingency money. Later in the evening we go to some restaurant called something Charles that is known for their ribs with the Milwaukee/Chicago folks. Food was decent, bench racing was fun as well. Highlights of dinner is me trying to get Steve to bet me whether or not our motor is going to blow do to the speed we are going to carry through the wallom, Steve thinks he will get to 71 mph, which is fast. That would equate to some crazy high RPM, I know we don't have the grip of the Corvette, but we are skinnier than the Vette and we have more camber, so we typically see similar speeds. We head back to the hotel and for the second night in a row pass out in quick manner. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Friday :: 6.27.08 :: by Jason
Get up nice and early, 4:00 am, to finish packing the Excursion with the stuff that Craig is bringing over. We plan to leave at 5:00am in order to get through Chicago and to make the practice session (11:00am - 3:00pm) on time, don't forget time change moving everything up an hour. We get all packed up and leave the house about 5:10am. We decide to get some breakfest before we hit the higway, we stop at the local Hardee's since Craig wants some cinnamon biscuits, the Excursion and trailer aren't fitting through the drive-thru and the inside isn't open yet, so no cinnamin biscuits for Craig! He's not happy, we end up settling on some McDonald's, they proceed mess up my order... it might have had something to do with the big ass diesel in their ear. At this point Craig is hating the idea of this trip and thinks of having me drop him off somewhere for his wife to pick him up, LOL. Regardless we aren't off to a great start. Do to the food stop and leaving 10 minutes late I'm feeling like we are pushing to make it though Chicago traffic on I-94. Everything is going OK for awhile, then we hit the parking lot about 10 minutes after the I-94/I-294 split. We spend about 30 minutes in stop and go traffic, once we get closer to downtown it opens up and we cruise the rest of the way though taking the Skyway. Not to bad. We arrive on site about 11:45 am, which leaves up plenty of time to get the car unloaded and hit the practice course before it gets too busy. We get everything ready to go and put the freshly shaved Bridgestone RE-01R's tire on the car, we are going to scuff them in on this grippy Peru concrete. We visit with the local guys for a couple minutes before heading over to the practice course. We buy 8 tickets and signup for a work assignment. Craig decides to go out first and get a feel for the course, not expecting much because of the new tires. I ride with him to learn the course, the tires felt like they normally do prior to scrubbing them in. We go back to grid, check the tire pressures (they are low), so we go hunting for air. We had 80psi in our tank, however, we used it all filling up one of the new tires that didn't have air in it for some reason. Andy Hollis borrows us his air compressor (thanks Andy) and we are ready to go. I go out for the second run on the tires, it feels a lot like the first run, the car is pushing for sure, we're not sure if it's the new tires of the setup in general. I got back and Craig says go ahead take another one. I head out for my second run, car is feeling a little better grip-wise, as I'm going through the slalom before the finish lights I get on the gas and something goes wrong! It felt as if the car popped out of gear or something, no drive in the car, and as I slow the car I notice that the steering is for crap too. I row through the gear, nothing. I give everyone staring me the slit throat gesture, and we proceed to stop the practice session due to our broke car on course. I get out just as everyone else arrives at the car. The axle nut is missing from the passenger side of the car, then we realize that the end of the axle is also missing! Not good, we sheared the end of the axle off. Maybe we're just numb to all of this from fixing the Civic so much over the last 2 years, but I'm really not even concerned, I just assume are going to fix it. I run back to grid and get the floor jack, we limp the car off course with the jack holding up the front of the car. We get it to a safe place off course and start examining the damage as the practice session starts back up. Craig wiggles the tire around and I can see it moving all around, not good at all. I take the wheel off and the rotor is flopping around, the only thing holding our wheel and rotor on was the brake pads! The brake pads look as if someone took an angle grinder to them, the wheel shifted toward the rear of the car and as I applied the brakes to stop the car they bacically folded over the edge of the rotor and causes the groove. The wheel bearing is separated into 2 pieces, so it wasn't holding the wheel on. It looks like we dodged a bullet, it could have been much worse. We figure we need a new wheel bearing, axle, axle nut, and brake pads. So much for a relaxing evening.
Andy Hollis and Larry Harts give us some directions to a junkyard south of Kokomo, we close up the Civic since it looks like rain and head for Kokomo in the Excursion. We're not sure of the name of the place, but I start looking for the place in my GPS unit. Not coming up with much though. Our thought is to purchase an entire knuckle so we don't have to get the wheel bearing pressed into our existing knuckle, it will save us time and get us going for tomorrow as long as we can find an axle (Autozone usually has them instock). We find a couple junkyards in the GPS unit, but none of them have what we are looking for, so we ask them if there know of any other place that might have it, this goes on with about 4-5 places, no one has one. Finally we find a place that says they have 3 knuckles sitting on a shelf! Sweet, we don't have to pull them off a car or anything, that will save us some time. I enter the address (Anderson, IN) into the GPS, it says one hour ago, we don't even think twice we just start driving, it's about 2pm at this point. In the meantime we are calling local Autozones trying to locate an axle, the one near Kokomo has one instock, so we are good to go there.
We jump in the Excursion, plug the address into Garmin for the event site, 90 minutes to get back. I didn't realized we drove 30 minutes south before we found that place so the drive back was longer than I thought. We get back to the site about 5:30pm. We borrow a drill and drill index from the SCCA trailer and drill out the screw holding on the rotor, it's still rusted on there though. Wynveen has a punch which helps get the rotor off. All of the nuts and bolts come off pretty easy, with the help of Steve ball joint popper and our BFH. We get the new knuckle installed, the new axle in, and everything pretty much put back together, however, they needed to close up the site at 8pm, so we'll have to finish up tomorrow morning. Still have yet to even glance at the course, we'll have to do that tomorrow. We go to Steak 'N Shake for dinner (dinner of champions), head back to the hotel, and proceed to pass out quickly after a long day.
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:: Wednesday :: 6.55.08 :: by Jason
Picked up the required nuts and bolts from the hardware store. Reinstall the ignition on the "good" steering column using some new low profile bolts with allen heads and some lock-tite. Started installing the "good" steering column in the car, get about 6 nuts/bolts into the project and realize that we forgot to plug in a couple wires, undo all of that and start over. Get the wires plugged in and run in the correct area, connect the plug to the backside of the ignition piece, adjust the steering wheel locking mechinism, and finish up bolting the 'good' column in the car. Everything went well and I think we are ready to go for the weekend, just to need to pack up the Excursion tomorrow night. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 6.24.08 :: by Jason
We decided to tackle the replacement of the steering column tonight. After getting something in the threads after the last event the steering wheel nut is seized up on the column and the wheel wobbles around. We are 95% sure that the threads are going to be trashed and we are going to need to replace it. First task is to head out to the parts car and pull the "good" steering column, that way we get an idea of what we need to do on the current car, and we still have the steering column on place if something bad happens (we've learned from experience that everything doesn't always work out as planned). Craig gets under the dash and remove the steering column, everything is pretty straight forward. There are couple small screws that are a pain to get to, luckily we just purchased some ratchets that allowed us to get in there without much trouble. Now it's time to remove the steering column for the currect STS car. First things first, we need to get the damaged wheel nut off. It's one there pretty good and it takes the two of us cranking on it with a 15" ratchets to get it off, as we thought, the threads were shot on both the column and wheel nut. I get elected to contort myself under the dash this time. It's starting to get dark, so it takes a little longer to get it removed since I have to keep repositioning the light to see the hardware. The key/ingition system is riveted to the steering column, and since we want the keying to match all of the locks we are going to have to swap the ignition. We drill out the rivets on both of the steering columns and be sure to note which is which. Going to have to get some nuts and bolts to reinstall both of the ignitions. We seem to have lost the nut that was on the parts car when we removed the steering wheel at some point in the past, so I will have to pick that up at the hardware store as well. We called it a night since we made some good progress, and the hardware stores are all closed at 11:00pm. I'll go to the hardware store tomorrow and we can finish of the installation and be ready to go to the Peru Tour. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 5.23.08 :: by Jason
Craig had a fun idea that we should get a second hood and give it a chalkboard paint job like the old Colin Fielder STS Civic. We had lots of fun with the car at events, we got a little taste of that last year with the 'tiger hood'. So Craig headed off the junkyard to find a hood for the car. We plan to run it at local events, then swap our 'good' hood back on for the National events which we need to have the contingency stickers on the car. $40 later we have a hood ready for a transplant. =) This brought back memories of the old car, and Craig happen to send some pictures to me recently... so here they are. And some pictures of the car before the cool ass paint job, and of it's final fate after Colin sold it. There it is, the Civic that started it all, if it wasn't for that car we wouldn't be where we are today. We also had those bad ass Cheap Ass Civic Racing t-shirts!
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:: Sunday :: 5.18.08 :: by Jason
Today is the first SCCA-MKE event of the year for Craig and I since we missed Event #1 because of the Grand Prix of Long Beach trip, thanks to Bridgestone. =) This event was only using half of the normal lot at Miller Park because the Porsche Club rented the other half. However, this isn't anything new and Jeff Cashmore laid out a challenging course which was still over 60 seconds long. After the morning runs it was apparent that we were either slow or the course wasn't very well suited for our car. I found myself in 4th place in both Pro and index, but just over a second behind Colin Fielder in his STU Subaru WRX STi. I didn't doubt that I could get faster, but I don't think we were leaving a second out there on course. Craig was sitting in 6th about 0.3 seconds behind me. I only managed one clean run in morning, but it was my fastest run (all of nothing, LOL). Megan found herself in 4th place in STS, but coned away a run that would have put her into 3rd. Before our 3rd runs we decided to swap a new set of shaved Bridgestones on the front of the car. Either we would be faster, or we would be scrubbing in the new tires for the next event. I got the honor of going out first on the new tires. Initial turn-in felt a little better, but nothing crazy. Typically we have to run an event on freshly shaven tires to get them up to speed, but we were hoping today would be different. I put together a pretty good run and expected to see a drop in time, however, not to be, I was slower by about a second. Guess, our wishful thinking didn't help, these tires are going to need to be scrubbed in. Craig went out for his first run in the afternoon, same fate. Colin gets a touch faster, and Chris Shay cleans up his runs and leap frogs both Craig and I move us back to 5th and 7th. We take our last runs and are unable to improve on the day. By the way of her last run Megan moved up into 2nd place in STS, just over 0.25 seconds from first place. Megan is the top Team Undercoat Racing driver today, bring home the 2nd place trophy.
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:: Saturday :: 5.17.08 :: by Jason
We got some new tires mounted up, so we will be having a garage sale for the old tires in the coming weeks here, so check back in the For Sale section to see what we have. It was entertaining to see Craig's Eagle Summit jam packed with tires! | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Sunday :: 5.4.08 :: by Jason
Well today is my maiden voyage of the year, WAI Event #1 at Miller Park, it's also the first time towing the race car behind the Excursion. I had to stop by Craig & Megan's to pick up the car since Megan drove it at the last event, it's been sitting there since. On the way there Craig calls and tells me that the car won't start and he thinks the battery is dead. We're not all that surprized, I'll just use the jumppack to get the car going. Craig and Megan are both staying at home trying to fight off some sickness, so I'm flying solo. I get there, we push start the car and get it loaded on the trailer... then I find out that Craig doesn't have the jumppack at this house, guess I'll be push starting the car... I get to the event and pop the clutch on the car as I roll it off the trailer to start the car, I'm getting good at this now. =) I haven't raced a car since last October, oh how I wish I lived somewhere warmer that had events for more than 6 months out of the year. Anyways, I need to knock the rust off today and get back into the swing of things. We've missed 2 events before this because of the Long Beach trip so everyone else has probably already knocked the rust off, so I'm hoping to just finish in the top 5 really. I let the car run all morning in paddock while I register, walk course, do my work assignment, etc. hoping that the battery will charge up enough for me to not have to push start it every run. I drove it halfway up on the triler so I could roll it forward without pushing it, turned it off, then tried to start it... bam, started right up, sweet! Hopefully it does that six more times today. =) The first run of the year was interesting, very sloppy, but I was running over cones on the inside because the car was turning in too much! Can't complain about that I guess. The car started for the second run, and I drove better for sure, on the 3rd run I came back with a great run that put me in the index lead. I actually had 'the shakes' when came back from this run, so I was feeling pretty good! I go into the afternoon runs with about at 0.8-0.9 second lead on index, way more than I expected. The course is very flowing without any corners that really need to be powered out of, so that helps out the Civic on index. Ryan Kroupa put his MaxQdata in the car for my runs since I didn't have ours with, so it was interesting to see my runs compared to his. Hopefully, it will help him out seeing the data.
