Wheels look good! Packing tomorrow night. Loading trailer wed night. On the road early Thurs!

 

I lied, results ARE up. I thought that Tom had said that Martin was in the 55's, I guess I misunderstood. So, people whose classes I know:

Me: 57.7+2, skipping the last part of the slalom (emailed registrar to get results fixed); dirty 58.9, clean 59.2 in fun runs
Tom, DSP E30: 56.5 (!!!) - needed a 57.1 to catch him in PAX (dayum)
Martin, ASP STi: 56.8 - 0.863 - needed a 58.2 to catch him in PAX
David, ASP STi: 57.5 - needed a 59.0 to catch him in PAX

Overall, pretty happy, despite my lack of clean runs. I thought Martin/David beat me way worse

Aaron, looking forward to getting there and hanging out. Group orange wheels shot, perhaps?

 

Solo Nationals - the drive begins - Wednesday

First I had to make all this stuff fit in an Evo.



I usually put one wheel directly behind the seat (rear footwell) but I am pretty sure now that stacking them flat on the rear seat is better for space. I brought spare brake lines and a spare rotor as well as pretty much anything else I could think of. Except tools, which I completely forgot...





Josh and I caravanned - it’s definitely easier on a long monotonous drive to go with someone. As a bonus, Josh brought earplugs, which were a massive help with all the droning.

A few transit shots..





We stopped about every 200 miles. That’s a long time on 600# springs



We made it to our goal of Indianapolis and called it a night.

Solo Nationals - transit part II - Thursday

Good nutrition is key to caravanning...



Or not... man I wish we had these on the east coast.

We were taking the not many tolls route - 70, 72, 74, and then some road through Missouri - 36 maybe - before cutting up and over to Lincoln. We had to plan our gas stops a little carefully since there isn’t a lot of stuff on the road we were on in Missouri.



We made it to St Josephs in MO before the final stretch up to Lincoln.

Last bit of “car prep” for the day was getting 1200 miles of bugs off the front bumper.

Pretty content-free so far, sorry about that.. should be more interesting when runs start on Saturday!

 

PROPS to you BOTH for driving the cars out there... seriously!! Prove you can drive a car there, and do well is awesome... I have competed against enough trailer-queens that it means so much more knowing you DD the car as well.

Pictures look great... telling you the $250 for an aftermarket cruise control is awesome! weighs about 5lbs or less...and is worth its weight in gold!

 

Agreed!
Funny that I chose to do an STU build so that I'd have a fun street car. The car is decidedly not fun on most streets around here. So now I have a trailer queen for any event that is more than a hundred(ish) miles away.

See ya'll in a couple of days!

-'chono'

 

Solo Nationals - we're here! - Friday



Ahhhh vast expanses of concrete. After switching wheels, registering, and teching, I decided to pass on practice starts. The clutch is still in the back of my mind. I'm debating whether to launch the car tomorrow morning or not or whether to save that for the last 2 heats. I'm not in a position to do damage in the overall points and Nationals is definitely the bigger deal.

Later on, pushue came over for the group orange photos:



His car is substantially more awesome than mine. I feel like I need a bunch of orange stickers now to get a theme going. But really, most events I'll be on the SSRs... these are just for special occasions

As we were about to leave, the lights came on and created some cool looking pictures. I don't have any of those fancy lighting rigs, so I took advantage.




This one was especially cool


FWIW - neither of us DD them - I drive 30K a year so that would not work out all that well - but neither of us trailer them either Yeah I was following rather than leading because Josh knew the way and he had cruise - easier to follow in that case. Really though, I have a long standing irrational fear of cruise control, I just don't like the idea that the car is controlling all that. I never use it even when the car has it.

It's not bad on the highways, but the car doesn't go into DC or anything. I even started driving on my SSRs these last 2 years, rather than changing tires at the event like I used to do in my WRX. This summer has been particularly brutal so that's been nice.

