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…

After finally destroying 2 sets of old tires, we acquired a “niew-ish” set of ~30 run slicks from Bo, Don’s friend.

In the wet, conditions were… interesting. Keep in mind Austin, the Austin Healey Sprite, has a welded differential and road racing slicks made for dry conditions. No standing water, but it was wet enough to make me not feel confident about the car. I actually had significantly more understeer issues than oversteer issues. I just straight plowed everywhere when I broke too late or came in at too high of a speed.

Once it started drying up, things were FANTASTIC!

More pictures & videos can be found here: March 19 practice – Videos/Photos [Solo2 Forums]

1st run in the wet:

Fastest run when it dried up:

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):

1st SDR SCCA event of 2011 @ Qualcomm Stadium. Weather was cold all day. We ran Heat 4. Fastest run shown here. Datalogger showed that we were peaking around 1.3 G’s (lower than we should be) & only 56-58 mph on the straights.

Without the rear sway bar, we push A LOT, especially w/ this more transition heavy course & the off camber turns compared to the AAA event a couple weeks ago. Some tweaking needs to be done, but I am still far away from the full capability of this car as is.

Run was still good; we are on our way. Placed 1st of 4 entrants in the class.

EDIT: updated video to have data overlay, WOO WOO. looks like it works pretty decent:

We ended 2010 kind of poopy – car still wasn’t running right, crazy snap oversteer, etc. Don fixed all the little issues like oil/tranny leaks (the big ones anyway), adding an MSD ignition so we can start easier in cold weather, upgraded to rear disc brakes for better bias, and most importantly removed the rear sway bar.

O M G, what a world of difference. However, it was only slightly different in the morning, still very drift happy. Once we found out we actually had the suspension set to full hard, instead of full soft, we lowered it to half way, and put the stickier newer Hoosiers on. Afternoon practice runs were a blast. I got down to a 48.0xx with still SO MUCH left in the car. I just need a lot more seat time now. The ST civics were in the high 46′s & low 47′s. We haven’t been this close to them since very early last year.

Sunday went even better. Didn’t make many changes other than putting smaller spacers in the front to fix the rubbing issues we were having Saturday afternoon. I managed to pull off a 55.4, which was barely enough to get 1st in CPM (Combined Prep Mod) w/ our GP indexing vs the other cars. It goes w/o saying, but I was a very happy camper. Again, still much more left in the car. Super predictable. Hopefully it will be even better w/ some minor mods like a rear spoiler & putting the front lip back on. Rear spoilers for similar cars have been helping w/ the rear inside tire wheel spin we have been dealing with when coming out of corners too hot.

One of Saturday’s Afternoon Runs:

Sunday’s Fastest Run:

In any case, looks like the orange 240sx convertible will be down for a couple months or so while I sort out all the problems and/or upgrades I’ve been planning for over half a year. In the mean time, I will probably be competing in the daily driver now that I have decent tires on it for the LA region.

Some of you may remember that I competed in SCNAX cup & got to drive a miata, mini cooper, and austin healey sprite. Don, the owner of the sprite, offered me an opportunity to co-drive the sprite with him in San Diego region this year! Driving a competitive and super fun car with 2009′s LA regional champion for CPM (Combined Prep/Mod), how can I refuse!

I expect that I will be learning A LOT about cars and so much more through out the year – I have learned quite a bit from Don already.

That picture was taken at this past weekend’s SD event. I accidently snapped a picture instead of recording a video w/ Don’s Hero HD, LOL!

Don had some time to edit and upload one of the videos:

Thanks for everything Don!