The afternoon was really laid back for me (bad thing), the normal rushing around at the event wasn't there since I wasn't doing the normal co-driving and then having Megan drive the other half of day. I was wandering around a lot, not really paying all that much attention to everyone running, then I hear the annoucer rattle off the top ten, and I'm in second, crap! That is what I get for screwing around, at this point I have had 2 runs in the afternoon and only have one more to go. Time to get the game face on and put one together! I check the results board and I'm in second by 0.007, so I just need to be slightly faster to regain the lead. About 3/4 of the way through my last run I run over an apex cone, doh! I had enough time, but it was dirty. Note to self, we have lots of good drivers in the region, stop screwing around because they can and will beat you! BTW - the car started everytime in the afternoon too, the battery just needed to be charged up I guess. Oh well, I started the day hoping to be in the top 5 and I ended up being 2nd (-0.007) on index and able to compete for the win, so I'm happy with the day. The brakes didn't feel the greatest, but they haven't been bleed since that year, so I imagine that has something to do with it. That is something that we will need to do before the next event. We'll probably get some fresh Bridgestones mounted up for next event too, I ran this event on the same tires we ran all last year. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 5.2.08 :: by Jason
I finally got the weight distribution hitch all adjusted and put on the Excursion, and I got the Prodigy brake controller installed. So, the Excursion is all ready for it's first tow this weekend. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 4.22.08 :: by Jason
It has been well documented in the past about how well Bridgestone treated all of people who ran Bridgestone tires at Nationals w/ posters, framed pictures, ad with the winners on the rear cover of Sports Car, etc. The icing on the cake was an expense paid trip to the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach for the 4 ST* class winners and a guest! We just got back from the trip and what can I say, it was amazing! Hotel rooms at the Hilton right on the ocean, grandstand tickets for Fri-Sat-Sun, paddock passes for Fri-Sat, tickets into the hospitality tent on Sunday, dinner at the hotel on Saturday night, dinner at a great seafood/steak restaurant on Sunday (Caption Jack's), and tickets to the Champ Car party on the Queen's Mary on Sunday night. It really was a great time, way more than I expected... I was happy thinking we were going to get an airplane ticket and tickets to Sunday's race! Just when we think it's over, Sunday night at dinner they present each of the winners with a framed copy of the ad that was on the rear cover of Sports Car magazine, and it's autographed by all of the professional drivers who also won on Bridgestones last year!!!! Kimi Raikkonen (F1), Casey Stoner (MotoGP), Sebastian Bourdais (Champ Car), James Stewart (AMA Supercross)... Pretty sweet way to cap off the extended weekend! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 4.20.08 :: by Jason
While Craig and I were off gallivanting in California, Megan was starting her race season in Milwaukee. She had the joy of driving the car to the event (about 15 minutes on city streets), so next time the car has to go somewhere it will be Craig's turn. =) The brake light on the dash ended up being from the brake fluid level being low, not the parking brake contacts being bad. Some local autocrossers helped her get some brake fluid and get the car all set to go, thanks goes out to all that helped. Only other hiccup is that we forgot to swap out the steering wheels, and apparently we didn't leave the wheel in the car either, so she had to drive with the large offset steering wheel in her chest. Megan ended up in 3rd Place in STS after morning funs, and since she is on the 'three and done' plan preparing for Nationals, she decided to pack it up and head home for the day. =) She dropped one spot after everyone else completed their 4th and 5th runs of the day. The 4th Place finish was enough receive a trophy at the first event of the year. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 4.17.08 :: by Jason
Got home from work today, went out to check on the battery charger, it reads the same as it did yesterday... Put the key in the ignition, turn it, and BAM, it starts!!! Amazing, turn the car off, try it again, starts again! This is a good start to the evening, woohoo. I start the shuffling of car to get the trailer/car out of the parking spot. Craig comes over, we get the car off the trailer and get the trailer moved and out of the way. Get the old set of Bridgestone RE-01R's out and ready to mount up on the car. Get half of the tires mounted before I head in the house to start packing for the trip to California, it's about 11pm at this point... that 4:30am arrival time at the airport is creeping up fast. We decided that instead of me driving up at 4:00am, I'm just going to drive the Civic to Craig's tonight, that they he can follow me incase something happens, and maybe help me not get a ticket. I get most of my stuff packed up, he finished mounting the wheels, then I re-shuffled all of the vehicles to get the trailer back into it's place and all of the car off the street to avoid parking tickets (alternate side parking) while we're in Long Beach. As I'm moving the car, and probably annoying my neighbors in the process, I notice that one of the headlights is out. Not exactly something that is recommended when you are driving around a car with no exhaust and large stickers all of over it. I go back in to finish packing as Craig pulls a bulb from the 2006 season car to use. 1:00am rolls around and we leave my house for the 25-30 minute drive to Craig's house. The car starts up again for the 5th time since I pulled it off the charger, so I have some confidence on the battery. The brakes feel like complete crap, but they come around once I get the rust off them. The brake light is stuck on in the dash, I try moving the e-brake around a lot, but it doesn't go off. The drive to Craig's is very slow as I'm attempting to keep the noise level down by not reving the car above 3000 rpm, and not putting to much strain on the engine. On the highway we had to go past a cop who had someone pulled off, I had to gain some momentum approaching him, then get off the gas as I passed him to keep the noise down. Aside from that the drive went fine. Park the car in his garage, head inside, and proceed to pass out at 1:45am. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 4.16.08 :: by Jason
Well, we are headed to the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach this weekend, but Megan is going to run the Bridgestone/Team Undercoat Racing car this weekend at the first SCCA Milwaukee Region event of the year at Miller Park on Sunday. At being said, we need to get the car ready for the event. It has been sitting on the trailer since the last Milwaukee event last year. The battery is almost certainly dead, the rotors are rusted over, the rain tires are still on the car, and the fluids need to be changed. Since the car was still on the trailer, changing the oil was first on the list. Craig headed to the autoparts store to pick up some Mobil 1 as I drained the oil. No metal shavings in the oil, so that is good. Fresh new Mobil 1 in the engine and ready to go. We then decided to tackle the battery, as expected, it was dead as a door nail. After a couple failed attempted to jump it using my battery charger, my neighbor was kind of to borrow us a battery to jump the car. We let it run for about 20 minutes, didn't really expect the charge to take, but it was worth a shot. Turn it off, attempt to start it, nada. Decided to put the battery charge on it for the night and see if it will start tomorrow. Not excepting too much, at this point I think we are going to add a $50 battery to list of consumables for the car each year. Maybe we could go with one of the smaller ones this time, even though this one is far from large. We need to be at the airport at 4:30am tomorrow morning, so it's going to be a trash on the car tomorrow. Also need to figure out how to get the car up to Craig's house so Megan can drive it to the event on Sunday. At this point, the plan is just for me to drive up to Craig's house before we go to the airport, and then Megan can drop us off. I'm so excited, I get to drive the STS car on the street again [rolling eyes], isn't this why I bought a trailer and tow vehicle? | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Thursday :: 2.14.08 :: by Jason
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:: Wednesday :: 2.13.08 :: by Jason
Not much going on in the Team Undercoat Racing garage lately, actually, nothing at all. It's too frickin' cold to be out in the garage, we really need to get a unit heater. The current STS car is buried under about 20" of snow, the 2006 car is in the garage on jackstands waiting to be put back together, and my daily driver (97 Prelude) is also up on jackstands to receive a new suspension whenever it warms up. Our next scheduled event is the Newport Pro Solo in Arkansas on April 12th & 13th, we are hoping to find something local before that to put the car through it's paces after sitting all winter, however, there doesn't seem to be any major events going on, we might end up at a Miata Club event (or something similar). The week after the Pro Solo, Craig and I are heading out to the Long Beach Grand Prix thanks to Bridgestone, I earned a trip for 2 to the event for winning the STS National Championship last year, it should be a fun weekend. There are other race series running along with Champ Car, I'm really looking forward to seeing the LeMans and Speed GT series run. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 11.29.07 :: by Craig
Wisconsin's winter is upon us. Cold temperatures, sloth, Jason's love of slaying prion filled deer, and a decent Packer team have conspired against us getting anything done. I spend my day looking at car forums that don't seem to have much action in November. I would go ice racing, however, my wife forbid it. Something about a car, on ice, with water underneath it, "doesn't seem like a good idea". Really, I think she needs the offseason so that we can spend some time doing things not related to cars. We need a car cover and to sell the 2006 car. Anybody interested? We will have it back to stock and ready to sell in less than a month. (trying to motivate myself) | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 11.15.07 :: by Jason
Finally got the concrete poured! I was starting to worry about the weather, but it all worked out. So in a couple days I'll be able to put the car and trailer on a nice concrete slab. =) Going to need to get some black dirty next year to level out the grade around it, but it's not a big deal now. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 11.7.07 :: by Jason
Finished up the bench top and placed all of the additional outlet boxes that I want. I made the bench 42" deep, the additional space is nice, however, reaching stuff high on the wall above the bench is an issue now. I'm going to run all of the romex wire to each duplex outlet (9 new ones total), then have someone come hook them up to a new breaker in my electrical panel, lucky I have one open. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 11.4.07 :: by Jason
One down, one to go. Thanks to Craigslist, the parts car is gone! They came and towed it away today using another Civic Si and a tow strap, they only had like 30 miles to go (shakes head). Hopefully they made it OK. I stood in my garage in wonder, just thinking, "What am I going to do with this space?" Maybe I'll move my stuff out of my storage garage, maybe I'll put one of my daily drivers in the garage for the first time in almost 3 years, or maybe I'll move all of that stuff out of the corner and finally build my work bench!!! Ding, ding, ding... work bench it is. I've been talking about doing that for awhile now, we have been getting by with a 6-panel door on a pair of saw-horses. Off to Home Depot for wood and electrical. The 150' of Romex cost more than all of the outlets and wood. I got most of it built, need to notch out the top and fasten it down, and then have someone come and hookup the additional outlets I added. Once I get the bench buttoned up it's time to get the '06 protest-mobile put back together. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Thursday :: 11.1.07 :: by Jason
Well, I need to clear out some garage/parking spaces at the house, so the parts car needs to go. Check in the For Sale area for pictures... Here is one of Craig molesting it, haha. This is the chassis I raced in 2005 before Craig and I went in on the protest-mobile. I finished 3rd at the Peru tour just behind Hollis (after leading day 1) with this chassis, Jimmy Crawford drove it to 7th at Nationals in 2005. Now that I got the tow vehicle, I need a nice place to part it, so I'm pouring a slab for the big ol' beast, you can see that in the background. Hopefully the weather holds out for the next week so I can get the it done before it gets too cold. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 10.21.07 :: by Jason
Flew down to Austin, TX yesterday to pickup the new tow vehicle, it was a nice 18 hour drive home for me to get acquainted with her. So now I need to make some room for the 2000 Ford Excursion Limited (2WD) with the 7.3L Powerstroke diesel, someone buy a Civic from us! I got just over 18 mpg on the drive home and was cruising along at 85-95 mph most of the way on Sunday from STL north. The huge gas tank is great, only had to stop once on the way home, in the Jeep GC I would have had to stop about 6 times. I need to get a new hitch because the old hitch that I used with the Jeep just about touches the ground when installed on the X, I had to move the hitch head up as high as it would go on the shank. The receiver on the Grand Cherokee was just so high, I couldn't get a large enough drop to get the car trailer level without having the Jeep nose-up. The receiver height on the X is much better and the trailer is able to sit level now. I think I need to paint the wheels on the trailer too, maybe orange. =)
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:: Friday :: 10.15.07 :: by Jason
Despite our bad showing yesterday the 2007 season was a good one. I ended up 4th overall in MKE region behind 3 national champs, Craig finished 8th overall. I'm happy with that considering we were building a car (again) as the year went along, it will be fun to run a competitive car all year next year instead of building one. And obviously, nationals was a capper on the year. Looking forward to next year. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Thursday :: 10.14.07 :: by Jason
Today was the last SCCA-Milwaukee autocross of the year, Event #8 at Miller Park. The weather in the morning started out OK, however, the forecast was calling for rain later in the day. It was just Craig and I running the car, and since we raced 2nd Heat we had time to putz around during 1st heat. We watch other competitors run and try to figure out some senarios for overall points for the year, it's pretty much a two horse race between Bartek Borowski and Jeff Cashmore. Chris Fenter has an outside shot if he takes index and the other two have to drop the event. During first heat the weather is holding out, however, it starting to sprinkle a little. We make the decision to switch to our rain tires, Goodyear GS-D3's. We had them mounted on our set of 16x7.5 K1's before nationals, and the overall diameter is larger than our normal tires, we test fitted them on the front of the car before Nationals. However, we didn't test fit them on the rear thinking there wasn't any issues, oops! We didn't even need to move the car to see that there was a problem, the fender basically sat on the tire as soon as we lowered the jack. So what should we do? Get out the BFH (big f'ing hammer) and roll the lip ofcourse! Craig did some massaging, then I did some more! While we would doing that the rain started to really come down, so our effort wasn't for nothing. We softened up the rear shocks to help reduce some understeer and took a guess at the tire pressures with the GS-D3's, which are now referred to as "the mudder's". As we went out for our first runs there was plenty of standing water on course, the car was sliding all over the place. I had a pretty fast spin in an area of the course with some higher speed offsets, I really thought I was going to make it, LOL. I did the same on my second run. I think both Craig and I were either dirty or spun on all of our morning runs. The thought of packing it up came to mind, I think the long season was finally wearing on us, however, we decided that we paid and I was kind of set on getting through that offset section! Haha, who am I fooling, Craig didn't want to leave... I was ready to go watch football and drink some beer at Chili's. The fact that all of the people on Hoosier rains were killing us on PAX wasn't helping my motivation. Bartek was hanging onto the lead for overall driver of the year by a couple hundreds of a second over Cashmore (who jumped into a STX WRX for the day). Craig noticed something that smelled like coolant, might be from the big over rev at nationals. That is something we are going to have to take a look at over the winter. The afternoon was more the same really, we really had to tip-toe the car through sections of the course to stop it from spinning. Looking back we really should have disconnected the rear sway bar on the car, it probably would have helped. Craig got a clean run in, however, I continued to spin in the offsets as I was pretty hard headed about getting through there at a fast pace. I was losing that battle, on my last run I gave it up a little earlier at got through the area, but coned somewhere else on course to finish the day without a clean run. Bartek had a better showing, stretching his lead over Jeff in the afternoon and taking the Overall Driver of the Year for the 2007 season with Milwaukee Region. That guy can do no wrong, a national DS championship, MKE Region Overall winner, and he wins the Pace trailer giveaway! In hein sight, we probably should have used the day as more of test-n-tune for our rain setup since this was the first and only rain event of the year, oh well, live and learn I guess.