Have a good trip!

STU runs first heat tomorrow. Only got three total walks in tonight, two rights and one left. The courses should be fun. Hoping to get 2 more walks in per course tomorrow morning. STU is going to be tough for sure.

 

Great build thread you have here and love your cars setup I very jealous of your Moton Clubsports on your car and I will be putting the new Sparco Evo's in my car as well. Glade to here you like the new one and I wish you the best tomorrow morning at Nationals

Thanks,
Dallin

 

Good luck out there!

 

Oh no! Sololive shows dnf/dns for you guys. Hope everything is okay or at least easily fixable.
Before the Evo I loved pros. But ever since el toro (which wrecked my clutch) ... I'm wary. I can't afford to replace clutches every year.

-'chono'

 

Solo Nationals - it begins - Saturday

After airing up the tires (thanks Hoosier) I pulled the car into grid since we were in the first group, just after STC/STX. I went out for my first run, had a decent launch, and then... no brakes. Same as Toledo. Seriously?

I went straight to impound. Yep, front left wheel coated in brake fluid, master cylinder almost empty. Awesome. I went back to paddock to figure out what had happened.



I don’t know if this is wheel contact or maybe dust shield contact but there are no more weights on the inside of the wheel so I’m not sure what it hit. The wheel is the best guess. Anyway, so much for stainless steel. I noticed that the zip tie around the line, was only around one of the strut zip ties, not both, and there was quite a bit of play. Annoying as hell. It had made it through an autocross last week and 1600 miles of driving and had been fine..



Thankfully, because of the failure at Toledo, I had spares this time. After getting a 10mm flare nut from the Vehes (thanks), a razor from Josh, a file from Ian and a bunch of tools from Newman I had the Toledo Hoses Direct line back on the car. I checked out chono’s brake line pictures (that I hadn’t gotten around to implementing on mine) and used something like 7 zip ties per side (since I re-did the passenger side also). Josh helped me bleed it and it passed inital testing, and I put the car up on ramps to make sure everything looked okay before heading out for afternoon runs.

Afternoon runs - meh. My first run on the left, I almost spun in the first hard offsets and decided to shut it down and coast for most of the course - 53 second run. Because the courses were so long, I was worried about tire management and figured lighting the tires up would probably not feel good later. First run on the right - 49.4 - a bit off the pace, but that was my first run on the right course all day, not a big deal.

2nd run on the left, little help - 50.2.. +4. I was late throughout the middle section and it showed. I ended up hitting the 3 finish cones as well. Last right side run - 48.6 - but DNF? Dunno where I went off, and there would be no video to figure it out as my GoPro was dead.

So I was solidly in last place and generally not driving that great. In addition, my launches sucked - 1.9s and 2.1s. But the car felt great, was pretty neutral in the sweepers and was pulling strong everywhere on course.

Danny and Mr MR both told me I was braking too much, which is about right. I was driving chicken, not confident the car would stick if I tried tossing it.

I had sort of a plan for Sunday - pretty much just brake less and look ahead.

 

Solo Nationals - hey, it’s just a test and tune, right? - Sunday

Sunday means an 8 am start time, which would be welcome given the oppressive heat.



Danny and I talked about not chickening out and not braking so much. I went out on my first left side run and got a 49.6 - a couple big mistakes, including entering the slalom way too fast. On my first right, I ran a 48.1 with a DNF. I didn’t know where I went off course, as with Saturday afternoon. I made a note to look ahead more and went back to the left. My last left was a 49.0 with two major errors - entering the slalom too fast again and entering the last lefthand sweeper too hot and not getting enough braking done. On the right, last run period, I ran a 47.9 +1.. wait, no, that’s an off course too.

So that sucked. I ended up staying in last place. I managed to find someone at the station that had DNF’d me and figured out that I had cut out one of the gates, and that on my last run I appeared to have hesitated going through that section trying to pick up the next cone.

