I won my first divisional this weekend, yay!

Car hasn’t changed much for the past few events; still learning the limits of the car.

In this particular Saturday run, I was trying to beat my 94.7xx; I tried a little too hard & ended up correcting a lot of little mistakes from overdriving certain sections. I still got faster (enough to be ahead of the competition), but not fast enough personally.

This run on Sunday felt fantastic. Definitely leaving plenty of time out on course, but that will change with more seat time & confidence in the car. This Austin Healey Sprite is coming along nicely; hopefully, I can make the driver faster in time for Nationals…

We actually had pretty decent grip. Dry & wet make such a huge difference in grip w/ Summer tires. Once they rewatered the course after the 3rd run, grip, or lack thereof, changed dramatically.

This RallyX event was held @ Glen Helen Race Park. For more info, you can check out http://www.calclubrallyx.com/.

Here is my fastest lap:

Here is my first “wet lap”:

Jon’s fast run:

Jon’s wet lap:

We found a few issues while taking the car apart, as well:
- hardened axles were still not strong enough, slightly bent, but was okay – replaced for this event.
- rear wheel hubs were binding on brake caliper brackets pretty badly – spacers have been installed.

Other changes since past event: changed Quaiffe to welded, taller gears (can run course in 2nd gear instead of 3rd), and increased rebound to deal w/ corner entry push. We also finally bled the rear wilwood brakes correctly (outside AND inside bleeding screw).

Austin is now significantly more predictable with the welded rear-end compared to when she had the Quaiffe. It is also MUCH better than the last time we tried welded since we have now fixed more of the suspension problems.

This event was meant mainly for testing steady state turns & transitions, etc. It’s better; whether we’re actually faster remains to be seen.

Note there is some data drop out, so the speed/g’s for the very slow back corner is obviously off.

We had a lot of help & input from Jon, who drives an ST Civic in the region. Here’s Jon’s run earlier in the morning after diagnosing the corner entry push introduced by the welded rear-end:

He was faster in the wet than I was in the dry, and only after driving the car a few times, each time w/ different settings!

To counter this, and to help keep the inside rear tire from spinning all the time, we decided to add a rear spoiler w/in the limits of G Prepared (GP) class for the next event. Don did a spectacular job mocking up & installing the spoiler. I helped a little by drilling the first few holes, hee hee.

Anyway, a few “interesting” things happened:

- We oversteered early mid-corner & even worse after mid-corner w/ any kind of throttle input over 5-10%. This was not an issue in the other 2 events earlier this year.
– this was totally unexpected, but keep reading.
- The inside tire still spins @ lower speed exits

So, after a lot of discussion between the two of us & w/ other colleagues, it seems we did increase the downforce by quite a bit. However, because of this, the quaife differential is now able to put more power to the outside rear wheel, which explains a lot of the of drifting action going on.

Regardless, we both felt this makes the car too difficult to drive. We had to change our driving lines to keep the car from getting upset, but those were defnitely not the fast lines…

We tried several band-aid solutions, such as adjust the rear height & playing w/ the shock settings, etc. We can probably also change the angle of the spoiler, but the spoiler is in fact doing exactly what it is suppose to do. If anything, we want a little more downforce at lower speeds!

We finally decided it was time to give the welded differential a try again. We’ll see how that goes next event!

In the mean time, here’s what the sexy little red sprite, I’m naming her “Austin” unofficially since I don’t think she has a name yet, looks like now:

And here is a video of me trying to take the fast line (more vids on the youtube page):

Recently, Lien from FRSport had some time to street tune my 240sx convertible, Kandi. She feels MUCH faster now. I obtained a set of 17×10 Enkei RP-F1′s (only 17 lbs!) and 245/40R17 Bridgestone RE-01r’s all around. The acceleration & turning response just from lighter rims is definitely noticeable, not to mention the stickier tires.

Between those upgrades, the much needed seat time, and the very slightly better CST (California Street Touring – basically, “run what you brung” with street tires of 140+ treadwear), I’ve recently moved up the rankings from the low 200′s all the way to 148 in the last event with CSCC / SCCA.

My buddies and I also attended the 2009 Pro Solo event at El Toro. Donny from FRSport & I competed in XP (bumped to R1 – Race Tire Index) class with our RE01r’s, hahaha. We had our “battle for 2nd to last place”, which turned out to be a complete blast. Pro solo’s are about as fun as autox’s can get, with the Lone Pine Time Trials coming in at a very close 2nd. It was very fun launching against Donny on Sunday.

I’ve also attended several events before that and the event directly after. The most recent autox had a practice slalom & figure-8 for testing & tuning during rest periods. Absolutely AWESOME!!!

Unfortunately, something got screwed w/ my DVR setup & I don’t have any video from my February/March/April events . It’s more or less the same stuff, though . I’ll definitely work on getting some quality video this upcoming event – a bunch of friends and I will be working the Motorsports Z Autocross event, which gives us a free practice the day after. Stay tuned!