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:: Saturday :: 10.6.07 :: by Jason
We decided to take the weekend off, the last week in Topeka really took a lot out of us. Craig & Megan also have this little wedding affair coming up on the 12th, so they might have some others things to take care of. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 9.28.07 :: by Jason
Oh, I almost forgot about our Team Undercoat Racing t-shirts we had make, the entire team was sporting the shirts on day one, as well as most of day 2 (got hot wearing a black shirt while working course). Anyways, they seemed to be a hit and we received lots of compliments. One person called them, "The best shirt of 2007 Nationals!"
Day 2 started off a little warmer than Day 1, however, it was still on the cold side. We had the tires up off the ground with the covers on them trying to retain any heat for Megan. We also tighten up the car more than we did yesterday so Megan can get a feel for the course without having to worry so much about the car swapping ends. First run she goes out tentative, but gets a clean run put down that she can improve on later runs. Second run out she puts down a good time, only 0.2 off the leaders, however, it had one cone attached. She was feeling more confident with the car's tighter setup, and decided to go for it on the last run. She went out and put down the second fastest raw time in STSL, however, another cone haunted the run. Based on her 1st run she was able to retain 3rd place in STSL. Congrats to Megan on the podium finish! Again today we pulled the rear tires off the car to get some extra heat in them for Craig, we left them laying on the ground as we went to get our last course walk in of the 2007 Solo Nationals (my feet hurt from all the walking). I'm not sure why were are walking again, but it just seemed like the right thing to do and I'd like to look for build-up off-line again too. Final course walk total for the week ends at 16...
We get back to grid after the course walk and wait until the last second to put the rear tires back on the car in order to retain as much heat as possible. Craig goes out on his first run and puts down a great time of 49.512 clean. All is going well, we cool the tires, swap the steering wheel, etc. in preparation for my first run. There is a little more heat in the front tires than yesterday due to numerous sweepers on the west course. I go out on my first run and put down a good clean 49.879, it wasn't a spectacular run, but it was clean, and I know had a time on the books for everyone to catch. Craig moves up to 2nd, and has the only clean time faster than mine after 1st runs, although there are a handful of drivers with faster dirty times (Shenefield, McCormick, and Caudill). Lots of people have cones, so I'm happy we both got clean runs to make them chase us a little. We cool the tires and make the driver changes again for Craig. He heads out for run 2 and proceeds to hit a cone in the slalom, once that happened it pushed the limits a little more for the remainder of the course which caused a pretty big bobble at one point. He finishes with a time only 0.3's slow that his first with the big error. As soon as he is pulling back into grid he's yelling, "Change the tires, change the tires... they are overheating!" We jack the car up, swap the front wheels/tires with one of our extra pairs, make the driver changes, etc. Objective for my 2nd run is the same as the first, stay clean, knock off some more time so other have to continue to hunt me down. I get a little more aggressive in places this run since I was pretty comfortable with the course after my first run. As I go through the slalom I get close to a cone and hear it as I ran it over, I'm not sure if I just ran over the base of the cone or knocked it over. During the slow-ish right hander after the slalom I can't resist the urge to look over my shoulder to see if the cone is down, if the cone is down I planned to downshift into 1st gear at the finish to see how it goes since. Fortunately, I don't see any down cones. After that close call I didn't push the issue too much through the "kink", but was still somewhat aggressive. As I finished the course and headed to get my time, I could tell by the announcers voice that my run was good. I see the 49.129 second time and I'm feeling good, announcer say, "new top time of the day in STS!", man, it felt good to hear that! Drive back to grid to get the car ready for Craig. As I get out of the car I get report that no one had a faster time after 2nd runs, Chris Shenefield did have another pretty fast dirty run though. Cool the tires, make driver changes, talk about how the tires feel good. At this point we are 1 and 2 in the standings and feeling pretty good, although McCormick has yet to log a clean run today. One more run to go, Craig gets settled in and prepares for the last run. He keeps it clean, but is unable to improve his time on the run, but he's still sitting in 2nd. Back in grid we consider swapping off the front tires again since last time 3rd run they fell off, however, we decide to just stick with the tires on the car. I try my best to get prepared for my last run, Craig makes the driver changes as Megan and I spend all of the time we can cooling the front tires. We cool the tires all of the way up to when I was sent out of grid. Last run, same plan... at tenth or two more would really be nice. As I accelerate away from the line I run the revs a little longer in first gear, it's the last run, LOL. The first part of the run goes great, about half way through the run I can start to feel the front tires giving up, guess we should have swapped. Regardless, I continue on still thinking I can go faster. I finish the run a couple tenths slower than the last run, however, I'm pleased when I hear the announcer say that I was still retaining the lead in STS. McCormick was a couple cars ahead of me, so I know that he didn't post a time enough to beat me, so now my attention was focused on the guys behind me (Hollis and Shenefield). I cruise back to grid, jump out of the car and run up to the viewing area just in time to hear Andy Hollis's time, which wasn't his fastest. Now it's basically down to Chris's last run. For those who don't know Chris Shenefield owns RedShift Motorsports, who is one of our sponsors, so it was cool that it was coming down to the two of us. The nerves start up as I see him leave the finish line, however, he coned in the first slalom. It's hard to explain the feeling as I saw that, I saw Craig and a bunch of other people from our region sitting on the bleacher near were I was, we started hooting and hollering, I literately jumped over this poor lady who happen to be sitting in the front row near the fence on my way over to celebrate with them! At this point I thought we took 1st and 2nd, however, I was later informed that Kevin's last run was enough to take 2nd place, bumping Craig to 3rd, still a great finish. So as we are about to head back to grid we hear that there is one more re-run in STS, it seems as if Jesse Caudill had a re-run coming. It would take a huge run for him to catch me, but he was within reasonable striking distance of Craig... so we had to take a breather and wait for Jesse to finish his last run. Jesse put down his best clean run of the day, but it wasn't enough to catch Craig. The time was full of lots of mixed emotions for me, I'd just won a National Championship! It felt great to come back and win this year by a good margin (1.151) to prove that last year wasn't a fluke because of some missing parts or our tire selection. It was also a little sad for me because I wouldn't be able to call and tell my dad I'd won, he passed away a couple months ago and was always a big supporter of my racing... this ones for you dad, we did it. Big thanks to Craig for being the best co-driver, the amount of time and effort we put into this car and our racing the last two years was second to none. Thanks to Chris at RedShift Motorsports for all of the help and advices with the car from the beginning, I'm glad I was able to bring home a National Championship for his shop. And last, but surely not least, huge thanks to all of the Milwaukee/Chicago Region drivers who continually push us weekend-in and weekend-out to make us who we are!!! Time to go have a couple frost cold ones with some friends!!!! | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Thursday :: 9.27.07 :: by Jason
The day has come, it's the day that we have been preparing for since December of last year when we bought the new chassis. All of the money, the long hours, the testing, the sweat and tears (OK, maybe not tears)... but regardless, all that we have done was done for this day, Day 1 of our 2007 National Championships. Megan races in STSL during first heat, Craig and I run STS in 3rd heat. It's about 50°-55° at 8am when Megan takes her first run. Our biggest concern is getting heat into the tires, mainly the rear tires. We have the rear tires up off the ground trying to stop the surface from cooling them, but they are still cold. We make some tire pressure adjustments for the first run to reduce oversteer. First run out the car is noticeable loose as she goes thru the first slalom, a couple seconds later she spins and DNF's. =( She finished the run, but by the time she got back to grid the rear tires are still cold. Time to tighten up the car, we make some adjustments to the shocks. Megan goes out for her second run, the car seemed a little better, but it's still too loose which causes another DNF. After the second run some heat started to get into the tires and the ambient temperature was going up, however, it's going to be hard to really push the car when you know you have to get a clean one in the books. On her 3rd run the car looked more planted and she stayed clean, however, it left her in 3rd place just over a second back, so she has some work to do tomorrow. We are going to tighten up the car more to start tomorrow if it's just as cold. We race 3rd heat, between 2nd and 3rd heats there was a time for course walk. We pulled the rear tires off the car and laid the on the hood of the car trying to get some heat into them for Craig's first run, in the meantime we went for a last course walk, just to get another look and see where there might be some sand build up. The course looked pretty good, areas where I wanted to be wide seemed to be clean unless you got out way too wide. After the walk we went back to grid and put the tires back on the car just before the heat started, there was definitely more heat in the tires than normal. Craig went out first and put down a decent time of 45.073, but had a cone. He said the car felt pretty good, however, when he attempted to shift to 3rd gear at the finish he stabbed the brakes in lieu of the clutch. So, he ended up stabbing the brakes, gridding 3rd gear, and coasting through the finish... note-to-self, that doesn't help your time. Now the fun begins, change the steering wheel out (we run different steering wheels and no quick release), get the belts ready, cool the front tires, cool the engine. We do this every event, but the first time always seems to check me out because I'm not in the flow yet. We get everything ready to go, I hop in the car to get my head on straight. I think about what I need to do, how I need to plan ahead for the 3rd gear shift, and the main points to not screw up. The goal of run 1 is to learn the course and stay clean so I can attack the course on the last 2 runs. I leave the line, enter the first slalom and proceed to hit the entry cone, $@!t, way to go. I finish the course a little more aggressive that I normally would because this run is basically a throw-a-way. I come up to the finish and proceed to pull a 'Craig' and stab the brake instead of the clutch! I grid 3rd, and coast through the finish, dae sha voo. I guess that note-to-self didn't work. I come in with a 44.865 +2, the run wasn't great by any means and the finish didn't help. The raw time is decent, but there are faster times out there, most are dirty though. We're feeling pretty good about our times considering. I get back to grid, repeat the switch-o-roo for Craig. We sit in grid laughing about how neither of us can shift the car correctly, and both try to make a larger mental note of what we need to do at the finish. We know that we can go flat through the area now, so there is no need to have our foot over the brake pedal, so as we approach the area we are going to move our foot onto the clutch. As Craig goes out for his 2nd run we are definitely in the mix time-wise. As he is approaching the finish his runs looks good, then he accidently shifts into 1st gear! Hearing it from the outside I thought our Nationals was over. He clutched in as soon as he realized and coasts through the finish, but the revs obviously went very high. Just after that there is silence from the engine, I thought it had died. Then, I hear some varying RPM's, in my mind it's over... come to find out it's just him feathering the engine listening for some metal on metal noises. I hop in the car after his run and listen to the engine as we head back to grid, the engine seems sound OK. We get back into grid, put the hood up and take a listen... everything seems good, we did blow the dipstick out of the engine though, along with some oil, yikes! Craig did run a 45.429, slower than his last run, but it was clean and he has yet to accelerate threw the finish. Once we're done checking the engine Craig mentions that the car is turning in funny and does feel good. Upon further investigation we find that the front passenger wheel is loose, there is a far amount of play in it, either a bad wheel bearing or a loose axle nut. We borrow a socket big enough for the axle nut (thanks Nick), and attempt to tighten the nut to start, it goes nowhere. We start asking around for a wheel bearing with the plans of replacing it that night. Doug Allen happens to have an extra axle nut, we replace the axle nut and this solves our problem. Fortunately for us, all of this happened at the same time that Andy Hollis had his issue on course, which gave us time to do the change without having to take a mechanical. Again big thanks to Doug Allen!!!