It didn’t feel as bad as it looked, though. That last 47.9 run would still have been a decent time if I had found the gate, and the two major errors on the left were fixable. Much like Toledo, missing that first session really sucked. The car was fast, and was transitioning and sweeping really well.

If you’re thinking “that sounds like a lot of excuses”, you’re right. A year ago, I had no idea where that extra 1.5 seconds per day between Josh and I was. Now I feel like I can see most of it, even if I can’t always get there. That’s a really big difference.

Big contrats to Rob for the win and to Josh for the big Sunday comeback.

Takeaways:

* Charge stuff. Not having video to analyze sucks.
* If you get a DNF and you don’t know where it was, it behooves you to walk the course again
* I am really glad I did the Finale first so that stuff like this would not affect Nationals.

The rest of today is going to be for chillout. Tomorrow I have some time on the practice course, gonna try to get that OPR off. No prep changes for the car other than rotating the tires front to back.

Here is hoping for dry weather!

 

Solo Nationals - Monday - test and tune

I was able to get my MaxQData hooked up again - whew! It’s such a regular part of my routine - I definitely missed it during the Pro. I just had to re-do the Bluetooth config to get it to work. Not sure what happened, but I think the Tactrix cable firmware update/driver update had something to do with it, changing a COM port number or something like that.

Time to hit the test and tune course. I know this is just a practice course and who cares, but this is a mental tuneup for me breaking down the data since I’ll have a lot less time to look at data/video tomorrow.



Danny was nice enough to spend some time coaching. Since I was driving too chicken in the slaloms on Monday that was a lot of what we worked on. My first run I was still not getting on it enough and not looking ahead enough, 31.6. Other STU drivers were in the 30.8/30.9/31.0 range so I knew I was quite off the pace. Next run I entered the slalom a lot better, was a lot more aggressive, looked ahead MUCH further in the sweepers and got on the gas very early for the finish. 31.2, much better...


My third run we dropped the pressures, er, only the front pressures, whoops, after someone who’s quite good at this gave me some advice. I never thought about the fact that on 9.5's I would not need as much to get the same result. I was focusing on taking the slalom entry better and carrying more speed through the slaloms, and I did, but the car stepped out which cost me a lot of time. I also didn’t line up the sweepers very well at all. 31.7. But I looked at the data later, and the first half of this run (before getting squirrely and not driving well in the sweepers) was .3 or .4 faster than my 2nd run.


My last run, we dropped the rears to match. The middle was better, but the ends were better on run 2. The slalom was a good 6 mph faster but now that I was carrying more speed I didn’t enter the following sweeper well. I also didn’t take the last sweeper into the finish as well. The net change was really small, 31.3.

The cool thing for me - the difference between my first run through the slalom, and my last run through the slalom, was about .5 to .6 overall. That’s a lot of time to drop in one section. The West course tomorrow is mostly offsets, but there is a wallom and a slalom at the end that this stuff will be key for.

Huge thanks to Danny for the coaching.



After it was all settled, I rotated the tires front to back and re-checked the brake lines. Everything still looks good. I took my coursewalks (4) and then watched the Evolution School video once I got home. I feel like the test and tune time was really valuable, not so much for tweaking the car as for working on my habits. If I was running Thurs-Fri I would probably have scheduled two sessions a day (and brought my 160-run set of tires) just so I could focus on that.

Oh one other takeaway from what’s happened so far. I am never coming to Nationals again without my bike. That would make things sooo much easier...

Time for sleep!

 

Drama... yikes.. CLEAR YOUR MIND... time to do it in 3 runs... no excuses, and no leaving time out there! GOOD LUCK JOHN!!!!

 

Thanks man. Definitely pushing myself hard, but not consistent. Runs 2 and 3 both had some really good sections but very few of them overlapped

Run 2

Run 3

Full breakdown later, just getting them up there for now.

 

Love threads like this...keep up the good work man!