After all of that we decide to swap out the ECU for our spare one without a rev-limiter since it's obvious that we can't shift. This ECU isn't tuned, but he feel there is more time to gain by not shifting at the finish then there is with the little extra power the car might have elsewhere. I take my second run knowing that I must have a clean run in order to really push it on my last run. I ran somewhat tentative at certain points on the course which doesn't help, but I manage to put down a 45.069 clean which was in the ballpark of of the top runners (Kevin was fastest with a 44.262, others in mid-to-high 44's). Third runs, do or die time. Craig goes out and puts down a 45.014 second time, he wasn't too happy with the time, but it was clean and puts him in the 7th position for the day with others in front of him within striking distance. I go out for my 3rd run feeling like I need to drop some time to have a shot for day 2. The lead would be nice, but I don't want to take too many chances and cone away a run instead of just getting closer for day 2. The first part of the course goes well, I end up being tentative in the offset again, but finish the run strong after a slight loose situation going into the final slalom. I really didn't think the time was going to be that good, however, based on the cheering of all of the people viewing the finish it must be good. As I see the time, I do a little celebration in the car, LOL. I drop almost a full second to a 44.091, and take the lead in STS. So, I go into Day 2 with a 0.171 lead over Kevin McCormick, followed by Shenefield (-0.353), Hollis (-0.589), Caudill (-0.750), Whipple (-0.789), and Craig (-0.923) in 7th. I was happy with today's results obviously, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow because I think that course better suits my driving style. We find a pair of tire warmers (or heat retainers) to use for Megan's morning runs thanks to the MN guys (thanks Larry). We go for a couple more course walks with some competitors who ran the west course earlier in the day hoping to get some insight on the course. It seems pretty straight forward though. We call it a night fairly early and prepare for battle tomorrow. Total course walks to date, 15. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 9.26.07 :: by Jason
Craig headed to Kansas City airport this morning to pickup Megan, he kept in constant contact for updates on the standings. The cell phone bill should be interesting for this week considering I'm roaming! Chris arrived with the stickers, I think the car is going to look really good. We decide to head off-site to [gasp] wash the car in the afternoon. I had to go get the trailer from the VIP lot so we could load up the car to take it to the car wash. We got the car washed and polished it up with some Nu-Polish. It looked better in the sun, but it still looked like the old car. Applied the black vinyl to the rub strip area before we left the car wash. Once we got back to the site Craig and Megan took some course walks while I unloaded the car and returned the trailer to the VIP lot. After they walked course it was time to apply the remaining vinyl. It actually went better than I thought it would, once we got a system down it went pretty smooth. It took about 2 hours our so to get everything applied, however, we are very happy with the way it turned out. It's like a whole new car, someone even complimented it, that's a new one! We finished most of vinyl before we headed to the Wednesday Night Awards Ceremony. We went to dinner then we came back to the site to finish up the remainder of the required stickers. We also had to cut some magnetic to put over the extra class letters/numbers when different drivers are piloting the car. We still need to get some black Bridgestone Potenza stickers for over the front wheel wells, we removed the old white ones because they didn't match the color scheme. Thanks to Redshift Motorsports for all of the help with the vinyl. After we finished up the car I saw Andy Hollis cruise on site in the Miata, so we decided to head over to his camp for him to give the car a once over before competition the next day. We did something similar with Chris Shenefield last year too to make sure we had everything, but that didn't work so well! LOL Regardless, Andy was kind enough to look over the car for us. We talked awhile about the car & the class and had a good time before it was time for bed. Went out for a couple course walks (2 more on east) before I headed back to the hotel, the late nighters (Craig and Megan) stayed up and rattle canned the front bumper with some flat black paint since it was looking pretty crappy. Total course walks up to 10. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 9.25.07 :: by Jason
We're on site today to help out other regional guys. Not to many of them are running, but we will be around to help out as much as possible and to watch the action. It was lightly raining in the morning when we arrived on site, this threw a wrench into the mix for Heat 1 and 2 drivers as conditions were changing by the minute. Went to the SPS trailer to get some vinyl for the car. We got some black vinyl strips to cover up the holes in the doors where the rub strips used to be. We also got some Team Undercoat Racing stickers as well as some with our last names. Chris is bringing the rest of the stickers tomorrow. One more walk on the west course to keep it fresh, 4 more on the east course... total course walks up to eight. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 9.24.07 :: by Jason
Slept in today after a night of drinking. Wandered around the site talking to people, a couple more people from our region show up. Don't do much most of the day. We walk the west course 2 times, and the east course once... we run the east course first on Thursday. We head to Walmart with a group of guys from the region, purchase a battery for the Spreee so we don't have to use the jump back all the time. We buy some cleaning supplies for the car, yikes. Later in the evening we go out for dinner and a couple drinks. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 9.23.07 :: by Jason
Today SCCA is running a practice course. For your entry fee you get 5 tickets, good for one run each, which you can use anytime during the day. Your only requirement for the day is your one hour work assignment. We decide to run 2 runs each in the morning at around 9:30am to see how the car handled in some 70-75° temperatures. The car seems really loose, however, I think it is just that we are trying to drive on a dirty line. There is lots of sand on the course especially when you get off line, unfortunately, we typically run a wider more sweeping line that most cars in order to maintain speed, that put us out in this area. We ran the morning runs with the muffler on the car, it made the shifting points seem weird (different sounding), so we decided to go back to paddock and swap the straight pipe into the car before our next runs. We wait until about noon to go and get back in line. When we arrive at the course entry there was a line of about 20 cars waiting to just enter the practice area, apparently there were too many cars in the grid, so we had to wait until other cars came out prior to going in. As we're waiting we get some food at the local venders, it takes about 15 minutes before we get into the inactive grid. We wait about another 30 minutes before we got into the active grid, once you're in the active grid you could take as many runs as you wanted (until you ran out or left). The course wasn't as loose off line at this point, however, they did change the course some due to a car leaving oil all over the course. This kind of sucked because we weren't able to compare our morning runs to our afternoon runs. The balance of the car was way better in the afternoon. We put down some good times on a couple different sets of tires, and left the grid with what was the fastest time of any STS car that we saw. Andy Hollis and Jesse Caudill we running the other practice course, so we weren't able to compare our times. Later in the day, David Avard ran a time which was 0.1 seconds faster than my time. Left the site feeling good about the practice session, nothing to do tomorrow so we decided to go out for a couple drinks. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Saturday :: 9.22.07 :: by Jason
Get up around 10am, head to Heartland Park to check out the ProSolo and Super Challenge. We stay on site most of the day hanging out with other people from our region and attempt to fit everyone in the limited paddock space we have. We don't really have anything to do today except get the car ready for the practice course tomorrow. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 9.21.07 :: by Jason
Got out of work late today and Craig was running late too, so the plan to leave at 12:30pm was out the window. We didn't have time to make a Spree mount, so we end up just putting it across the front seats of the Civic. By the time we get everything loaded we hit the road about 1:45pm, which will get us into Topeka pretty late. The journey is going well until a semi-trailer attempts to run me off the road, I end up with 2 trailer tires off in the gravel as I avoided him with my horn blaring. I seemed to have survived, however, about 45 minutes later Craig comes flying along side me pointing at the trailer. I ended up blowing out a trailer tires, guess we'll test out that plug! This is the point in the trip when I get concerned since I'm out of spare tires, maybe I'll pick up a second spare for next year. The remainder of the drive is uneventful aside for a few detours which the navigation system handled with ease. We arrive at the motel at just after midnight and check-in, then we went dropped the car and trailer off at the site so it wouldn't sit at the motel. Total drive is 642 miles in 10.5 hours, one tire trailer, and 57.8 gallons of gas at 11.1 mpg. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 9.20.07 :: by Jason
Tonight I put all of the electronics on the charges so they are ready to go tomorrow, Craig dropped off the Spree to be put on the trailer (going to have to be tomorrow). Got most of the stuff loaded up in the Jeep and ready to go, just last minute stuff will go in tomorrow. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 9.19.07 :: by Jason
Got both seats mounted in the car and checked the length on both exhausts, again. I think the car is ready to go now. Attention has now turned to the car trailer. I came home from work today to find the trailer with a flat tire., what the hell, I guess better today than when we are going down the road on the way to Topeka. Seems to just be an industrial size staple which caused a leak. Going to put the new spare tire on it, then plug the tire that is flat now. I want to figure out a better way to put the mountain bike on the trailer, and make room for the Spree incase Craig gets it done tomorrow. Also would like to find a way to store the gas cans on the trailer for the trip so they don't stink up the inside of the Jeep. I think these items, along with some other personal things that need to get done before we leave, are going to make tomorrow a long night. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 9.18.07 :: by Jason
I dropped off one of the exhausts off at the local muffler shop to have it cut to the correct length and have the new flange welded on. I spent a couple minutes talking with the guy who was going to be doing the work just so he would understand what I was expecting. Really common sense things really, center the flange, cut the pipe at a 90° angle, etc. When I go to pick it up, he gives it to me and it's all balled up! I can see the edge of the cut pipe when I look down thru the flange. The hole in the flange is 2.25" and the pipe is 2.5", this doesn't seem like rocket science to me, how hard can it be? And when you look at it don't you say to yourself, "this doesn't look what the customer asked for!" It's like talking to a wall when I'm there. I have the guy grid the lip of the pipe down so it was pretty much smooth. For those in the area, do not use JC Muffler on Douglas if you're looking for some decent work. I headed up to Craig's with the drivers seat, we broke a weld on the bracket last weekend... I think we need to lose weight. Regardless, we repaired the bracket on the drivers seat, it was pretty easy. We also finished up the passenger seat mount. Then we, well maybe just Craig, proceeded to weigh each seat about 10 times, needless to say, we aren't worried about our seat weight. They both weighted in at 26 lbs, we figured they extra pound would account for any variance in scales. We also welded up our other exhaust at Craig's, still not sure which exhaust we are going to run, however, we are going to go with old faithful, unless the MaxQData says differently. We gave it a coat of hi-temp black paint, and it looks stealth, too bad it's far from. =) We got all of our 'need to do' items done, just need to put the seats back in the car. Well use the next couple nights to check everything over and get packed up. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 9.17.07 :: by Jason
Final preparations for Nationals need to be buttoned up in the next couple days here. We started to get everything together in a pile that we need to bring down. We are going to be loaded for bear... bring extra parts, tires, axles, etc. Hopefully, we'll be hauling all of this stuff for nothing, but better to be prepared for the worst during the week in Topeka. We removed the damaged exhaust from the car, Craig is going to put a new turn-down on the exhaust, I'm going to put a flange on our old exhaust so we can compare the two. Maybe we will have some time to do a couple runs and compare times with the MaxQData, then decide which one we want to run at Nationals. Both will be long enough to exit behind the driver without a doubt!!!! Our numbers/stickers aren't going to be ready until next week, so we'll be installing them down in Topeka, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Sunday :: 9.16.07 :: by Jason
I made the trek down to Chicago today to meet up with Craig and get one more event in before Nationals. SCCA-Chicago Region was hosting Event #6 of their season at Route 66 Raceway in Joilet, IL. The course was similar to the course on Saturday, however, they made some changes to bring the speed down. The run to the "Route 66 Turnaround" was a series of about 6 offsets which you had to be patient with, or they would cost you lots of time. After the 180° turnaround you were brought into a 5 cone slalom, followed by a couple more offsets into a tighter left hander before the finish. We got to the rev-limiter on the way to the turnaround, and just at the end of the offsets before the tight finish turn. I think I ended the morning runs in second place on index behind Bartek Borowski, with Chris Fenter right on my tail. Craig was sitting 2nd in STS about 0.8's back. I know I have some time out there, and knocking 0.3 off in the afternoon to beat Bartek's current time is within reach. The question is if the surface will allow us to go faster, and how much faster he can go in the heat after us... and ofcourse there is Fenter who could beat us both! First run in the afternoon I got don't improve my time, Craig matches his exact time, but it's dirty. Fenter puts down a faster run and jumps into 2nd on index. Our second run I drop about 0.15, but it's dirty (wouldn't have been enough to move up)... Craig is slightly slower than his morning run. It comes down to the last run of the day, I need at least another 0.2's off my last dirty run to catch Bart. I get a good run to the turnaround and have to stop due a down cone, re-run. Next run I hit some cones on the first half of the course, but there is another cone out for the box on the run back to the finish, luckily I receive another re-run. So, 3rd attempt at my last run... I put down a decent run, but had a couple bobbles and can only match my last dirty run time, but clean. Not enough to catch Fenter or Bart, but enough to hold off anyone from behind me. Fenter is unable to improve on his final 2 runs, so Bart goes into his afternoon runs with the lead, and takes the index win. Nice running Bart and Chris. I thought the brakes felt good, Craig wasn't so fond of them.
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:: Saturday :: 9.15.07 :: by Jason
Craig headed down to Route 66 Raceway to attend TSSCC Event #7 in Joilet Raceway. I wasn't able to make it down because I had to bartend on Saturday night, so he flew down solo and co-drove another STS Civic (thanks Ryan). The course was pretty fast, some guys getting into 3rd gear on the long run out to the "Rte. 66 Turnaround". They were battling a loose car, and found that the rear toe had moved way out. After adjusting the rear toe they improved their times, Ryan taking 1st in STS, and Craig moving up to 7th in Pro. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 9.14.07 :: by Jason
Craig stopped by the house today and swapped out the questionable rear wheel bearing for one without any play in it. One more thing to cross off the To-Do List. Probably going to bring an extra one to Nationals just to be sure we don't have any problems. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 9.13.07 :: by Jason
We got out and bleed the brakes on the car tonight. The pedal was feeling a little spungy the last couple events. We'll see how it is this weekend. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 9.12.07 :: by Jason
They came out and replaced the cracked windshield today. It looks like there might have been a small chip in the windshield when the originally installed it. Regardless of the cause, it was replaced free of charge. It does look very naked without the Tire Rack banner. Also on that note, we aren't going to be able to run the black Tire Rack sticker on the windshield, that was straight from the horses mouth at Tire Rack. =( Oh well, maybe we'll try to put some orange behind it or something to make it look better. Craig looked around at a couple places today to try to find some 7/8" solid square steel to put in our passenger seat brackets. He found some, but the weight wasn't enough (2 lbs per foot), so we are going to look for some lead, hopefully that will be heavier. He need to add about 7 lbs to the existing seat/mount to meet the 25 lb. minimum, right now we are just running a stock seat & rails. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 9.11.07 :: by Jason
Tonight we replaced the old bondo-fied door with the all metal door off my old Civic. Come to find out they weight exactly the same amount, but the magnets should stick to the door now. Adjusted the doors and swapped the key cylinders, it went pretty smooth, but still took a good two hours. Sanded down the spot of rust on the door and sprayed some rust inhibitor on it, we're getting good use of the can we have. Finalized the order of Team Undercoat Racing t-shirts today, they should arrive just in time for Nationals. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 9.10.07 ::
We've had a pretty big crack in our windshield since about the second event after we got windshield replaced last time, I finally got around to called the place to have them replace it. They are going to send someone out to the house this afternoon to take a look at it. Didn't really get anything done, just made a list of things to complete before the trip to Nationals. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 9.9.07 ::
Arrived this morning with some sleep under our belts, which is a good thing. While attempting to pull the car off the trailer we proceed to rip a portion of the exhaust off the car! It folds itself over enough to the point that we need to remove about 8-10" of the exhaust just to get it straight without any kinks, something else to add to the list of things to do before Nationals. The course is basically the same as yesterday, just run backwards w/ a couple corners opened up to allow better flow and revised start/finish cones to allow adequate time to slow the car down exiting the course. We took our morning runs on the new shaved tires and weren't too far off the pace. I ran a pair of 62.1's (62.108 being fastest), but needed a 61.520 to catch Chris Fenter on index. Craig sat on a 62.678, although he had a 62.284 with a cone. I think a 61.5 is possible in the afternoon on the shaved tires. We run the new tires for the 1st afternoon run, then swap to the known good tires for the 2nd and 3rd runs. My times get faster with the old tires, but I'm not really convinced that it was the tires, I think I just drove better. Craig's times are pretty consistent, our conclusion is that the new shaved tires are pretty much the same as the old 130 run tires. I'm able to get down to a 61.697, which got me close to Fenter's morning index time. However, Chris got faster (60.976), but was leapfrogged by Jeff Cashmore (58.713 in AS) who changed to the good tires. Congrats to Jeff on the index win, and on a well designed course. Megan put down a couple blistering fast runs in the afternoon to take the win in STS. She ended up sitting on a 63.763, but posted two fast dirty runs... a 62.944 and 63.058. The fast times might be in response to the putting the stock steering wheel back on the car. Regardless, it looks like she is primed and ready for Nationals.
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:: Saturday :: 9.8.07 ::
We have two events this weekend, both hosted by SCCA-Milwaukee Region at Miller Park. Our plan is to scrub in the new shaved Bridgestone tires all day on Saturday, then compare them to the existing Bridgestones on Sunday to make sure they have similar (or better) performance. Just seeing the tires mounted on the SSR's puts a smile on your face! I'm a little tired today because I got zero hours of sleep last night (bartending on the weekends has it's downsides), but I've done it before and I sometimes even do well. Craig & I run 1st and 3rd heat, Megan is supposed to run 2nd and 4th, however, she has a dress fitting and hair appointment in the /early afternoon... she decides to skip morning runs and comeback after she's finished (she works registration in the morning, so no work assignment during racing) and get as many runs in as possible. Steve had some extra time in the morning to take a look at our shift indicator (thanks Steve). Seems as if we have it all wired up correctly, we even tried a different location for the tach signal with no success. Going to have to contact the supplier on Monday to see about getting a replacement. We run the car first heat, the tires feel somewhat slick, but they aren't terrible. I hit a couple cones on my first run, then proceed to DNF my next two morning runs when the car gets really loose on me... so much for Pro Class points. Craig also ruins the morning, coning every run. The tires weren't that bad, my DNF's were driver induced. Our times aren't that bad (around 1 second off index), we're going to have to clean it up in the afternoon though. Both Craig and I finally got clean runs in the afternoon, my fast time was a 63.465, Craig had a 64.004. That left me 0.444 back of index for the day, which was OK with me. New tires and not much sleep, can't complain too much.
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:: Friday :: 9.7.07 :: by Jason
We had a couple hours to get some work done on the car for the weekend, the plan was to wire up the shift indicator and fabricate a video camera mount. During the day, Craig stopped by the local metal shop and picked up some aluminum square & flat stock to fabricate the mount. After work I started to wire up the shift indicator, it seemed easy enough... power, ground, tachometer signal. While installing it Craig showed up with the aluminum and started working on the camera mount. He also brought back the wheels and tires, which we got mounted and balanced at Lake County Alignment. I got everything wired up, however, it wasn't working. Not sure what was going on, but I had to head to work, so it will have to wait until tomorrow at the event. Craig continued to work on the camera mount. He called me about midnight at work and said he got the camera mount done & put the new wheels and shaved tires on the car. This worked out well, I loaded up the car, trailer, and tow vehicle with everything when I got home from work, however, that happened to be really late (5am). The morning is already here. Hopefully, we can talk to Wynveen at the event about the shift indicator (he has the same model) and get that resolved. BTW- The wheels look HOT on the car!!! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 9.6.07 ::
We were able to work on the car for a couple hours late night (11pm-1am). We installed the rear bumper, the old one had a decent size chunk of plastic missing from it and we didn't want to run into issues at nationals, so we replaced it. We also did some rust prevention/detention while we had the rear bumper off the car. We sanded down some rust areas and coated them with rust inhibitor. We pulled the stock steering wheel off the old car for Megan to use at this weekends event. She has been wanting to get a steering wheel that doesn't have as large of a offset dish as the one in the car, it's too close to her. The current wheel works fine for Craig and I beacuse we have longer legs and sit back farther. We'll see how the stock wheel works for her. We received tires from Tire Rack today, so we are going to have to get them mounted tomorrow (Friday) so we can scrub them in over the weekend. Craig loaded up all of our wheels, along with the rain tires for nationals, and is going to get them all mounted tomorrow. Didn't have time to install the shift indicator or swap the bondo-fied door off the car. We are going to have to swap the door in the next day or two though because someone might purchase the parts car which the door is on. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 9.4.07 ::
Our new shift indicator arrived in the mail today. We're going to attempt to get it installed for the dual Milwaukee Region events this weekend. We have some other stuff we want to get done for this weekend too, so we'll see how it goes. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Sunday :: 9.2.07 ::
This weekend we headed down to Route 66 Raceway in Joilet, IL to run G.A.S.S. Event #7 (Chicago Region Event #5). It was a great day for racing (mid 80's, clear sky), however, we are looking for some rain to test of the rain setup before Nationals, maybe next week. ;) Craig was looking (and feeling) rough from drinking 2 nights earlier (lightweight). Got registered, I talked to Wynveen about his new car purcahse while Craig took a nap, unloaded the car, teched, and headed out for some course walks. The course had a mix of two mid-speed 180° turns at the start, followed by a fast acceleration straight (sort of across the lot), into a fast right-hand "kink" leading into a 5-come options slalom. If driven correctly it was a fast and fun section of the course. After the slalom it brought you into the 180° "Rte. 66 turn-around", followed by an acceleration zone heading back into four fast offsets with some decent space between them. After the offsets there was a tight "gap" to shoot thru, which brought you into second slower optional slalom before the finish lights. Walking the course we were concerned that we would be at a pretty big disadvantage in the acceleration zones, as they were long. History shows that we really loose out when we go from 2500rpm to 7500rpm in one section of a course, however, we can make it up with some tighter sections were we carry speed better than others. Morning runs went OK, we were going left-left on the 2 slaloms which seemed to be working well. Craig drove first and after his second run (59.113 +1) he comes back and says, "I think I can take the kink after the fast section flat!" I'm sceptical, but start to wonder if it's possible if we get out wide enough on entry. My first run I gave a lift of the throttle then back onto it, but hit the apex cone on the way thru. I decide I'm committed to trying it flat on my second run, well that didn't work out so well, I smacked the outside cones with the side of the car. The rear stepped out and there just wasn't anymore power on tap to pull it straight. I knocked off 0.4's (58.558 +3), but I don't know if it was thru that corner. Craig DNF'd his third run trying to pull off the same move, so I decided that it wasn't going to happen. After that run I started to think that we've been doing a lot of stupid thinking just like that, and it's been costing us both time. So no more trying to be superman, take what the course gives you. I go out for my final morning run and pretty much match my second run (58.569), I whimped out at the kink (braking really early) but the run was clean which is what I was looking for. Craig had to sit on his first run (60.949) after dirty 2nd and 3rd runs. I finished off the morning somewhere around 7th on index, only a couple tenths from second, but about 0.7's from Chris Fenter's index leading clean time (57.694 in STX). Chris had an even faster dirty run (57.259 +1), I think I can catch his clean run, but that dirty time would be a serious stretch. While watching some cars in third heat I started to notice some of the fastest times were coming from competitors going right on the second slalom, you drove farther into the slalom and reduced distance on the way in, but were slower with more distance on the out. It really seemed like a horse a piece, but you can't argue with the results. So on Craig's first run in the afternoon he ran it on the right and was a little faster than the morning (59.018 +1). I compared the data from the MaxQData and it really didn't show any difference in time, however, it was the first time he'd done it that way, versus twice the other way. I decided to also try it out to see what I thought and to gather more data. I ran a 58.320 which was faster, however, I'm a dummy and forgot to turn the data acquisition on (errr). Craig goes out the third run really needed to get a good clean run under his belt, and puts down a clean 59.429 taking the slalom on the right. Just after this run the battery on PDA dies... no more DA for us. In the meantime, Fenter goes out and ups the ante by cleaning up his dirty run from the morning (57.293) and extends the index lead. Now I need to run lower than a 57.506 to capture index, that is a lot of time and it's not looking good. I go out on my 2nd afternoon run not really sure which way I'm going to take the slalom, I really hussled the car (didn't whimp out at the kink) around and when I went thru the gap before the slalom it really pushed me to the right side, so that is where I went. The display came up with a 57.807, I was happy with that. At this point I really can't see myself cathing him, regardless, I think it was a good time and I'm pleased. Craig goes out and knocks drops almost 0.6's from his time (58.844) on his last run of the day, he was a little disappointed that he wasn't able to 'step it up' a little earlier in the day (he did look a little green). I went out on my last run telling myself that I only need to make up 0.08 of a second in 5 different corners to catch Chris, it's that easy, yeah right! The start of the run was similar to the rest until I got the kink, I was able to get thru with a very slight lift. The second I got back onto the gas I was on the rev-limiter again and able to carry that all of the way to the entry of the first slalom. The run back from turn-around was typical until I got to the last offset just before the 'gap'. As I lifted the tail was really coming, I stayed on the gas as the rear came back in the opposite direction I was able to somehow shoot the gap with the tail in the opposite direction (Padberg-style), I was amazed as I made it though. I remember thinking, "don't mess up this last slalom" as I came into it. I got a touch behind, but was able make it through. When I crossed the line to see a 57.333 I was beyond amazed!!! That was the best I've felt in the car in a long time, maybe even back to nationals last year. I still can't believe that I put that run together, doing it to win index on the last run of the day made it even better. WOW, that was long... I was really excited to write that much, LOL. Got a big index win to boost my confidence just before Nationals. Sorry to take Chris's 2nd index win away, but he'll get them at nationals!
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:: Tuesday :: 8.27.07 ::
The two year search is over!!!!!!! We finally found a set of 16x7.5 SSR's Competitions. For those who don't know, the wheel hasn't been available since the SSR (Speed Star Racing) company when bankrupt early in 2005. It took a couple month to sell out exist stock of the 16x7.5 wheels. There isn't really any other light 16x7.5 wheels available in the 4x100 bolt pattern, we have been running some Kosei K1's for the last couple years, but they are roughly 4-5 lbs heavier per wheel. Other used pairs/sets have popped up for sale, however, we never seemed to be the "lucky dog" who got them (or the price was just too high). | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 8.26.07 ::
Todays was a half-lot WAI event at Miller Park. The course included a optional slalom and was tighter than normal, which was nice. We had clear skies with temperatures in the 80's, almost perfect racing weather. After walking course I was pleased with the course design and thought we had a chance to do well. In the morning runs we showed great pace, however, all of my runs were dirty (eerrr). My first two runs had cones in the slalom, but nothing that would really effect my times, my last run was a DNF after getting too loose coming into the slalom (trailbraking around first cone) and smacking 2 cones pretty good. I decided to save the tires the remainder of the run. Craig had a clean 49.916 on his last morning run and was 2nd on index at that point. I had a 49.6XX dirty on my second run, and felt the 49.2XX that I needed to take the RTP index lead (held by Alex Tziortzis) was attainable, however, it would have to wait until the afternoon. Each of our first afternoon runs felt good, however, the time just wasn't there. We changed front wheels/tires for the second run and the car felt a little better, we both put down our fastest raw times (Jason 49.592, Craig 49.723 +1) and were unable to improve on the final runs of the day. Cashmore put the good tires on for the afternoon runs (he likes giving up false hope) and leap frogged me on his last run of the day. It seemed as if the grip just wasn't there in the afternoon for us. Alex knocked a tenth off his morning runs and held on for the RTP Index win.
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:: Monday :: 8.20.07 ::
Spent some time today trying to figuring out stickers for the car. We know we want to do orange and black, and I finally got around to playing in Photoshop to get the layout done. The question now is if we can run the black Tire Rack banner or not, if we can't I guess we'll just run a white one, but it won't look as nice. This is kind of weird to spend time working on stickers, we've never really had time for this... we generally are trashing to get the car done for the weekends event. I like how Megan is sitting on Craigs lap!!!  ::
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:: Sunday :: 8.12.07 ::
Unfortunately, no change in the course design for Sunday, actually, there was a longer acceleration point on the course due to a drag-style start. It looked like an uphill battle, and Chris Fenter (who didn't attend on Saturday) made that clear in first heat when he put down some smoking times. I was in paddock calculating out the time I need to catch him (54.136 sec. run) and I'm not feeling to good about it, not to mention some other really fast drivers in fast cars (Cashmore, Wynveen, Tziortzis, etc.) have yet to take the course. Later in the day Alex Tziortzis does just exactly what I was worried about and raises the bar with a 51.109 in a SS Corvette Z06, now we need a 53.838 to get index! I was driving the car first today and came in with a 55.512 on my first run, at this point I know we are in trouble. It had been about 4 hours since I walked course so it wasn't exactly fresh in my mind, however, it was basically the same layout as yesterday and I didn't really mess anything up. Craig takes his first run and is only a tenth behind me. Second run I cleaned it up and dropped a couple tenths (55.125), but nothing close to what we need, Craig DNF'd while pushing the car hard thru the fast sweeper. Third runs brought my best run with a 55.001, Craig followed up with a 55.524. Our last runs were in the same ball park, I slowed down a tenth or so with a 55.121 and Craig picked up a tenth to improve his time to a 55.439 to finish off the day. We finished a ways back on index, but I think we will hold out evaluation of the speed of the new setup until we get a more common ground course, however, we did pretty well against other low power cars in the ST classes.
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 Thanks to Andy Seipos & Jeff Cashmore for the images. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Saturday :: 8.11.07 ::
This weekend is a two day Great American Solo Series event at Miller Park which counts as two seperate points events for WAI. Before the event I headed to pickup the car from the alignment shop since I didn't have time to do so yesterday, the later start time of the event gave us some extra time. Picked up the car, unloaded at the event site, and reinstalled the sway bar endlinks. The new ride height is much better and pretty much even, unlike the last debacle. Craig went out for the maiden voyage with the new setup, and thought it felt better than before. The question is if it was the new "even" ride heights or the new rear springs. Either way, it felt better, which was good. The car felt good, but it still wasn't to the point we want it, we continued to change the rear tire pressures trying to find a sweet spot with rotation. On my fourth run of the day I finally got to a point of oversteer while trailbraking, this was the only really loose portion of the course, so it could very well have been my driving. The course only had one high speed corner which the car was fairly neutral in, unfortunately most of the course was flat out in our car (some tighter slaloms would have been nice). We think all the fast acceleration sections of the course really hurt us index-wise, so comparing our index to all of the normal suspects might not be best with this course, but I was still close. I don't think I left much time out there, maybe an additional 0.2's if I really put it all together. Considering the style of the course and the new setup we went home happy, Craig was nipping on my heels finishing only 0.132 second behind me in STS! Looking forward to running it again tomorrow and hoping the course gets slowed down when we run it counter-clockwise.
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:: Friday :: 8.10.07 ::
Craig went this morning to sit in the car for the corner balance and alignment. We had a list of the specs we were looking for and Justin did a great job getting us what we wanted. Looking forward to driving the new setup tomorrow, hopefully it is a step in the right direction. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 8.9.07 ::
Tonight I swapped rear springs on the car with hopes to induce some oversteer in the setup, also got all of the ride heights set were we want them. The car gets corner balanced and aligned tomorrow morning at LCA and we'll run it through it's paces this weekend at the WAI/GASS events at Miller Park. Disconnected the sway bars before we loaded the car on the trailer so we don't have that issue again. The stupid trailer lights are acting up again, I think it's just time to rewire the entire trailer.  ::
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:: Tuesday :: 8.7.07 ::
Back to the old grind on the Civic. We attempted to "strong arm" the camber kits into the upper arms, however, it didn't go very well. We ended up just spreading them opening a little to get them in, then sqeezed them back together with the thru-bolts when re-installing them. To others that are installing these be sure to remove the brass rings when installing them on the Civic, or just read the instructions, haha, but who does that. We got the camber kits all installed and we are ready for another corner balance and alignment, I think we should just buy some scales. We have an appointment on Friday with Justin at Lake Country Alignment (262-569-5100), I've had corner balances and alignments done by him in the past when he worked at Big Bear Tire and was happy with his work. Now he has his own place. The drive is a little long, but as we have found out this year, having it done someplace that doesn't do good work is just a waste of time & money. We need to get the ride heights close to what we want and disconnect the rear sway bar (so we don't forget) for Friday. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 7.30.07 ::
The ride heights of the car have been wacky since we first had the car corner weighted. We couldn't get the front ride height and camber the way we wanted, so we picked up a set of Ingall front camber kits from RedShift Motorsports so we can adjust them seperately. This way we can get the ride heights straight, those who have seen the car know how far off they are... there is no need to get the tape measure out to see the ride height differences. We removed the inner front upper control arm mounts for replacement. Lubed up the camber kit and attempted to isntall them, however, the sleeve for the bushing is really tight. It is going to take some force to get them in there, but once installed the bushing/mount rotate nicely. Maybe we just need to pry the opening a little wider to make them fit. We called it a night after enough frustration set in, so we will tackle it later this week. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 7.29.07 ::
Finally pulled the car off the trailer since the Milwaukee Tour, some other happens in my life didn't allow much time for work on the car, so nothing changed setup-wise. We had SCCA-MKE Event #5 of the year at Miller Park today, weather was in mid-80's with a clear sky. I was a little slow moving in the morning due to a very long day & night at the Jimmy Buffett concert, but it was worth it. Craig and Megan looked to be in similar shape after a wedding the previous night. Megan headed home during the first heat to get some sleep, man that sounded good. We ran the event with a little less realestate than we normally have due to the Porsche club also having an event, however, Jeff Cashmore designed a fun and challenging course for us. After the last couple events we've had to run along side a Porsche Club event, I no longer feel as if running this "half lot" configuration takes away from our course design, it was right on par with our "full lot" course designs. Morning runs went OK, I coned away my first 2 runs (errr), so I needed to put down a clean 3rd run to make sure I stayed in the hunt for Pro Class (fast morning + fast afternoon). I matched my 2nd run time, but was still trailing Chris Fenter who put down a really fast dirty second run and a decent dirty 3rd run. Despite the dirty runs, Fenter was leading Pro and RTP Index with his first run going into the afternoon. Craig finished right on my heels, only about a tenth behind me. At this point I think I can catch Fenter's clean time, but I don't know if catching that dirty run time is possible. After driving I headed to the Jeep for my turn at some needed z's. Megan arrived just before 2nd heat and finished off the morning leading STS by just over two tenths. The afternoon brought some extra surface grip from all of the rubber being put down. I went a couple tenths faster on my first run, but still not enought to catch Chris's first morning run. Chris then proceeded to lay the royal smack down with an even faster clean run to stretch his Pro and Index lead. On my last run I decided to let it hang out a little more than normal (thanks Craig) and tossed the car around a bit. I know it helped me in some places, but hurt me in others. Regardless, I dropped another two tenths, but not near enough to catch Chris Fenter, nice driving Chris!!! Craig put down a good last run to finish just over 0.3 seconds back. Megan was a dirty girl in the afternoon (haha), but her morning runs were just enough to hold off the STS field by 0.054 seconds. The car felt pretty good this weekend, Craig thought it was as good as it has been this year. I think it was on par with the tour performance, however, I think there is still work to do and the car will get faster.
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:: Sunday :: 7.8.07 ::
My wife was running a triathlon today, so I dropped her off in the morning, however, all of the participants caused a traffic jam. I was worried that I wasn't going make it to the event to get a course walk in, however, I arrived on-site at ~7:40am thinking I was going to get a quick one in. To my disappointment they closed the course for walking early, what the hell do they provide a schedule for if they aren't going to follow it. I put that on my event evaluation form. I was able to get one walk in during the lunch break, granted I should have walked last night or arrived earlier, but I was still upset about it. Oh yeah, it was hot. The temperature gauge in the Jeep said 99° everytime I jumped in there to get some air conditioning, not exactly the best day for standing in the middle of an asphalt parking lot with little-to-no shade, or a triathlon for that matter. Megan looked good on her first run of day 2, and more important it was clean. The time wasn't there to catch up, but it was the first clean run in the car. The second run was 1.2 seconds faster and put her within striking distance. However, the 3rd run was a different story, she put down a smoking run that was another 0.9 sec. faster and enough to take the win in STUL. Congrats to Megan!!! Sundays course was another good one, a long slalom on the front part of the course, followed by a fast section, into a tighter complex of offsets, into a couple sweeping Chicago boxes, a short slalom, and then a unique finish that was faster than it seemed. I was able to sit on my clean first run of day 2 in order to take the win in STS. I was disappointed that I didn't improve my time on my second run which I know I drove better (track conditions), but I did manage to rip the passenger side fender liner out of the wheel well and send it flying into the air. Craig posted the fastest STS time of the day, however, it wasn't enough to overtake Jesse for 2nd Place in STS. We finished the day just as we started it, in 1st and 3rd. It was a fun weekend, got a nice trophy and little sun burn to show for the efforts. We're looking forward to seeing everyone again in Topeka. It was a great tour event, I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. Now it's time to get the car's ride heights figured out (it's all jacked up now) and try to get the handling of the car were we had it last year. We have three weeks until the next event, so there isn't any reason we should show up with the car in it's current state.
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:: Saturday :: 7.7.07 ::
Arrived nice and early and got the car all setup. Actually had time to clean the car, which doesn't happen very often lately. We didn't run until Heat 3 so we hung out and watched that great AS battle as well as some other classes. Megan decided to run a 2006 Mistubishi EVO Lancer in STUL in lieu of the STS car since there wasn't enough entrants for Bridgestone contingency money and lets face it, it's probably more fun than the Civic. She ran some good times, however, all of her runs were dirty and she is about 1.7 seconds back after day 1. It's the first time she has driven the car, so it will be an uphill battle tomorrow. She said she had fun in the car and wants one now, I can't say that I blame her. Our day 1 went a little better, I finsihed up leading STS class by ~0.9, 2nd was Jesse Caudill, and Craig was in 3rd about 0.2 behind Jesse. The car felt a little tight, probably because of all of the rubber put down, but it was working well. The course was fun and challenging, kudos to Steve Wynveen on the course design. We had the local Milwaukee cable company at the event, they are planning to do a show about the event. They had two camera guys and a scissor lift on-site for the entire day. They came by and did a little interview with me, so that was cool, hopefully I make the final cut! We'll keep everyone posted as to when it might air. | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Friday :: 7.6.07 ::
Showed up at the Milwaukee Tour this morning and took some runs on the practice course. We seemed to be running good times, however, the car wasn't feeling great at first. Craig was saying that the power wasn't there, maybe the exhaust or the VAFC tune? Going to have to look into that next week I guess, no time to do so today. We're still battling a loose car on first runs due to cold rear tires, so the first run is a throw away. I took 4 runs and Craig went out for 8, balance got better once we got a couple runs in. Regardless, I think we are looking good for this weekend. Stayed around until later in the evening, introduced ourselves to all of the other STS drivers we saw (nice meeting everyone) and caught up with some past acquaintances as well. Got all of the stickers put on the car that we needed, which helps the car look a little better because all of the sticks detract attention from dents. =) | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 7.5.07 ::
Rechecked the VAFC connections, everything looks good, not sure why the throttle position isn't showing correctly, it starts to show the throttle increasing, but it gets to like 15% then drops down to 0%. The RPM's are showing correctly, so hopefully it is applying the corrected fuel setting. We got the fender painted with the rattle can and I'm fairly impressed on how well it turned out, I actually suggested to Craig that we do the entire car!!! Haha, I don't think we'll go that far, but the car definitely looks better now. We ran around town for about an hour trying to find some lead weight to add to the passenger seat, however, no one was open or they didn't have enough. We'll be putting the passenger seat back in the car for the weekend and adding some lead to the seat mount next week. We also checked the drivers seat again for weight and added a couple ounces of weight to make sure we are over the 25 lb minimum since we don't know how accurate my scale is. Replaced some broke interior pieces on the car like the rear hands on the headliner, and the rear view mirror mount. All went smoothly and I think we are ready for the Milwaukee Tour. Ordered the Ingalls Front Camber Adjusters (control arm version) from RedShift Motorsports, we'll install them after the tour. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 7.3.07 ::
Removed the V-AFC (we don't use the VTEC side of it obviously) from the '06 car, and got the Air/Fuel Controller installed in the '07 car. All of the setting stayed with the unit, thank god. It took awhile to install it, more so because I'm anal about stuff and need to check and re-check every connection, then compare it to the Helms manual. All of that and the throttle position isn't reading correctly on the unit. Going to triple check the connect. We removed the exhaust because we want to fabricate something lighter because the one on the car is a tank. Come to find out when the exhaust shop fabricated the heffier they bottlenecked it down right behind the cat in order to attach the flange. The pipe diameter right off the cat was 1.625", then widened to 2.25". Maybe we'll pick up some power, that would be cool. It will probably be hard to tell though because we'll get some extra power from the V-AFC at the same time. Pulled the passenger seat out of the car to mount some weight to the bottom of the seat. We're going to have to head to the hardware store to figure out a way to add about 7 lbs. to the bottom. If we don't get it done and it's in pieces we'll just throw the stock seat back in there. Stock seat weighed in at 30 lbs. We have a couple things left to do before the Tour. Our paint guy wasn't able to paint the car, so we'll be painting the red fender with some rattle can paint for the Tour so we don't look too bad. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 7.2.07 ::
We spent a couple hours last night looking at the MaxQData from yesterday. We couldn't figure out how to get the runs to lineup at the start (maybe we were just in different spots, or the satelite moved), but the rest of the run seemed to work out. Comparing our faster runs we were able to see where each of us were faster, and how our driving style varied. I'd be interested to see if other people would comprehend the data the same way. We need to figure out the multiple driver name feature, but I don't think that is going to be a problem. I see us needing to fabricate some sort of mount for the PocketPC so it's accessable to the driver while strapped in the car, yet doesn't risk it flying around during a run. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 7.1.07 ::
Attended the WAI Event #4 at Miller Park today. The first half of the course was basically the test 'n tune course we ran on yesterday, and a second half was added to make a 55+ second course. There was a medium speed offset which the car was rotating well though, and some really slow portions that required lots of patience. We finally got the MaxQData to log some runs, we forgot the manual in the morning, so we didn't get any runs until the afternoon. Going to try to view some runs this week if we get time, at this point I'm just happy to get some data to look at so we can start seeing what we can do with it. It's going to take some time though. I forgot to bring the video camcorder this weekend, so no videos for comparing runs which would have been nice. Oh well, live and learn. For as organized as I try to be there always seems to be something I forget!!! Again, the car felt as good as it ever has. We're not quiet to the point where the '06 car was, but we are getting there. We were able to compete for the win on a course that had us way out of our RPM range (other people were probably in the same boat too). We had some great competition with several index lead changes in the last runs, but Darrel Padberg put down a smoking run last run to beat me. Congrats to Darrel, it was fun day.
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:: Saturday :: 6.30.07 ::
Our goal for the day was to find some way to get the car to rotate, we've been battling this understeer situation since day one with this car. Craig did all of the testing with the car today so we could have a constant driver in the car. He did about 4-5 runs on a 26 second course to get a feel and put down consistant times. After that we started to dial out the camber on the rear of the car, the problem is that with the different ride heights turning the camber adjuster the same amount on each side did not equal the same changes. So we ended up with different camber on each side (or so our Smart Camber gauge tells us). More positive camber helped to induce more oversteer in the car as expected, and was a step in the right direction on this course. I'm not so sure how it will be on faster transitions, only time will tell. We also played with pressures on the rear tires. We seemed to free up the car, and it is feeling better than it ever has... I just can't help but think that there is a better way to solve the problem (ie. different sway bar or springs). After the event we attempted to setup the MaxQData GPS unit again, we had to hard reset the PocketPC so re-installation was required. Got the program installed, but the batteries on the PocketPC and the GPS unit weren't charged enough for us to go do some test runs. We both had things to do, and neither had much sleep the night before, so we decided to work on it tomorrow at the WAI event. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 6.29.07 ::
Installed the B-pipe in the header with the new gaskets and rear donut-thing-a-ma-jiggy, installed the upper strut towerbar (always seem to have to do this twice get the throttle & clutch cable in the correct position), put transmission fluid in it, checked the oil, re-installed the fuel line to the fuel rail, re-installed the exhaust, put the coolant in the car, and adjusted the throttle cable again. The engine fired up like a champ!!! We got the wheels/tires back on the car, and have it loaded up for the mini test 'n tune event tomorrow. We didn't get the car to the point we wanted (re-corner balanced), but we'll do what we can to try to get the car to rotate tomorrow. The car is still at weird ride heights since our issue with the sway bar during the intial corner balance, however, we don't want to go and change the car all around before the Milwaukee Tour unless we can do it right and get the car on a rack. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 6.28.07 ::
Picked up needed parts... and changed the website colors in honor of the selected color scheme for the car, take a lucky guess. =) | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 6.26.07 ::
Work continues, the list of things seems so short, however, when your in there doing it more just pop up. Installed the intake, double checked all of the motor mount bolts, re-installed the axles and front spindles, hooked up the speed cable (PITA), re-installed the lower splash shields, re-installed the distributor & spark plugs, adjusted the clutch to a point to start it (finally adjustment when we start it), re-installed the shift linkage (stupid pin is a BIG PITA), and installed the upper portion of the header. We replaced the front lower ball joint boots with the ES poly piece, the boot on the new ball joint was even ripped & the ball joint is feeling 'used up'. Looks like we might be picking up an OEM part this time as that Autozone part lasted about 4 events. =( We attempted to replace the shift linkage bushings at the transmission, however, the ES kit had the wrong part in the package, errr. We got one part #2177 (correct part) and one #2169, which a lower control arm bushing. Good thing we didn't ruin the original bushing when we removed it, as it will have to do until the correct part is received. The rear shift bushing (near the actual shifter) went smoothly once we realized that we had to reuse the stock sleeves. It started to get late (~1am), so we decided to call it a night without getting the car fired up. We need to pickup some parts anyways before we can start it up... pair of header gaskets (upper-lower connection), a donut/gasket for the header where it attached to the cat, transmission fluid, a couple axle nuts, and some anti-freeze. We still need to re-install the radiator, B-pipe of the header, adjust the clutch, install the upper strut tower bar, hook up the battery, install the axle nuts, re-install the fuel line, and fill it with fluids. We're also trying to figure out a graphics scheme for the car, going to have to brush up on my Photoshop skills. Something feels wrong about worrying about making the car look good, cleaning the engine bay and now graphics, what the hell is going on? I guess we are finally getting to a point that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I'm sure something will close the door on us though. Doesn't look like we are going to have time to re-corner balance and align the car before this weekends event. So I guess we'll do it next week, and then use the Milwaukee Tour practice course to test the car out, scary thought. Might work out because we'll be more liberal in make adjustments knowing that we are going to put it on a rack the following week. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 6.25.07 ::
Well, it was a productive night. We changed the fuel filter and installed the new brakelight switch (which was infact the problem). We removed some surface rust from the brake booster to try & stop anymore surface rust from spreading, also did some rust removal/prevention on other areas in the engine bay. Then something really weird happened, I started cleaning the engine bay... for those who know me this is not common! It actually looks pretty good, I proceeded to clean up the entire engine bay, those Leiny Berry Weiss's must have really been working. Once all of that was done we dropped the engine in the car. We were going to just get it bolted in, however, once we saw it in the engine bay we had to start hooking everything up. The motor mounts were a little bit of a pain (as normal), however, everything came together and we got most of the stuff on the top of the engine connected. We still need to connect the shift linkage, adjust the clutch, install the fuel line, intake, & distributor, and add fluids. We will finish that up tomorrow, and fire it up hopefully. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 6.24.07 ::
Install the new front brake rotors, everything went nice and easy. Installed the ES poly steering rack bushings, installed the painted battery box. We started to troubleshoot our rear brake light problem (no brake lights). It seems to be the switch on the brake pedal. Decided to not change the brake booster, and a new one isn't exactly cheap, so we'll hang with what we got until we have a problem with it, hopefully that won't be at some major event. Going to pick up a new brake switch and a fuel filter for installation tomorrow before we put the engine in. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Saturday :: 6.23.07 ::
Got the battery box out of the car and painted, messed with the brake booster. Ours has a little surface rust on it, but the other one we have doesn't look all that much better... not sure what we are going to do yet. Removed the steering rack bushings, we'll install the new ES poly bushings tomorrow. We cleaned up the rear motor mount bracket, sanded it down and painted it to stop anymore rust. Installed the rear ES poly motor mount. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 6.20.07 ::
Got the MaxQData logging at 5hz, going to have to put it into some car to get some test logs going. Found out the bluetooth modem in the laptop isn't working, so I need to replace that before we can get data onto it, we can still use the Pocket PC though. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 6.18.07 ::
Removed the engine & transmission from the '07 car. It didn't go as easy as the '06 car, but it wasn't horrible. The rear engine mount still had the stock bushing in it and didn't want to rotate like we wanted, so that held us up until we finally sqeezing in and removed it. At this point we have two engines sitting on tires on the floor waiting to be put into cars. We want to do some small maintenance on the car while the engine is out, like replace the fuel filter & brake booster, and paint the battery mount we fabricated. Also noticed a small crack in the new windshield, errrrr, we just replaced that! Something else to add to the list. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Saturday :: 6.16.07 ::
Removed the engine from the '06 car, it went pretty easy. We didn't have much time today to get stuff done, but all went well. Hopefully the removal of the engine from the '07 car goes just as well. It would be nice to get the engine in the car this week, then start putting the '06 car back together to sell and make room in my garage. Bought a laptop for the car (and other things), hopefully it will make seeing the datalogging easier than with the Pocket PC. As long as we can get it to work that is!! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 6.10.07 ::
Today was SCCA Milwaukee Event #3 of the 2007 season. The event was held at Miller Park, like normal. Arrived very tired, but Craig was awake enough to drain some oil and pour the Stop Leak in the engine. This seems to work since we weren't leaking anything thoughout the day, not sure how long it will last though. Our plan is to get the built engine in the car for the next event on the 30th. We loaded the car on the trailer yesterday with the 205/45-16's on the 16x7 SSR's on the front. I had planned to run that setup during the test 'n tune, but time ran out as I was changing to the setup. Since we were both so wiped out from the day before we decided to just run them instead of the 16x7.5" K1's on the front. We would change if they felt bad, well they didn't feel horrible, but I did, 2 hours of sleep and a day in the sun was catching up with me quick. So, we just stuck with them, who knows the 16x7.5's could have been faster. After my 3rd morning run I switched numbers for Craig and headed for the cargo area of the Jeep to take a much needed nap. I woke up a couple hours later to find that I was leading index after morning runs, cool. In the afternoon runs someone took over the lead. I was feeling somewhat better in the afternoon, and on the last run of the day I thought I put down a time fast enough to win index, come to find out I was 0.042 short of the win. Oh well, I think the car felt good, and we are obviously back in business with the car. Only got the morning runs on the camcorder before the tape ran out, and I was more interested in laying down between runs than changing the tape. We also failed to get the MaxQData up and running, which isn't that big of a deal because we need to call and register it so we can receive 5 Hz recording in lieu of the 1Hz in the trial version. All said and done, it was a long tiring day that rebuilt some confidence in the car.
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:: Saturday :: 6.9.07 ::
Thanks to Tracy for letting us borrow his scales this morning. We put the car on the scale to get a baseline, then we disconnected the rear sway bar and weighted it again. There was some weight transfer across the back, however it didn't effect the cross weight very much (less than 0.5%), so we decided to just leave it the way it was. We adjusted the endlinks to remove any bind and re-lubed the sway bar bushings. We did notice that the sway bar was very tight in the bracket, not allowing it to move freely, so after we lubed it we made sure it able to rotate without binding. After picking up the tires and re-checking the corner balancing off-site, we didn't get the car unloaded at the test 'n tune until almost noon. With our limited time we were able to find good pressures for the 2 sizes of RE-01R's. We didn't really find much time in the car though, which kind of disappointing when you spend most of the day testing, guess that just shows that we had the car together to begin with. The new GC upper mounts seemed to help with shock travel and our issue with bouncing off the bumpstops, we still get to the sumpstops from time to time, but not a much that is for sure. Engine started spewing oil from what seems to be the rear main seal today, we were getting about a 3" circle after sitting in grid for less than 4 minutes. It never fails, the car is now 4-for-4. We need to address before the event tomorrow. Headed to a couple Autozones and one Checker to find some rear main seal Stop Leak, however, all of the shelves were empty, WTH! Craig finally found some late this evening, we'll put it in the car in the morning since Craig and the car are about 30 minutes drive from each other. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 6.8.07 ::
This mroning Craig dropped the 195/50-15 RE-01R's off to be mounted on a set of our 15x7.5 SSR Comps before heading to get the car corner balanced. Corner balancing went OK, except we forgot to disconnect the rear sway bar (eerrrrrrr), we'll have to see how much bind there is on the rear sway bar tomorrow when we can get ahold of another set of scales. We don't have any camber adjustment piece on the front of the car, so we just lowered the car to get our desired camber, then made adjustments on the rear of the car to get the weights we wanted. I made an excel spreadsheet that calculates corner weights and left/rights, as well as what adjustment is needed to get the optimal weight. All of the weights worked out, but the left rear of the car is about 1" higher than the right rear. Not sure if it's that big of an issue, but we might just get some front camber kits so we can adjust the height on the front and then adjust the camber. Total car weight was 2021 lbs with 205/45-16 RE-01R's mounted on 16x7.5" K1's on the front and 16x7 SSR Comps on the rear, race level gas, the heavier exhaust, and the camera mount (about 4 lbs). At first I thought this was a little heavy, then I remember the extra weight for the seats from last year and the camera mount, so I think we are close to were it needs to be. We can drop a couple more pounds, but not much. The tire placed closed before we could pick the tires up, guess we'll have to pick them up tomorrow on the way to the event. Got all of the MaxQData programs installed on the PocketPC, and got the MQGPS unit setup. We need to call to register it, but we might try to get some data this weekend anyways to just get a feel for how it works. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 6.7.07 ::
UPS delivered the Dell X51 we ordered last week for use with MaxQData unit. Craig went to the race shop to sit in the car for the corner balancing at the time of our appointment, the guy was giving some additude and wasn't ready to do the car at the scheduled time. The worst part is that we had been calling all day long to confirm they were ready for us so we weren't wasting our time, however, no one was answering the phone and they didn't return any of our voicemail messages. We decided to leave and figure something else out. We need to do it asap though, as in by tomorrow, because the test 'n tune is Saturday. Talked to a buddy of ours and he is going to be able to get the car in for the corner balance and alignment tomorrow. I went and dropped the car off (again) so Craig can just show up and sit in the car tomorrow during the day while I'm at work. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 6.6.07 ::
Craig got the battery box fabricated out of sheet metal and mounted in the car tonight, it looks good. The battery fired up the car without problem numerous times with minimal charging time. I dropped the car off at a local race shop to get a corner balance and alignment done tomorrow. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 6.5.07 ::
Went to Wal-mart to purchase a new battery, our old Hawker battery died last year just before nationals, we actually borrowed someones Hawker to get us through nationals. After standing in the store for about 45 minutes looking at batteries, comparing weights, cold cranking amps, etc., we decided on the ES14-BS. It is heavier than the ES9-BS that others are using, but it has 60% more CCAs and only weighted about 2 lbs. more. I made a template out of a cardboard box for the battery box, Craig is going to fabricate it tomorrow. During the last event we noticed that the car was bouncing off the bumpstops a little more than we would like, so we installed some Ground Control Upper Mounts on the front suspension to try to gain a little more suspension travel before hitting the bumpstops. The question will be if we hit the upper control arms in the wheel well now, we'll test that out this weekend at the Test 'n Tune. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 6.1.07 ::
Found a used Dell X51 on Ebay to run the MaxQData unit, hopefully we will received it in time for use at the test 'n tune and event next weekend. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 5.30.07 ::
UPS man put a nice set of shaved RE-01R's into my car today, overall diameter is smaller than the 205/45-16 RE-01R and it might be wider, we'll have to get them mounted to see though. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 5.28.07 ::
Purchased a MaxQData MQGPS unit to start data logging information and trying to make both of us faster. We thought about some of the higher models, but at this point anything is better than nothing. We only had the camcorder in the car for one event and that was useful, so we don't want to overwelm ourselves with too much data at this point. I doubt we will outgrow this unit this year. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 5.27.07 ::
Attended the SCCA Milwaukee Event #2 at Miller Park. The car was feeling good, however, our results don't show that. There was a long section of the course which basically was a straight, we dug ourselves from about 2,000 rpms all of the way to three bounces on the rev-limiter. I think that most of our time was lost to higher hp cars at that point of the course. So regardless of finishing position I think the car was pretty good, this weekend was a big step in the right direction.
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:: Saturday :: 5.26.07 ::
Attended the TSSCC Event #2 at Miller Park. We got 3 dry runs in the morning, it rained for afternoon runs. First event on the Bridgestones, they do feel like they have more grip, but we were running on some old RT-215's before this. All of my morning runs were dirty, what the hell was I doing! I put down a possible PAX winning time and one another that was within hundreths of PAX, so the car isn't way off. The HF front sway bar tightened up the front of the car, however, my last run I had inside wheel spin through a lot of the corners. I'm not sure if that was due to the bar or from the RE-01R's getting too much heat. I have a feeling we are going to need to cool them just like the Falkens.
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:: Friday :: 5.25.07 ::
Installed CRX HF front sway bar to see if that helps with the feel of the front of the car, we'll get a chance to test it out this weekend with two events scheduled. Looking forward to the event tomorrow with the new tires, seat, and mis-matched fender. Oh, and Tire Rack called and said our 195/50-15 Bridgestone RE-01R's are on the way to the South Bend warehouse to be shaved, and should ship out on Tuesday afternoon. Sweet. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 5.24.07 ::
With the new STS seat rule (25 lbs. minimum w/ mounting hardware & bracket) this year we decided to make some hefty seat brackets for the drivers seat since the current mount has failed us numerous times now. We headed to the hardware store to pick up some 1" square tube, some flat stock and some nuts & bolts. We spent the night fabricating a bracket that worked with the stock sliders and allowed the seat to move far enough forward & back to accommodate all three drivers. We welded the bracket to the stock sliders and bolted the bracket to the seat. Now we have a drivers seat that feels very rigid, unlike in the past. Sometime down the road we will have to do the passenger side, until then we'll continue to add weight to the old seat design. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 5.23.07 ::
Went out to the now '05 parts car, removed the front trim piece (and the front bumper & cornermarkers to get to it), hood, and drivers side fender for use on the '07 car. The '07 car didn't really have what I would call straight panels and the tiger hood isn't something we wanted to send to paint. I had an extra red fender that I planned to use on my H4 Civic Project, it was in better shape than any other panel, so we used that. The goal was to get the good panels on the '07 car so we can get it painted before the Milwaukee Tour. Removed all the same panels from the '07 car and put the 'going-to-be-painted' panels on the car. Replaced a broken horn (because we really use that, haha) and had to clean up the hood locking mechanism in the process. Finishes installing the radiator bracket, the bonding agent seems to work well. It's pretty solid, but we're not going to yank on it to much to find out how good it is. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 5.21.07 ::
Got the 205/45-16 Bridgestone RE-01R's mounted today. We mounted two of the on a pair of our 16x7.5 Kosei K1's and two on some 16x7 SSR Comps. The RE-01R's mounted on K1's weighed 3 lbs. more than our 205/50-15 RT-215's on 15x7.5 SSR Comps, so we are rotating more mass than we did with the old setup. Replaced the radiator and installed the front ES mounter mount. Processed to break the upper tab on the radiator, errrr. Head to Wal-mart to pickup some type of bonding agent. Come back home, complete the repair and decide to let it sit until tomorrow before installing the radiator bracket so it isn't stressed while curing. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 5.17.07 ::
Tire Rack shipped our shaved set of the Bridgestone RE-01R's 205/45-16's today, woohoo! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 5.16.07 ::
After other people across the country stated saying they were receiving set of the Bridgestone RE-01R's, I made a call to Tire Rack to see what was going on. Come to find out they actually have our set of tires in the warehouse, however, they were going to wait for our set of 195/50-15's to come in before shipping them to us since we placed the order for both sizes at the same time!!! That could be months. Needless to say, I had them process the order on just the 205/45-16's so we should have them soon. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 5.13.07 ::
Attended the WAI event at Miller Park today. The car still didn't feel good and it just felt like the front was washing out. Still finished 3rd on PAX, just over 0.308 from the overall win. During instructional runs we drove another STS Civic prepared similar to ours, holy crap, that car had a ton of grip! I think our pair of RT-215 have finally given up the ghost. I don't know why, we've only been running this pair on and off for 2 years, LOL. After this comparision I think we've been chasing our tails because of crappy tires, not something with the actual car.
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:: Thursday :: 5.10.07 ::
Replaced both front inner lower control arm bushings, the passenger side bushing still looked to be in decent shape, however, it was more flexible than the new one. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 5.9.07 ::
Had the windshield replaced, the old one had a crack in it that had spidered to two edges. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 5.1.07 ::
Discovered that we that the inner front lower control arm bushing on the drivers side was all tore up, could this cause the crappy feeling front end? Probably not, but we can hope. Called up Chris at RedShift Motorsports to get a new ES Polyurethane Master bushing kit, if that bushing is bad there are probably other ones as well. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Sunday :: 4.29.07 ::
Picked the car up before heading to the event, again, big thanks to Will for staying late on a Saturday night to get our work done. The handling on the car really feels like crap! At times the turn-in feels OK, other times it's slow and sloppy. After some tire pressure adjustments the car still isn't rotating like we would like. The car is also hopping during the launch, we'll have to install the motor mounts before the next event. Half way through the day we take some rough measurements on the alignment, the front is at 3/8" out and the rear is at 1/8" toe-IN. WTH!!! Then I actually remember tell the guy to put 1/8" of toe-in on the car, I don't know what I was thinking!?!?! So we made pulled the rear toe out at the rear to roughly 1/8" of toe-out, we didn't have toe plates, but it's close and definately better than toe-in! We finished off the pace for the day, but considering I was had the PAX lead at one point in the day the car isn't all that bad even though it feels like crap.
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:: Saturday :: 4.28.07 ::
We had the Milwaukee Region drivers school today, instructors were allowed to run the course in the morning while the students were attending the classroom portion of the school. It consisted of two short 25-30 second courses. The maiden voyage was.... disappointing. The good news is that the engine feels great, the timing belt adjustment made a huge difference, so the reason we got the car so cheap (the engine) ended up not being an issue. The front of the car feels very sloppy (almost like something is loose), the car isn't turning like we would like, and the clutch is slipping VERY badly. We also found a lower ball joint that was bad when trying to figure out why the steering felt sloppy. We got about 5 runs out of the car. Oh yeah, we broke the new seat mount!!! A local competitor/mechanic offered to install the clutch and ball joint for a very decent price, so we dropped the car & trailer off at his shop after the event so we could have a car for the event the following day (thanks Will !!). | |||||||||||||||||||||
:: Friday :: 4.27.07 ::
When and had the car aligned today for the first time. The baseline alignment shows the front camber was off a ways and we continue to have a bunch of camber in the rear of the car. I attempted to adjust the spring perches to get the front camber close to what we want, however, my adjustments are doing anything. WTH. Come to find out the alignment machine developed a problem and we were unable to get a camber reading. I re-adjust the front ride height based on the measurements we took from the old car, then they adjusted the toe to 1/4" out. They didn't adjust the rear camber at all, but did adjust the toe. The car is ready for the maiden voyage at the MKE Drivers School. Also placed an order with Tire Rack for the much anticipated Bridgestone RE-01R's, both the 15" and 16" size. They are both on backorder, only time will tell when they will be shipped, hopefully it will be before the Milwaukee Tour. The engine that came with the '07 car has been a dog every since we picked it up, we planned to just run it the way it was, but it could barely get out of it's own way. We figured we would address it after we got the car up and running add the suspension on, then replace the engine next week. Well we noticed that the timing belt was misaligned, it looked to be installed in the position for a non-Si engine. We removed the timing belt and re-adjusted the belt, hopefully that will help. Installed my extra UR crank pulley, it has the additional groove for power steering belt, however, it WAY lighter than the stock piece. It was about 1am when we got this done, so we didn't get to take the car for a quick run because I didn't want to piss off all of my neighbors. We did take some time to have some some fun and chalk up the 'tiger hood'. We were pretty tired, but I must say that we had fun, I think we were just slap happy at this point in the morning. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 4.20.07 ::
Got the parking brake lines removed from the '07 car, what a pain. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Thursday :: 4.19.07 ::
Pulled the '06 car in the garage, recorded all of our alignment settings, ride heights, etc. to use as a baseline for the '07 once we get the parts on. We got the front suspension off the '06 car and installed on the '07 car. Started removing the rear suspension off the '07 car, all there is left to remove are the parking brake line. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Friday :: 4.13.07 ::
I had an extra AEM CAI from the '05 STS Civic in the garage, so we removed the stock intake box and installed the AEM piece. We also installed the extra DC Sport header that I had. We removed the stock exhaust, so it's ready for the other exhaust. At about 11pm we decided that we weren't going to be able to have the car ready for Sunday (it's Friday) and we're going to run the '06 car for the first event of the year. =( It is ready for all of the suspension parts though, it's sitting up on jackstands with empty wheel wells ready for parts. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Wednesday :: 4.11.07 ::
Continued and finished removing the parking brake lines from the '07 car, what a pain in the ass! Installed the block off plate for the antenna. Pulled the carpet up in the floor to see if there was any sounds deadening, it was there. =) | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Tuesday :: 4.10.07 ::
We're trying to get the car together for WAI Event #1 on Sunday. Our plan is to get the '07 car stripped before we start removing parts from the '06 car (which is still together and running) so we still have something to drive just incase. Removed remainder of the front suspension (upper arms, lower arms, knuckle assembly) from the '07 car. Pulled the driver seat, radio, and antenna. Installed the block-off plate for the radio. Started removing the entire rear suspension, we are being held up by the stupid parking break cables. After spending too much time trying to disconnect the cable from the rear brakes we decided to just remove the parking brake cable altogether with the rear suspension, hopefully we'll finish that tomorrow! Surprise #1 on the car !!! We found a Autometer shift light installed inside the center vent. I was jammed in there pretty good with the light cover on it. So much for hoping the car was babied all it's life, LOL. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 4.9.07 ::
Finally got the 2007 car moved into the garage to start removing stock parts. Yeah, yeah, I know... but it's been cold as hell and I have no heat in my garage. We got the front end of the car up on jackstands so we could start ripping on it. Got the front stocks/springs removed, removed front cornermarkers in order to clear the way to install the missing trim piece above the front bumper. | |||||||||||||||||||||
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:: Monday :: 12.4.06 ::
Well, after the DSQ at the 2006 Solo National championships we decided it might be best to wash our hands of the car due to some issues and not wanting to encounter any other surprises. The car was great, I can only hope the next car is the same, it just isn't something we want to take a chance with again at Nationals. If someone is interested in purchasing last years car let us know. Purchased the car we plan to campaign for the 2007 season. We found a '89 Honda Civic Si originally from Arizona, it went through two winters in the Chicago area, it only has one dime size bubble on the passenger side rear wheel well. As soon as the weather gets nicer we'll start the fun of what will be the my 4th STS Civic build in the last 4 years!!!!! | |||||||||||||||||||||
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No Weenies... (from the SCCA Rulebook)
While the right to protest in proper cases is undoubted, it should be remembered that Solo events are sporting events, to be conducted in a sporting spirit; that all events are organized and managed by amateurs who cheerfully give their time and do their best, that the competitor may expect some imperfections of the organizers and of his fellow competitors; and that, to a reasonable extent, these things are part of the chances he takes in entering the competition. |
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