Nice job man!

If your schedule allows, just come out to National's in September! National tour events can be hit or miss depending upon who shows and doesn't sometimes.

 

Schedule does not allow.. will be pretty out of vacation and that's when school starts for the kiddos. One of these years maybe I can do an arrive and drive or something.

I agree, and there's a local that weekend to so if STU is a ghost town I would probably skip it. I think there are enough folks to fill a class but we will see.

 

Event 4: 2022-07-17: WDCR SCCA @ Fedex

For this event, WDCR ran 3 runs in the morning, 3 runs in the afternoon. The idea was to avoid people needing to work a 2 hour shift in the 90+ degree weather. It worked out reasonably well and ended up being helpful for setup.

My previous event at Fedex, the car had sucked. And in the morning… the car still sucked. This was a little odd because I had made changes since then: reducing rear camber in the rear a little and going back to the old diff fluid. But the car was still pushy in the morning. I had been using the same settings from the June event. The June shock setup wasn’t 100% scientific: front: 2/6 comp 3/6 rebound ; rear: full soft. Tire pressures 34 front, 30 rear. I started out this way figuring that I’d go stiffer in the rear if it was necessary but the car ended up being really good from run 1 so I didn’t end up changing it. (and it was hot and I was lazy and the sun was in my eyes bla bla bla)

After the 3 morning runs, Anthony (Evo X, an2ny on here) was leading with a 47.3, and I had a 48.0. STR on the other hand was being led by Marcus Pyne (45.8) and STX was being led by Brian Karwan (46.3). So I was way way off. In the afternoon, I went to 35 psi front, 33 psi rear, and changed the shocks to make the front a little bit softer and the rear a lot stiffer. The car was a lot better - critically, it was actually fun to drive - and I was able to get down to a 46.6. Marcus dropped to a 45.5 in STR - top PAX (including a 45.1 dirty) and Brian didn’t improve (but had a 45.6 dirty; yikes!) and was 2nd in PAX.

Despite getting pasted by STR/STX I ended up 9th in PAX out of 131. Marcus has been pretty much on fire this year including winning the Bristol tour and the Bristol super challenge so I’m not too sad about that. The car had a lot more time in it in the afternoon. I think with 6 runs on the “afternoon” setup I could have definitely taken some more time out of it. I never got the right-hander downhill quite right.

My best afternoon run:


Event 5: 2022-08-22: WDCR/Philly SCCA @ Ripken

It’s hard AF to get into a rhythm when you’re autocrossing once a month. Sim racing has been critical for me, both from a sanity standpoint and a sorta-muscle-memory standpoint.

This event went a lot better. Mid/high 80s, work first run thirdS, but things were running reasonably fast. It was only a low 30 second course but everyone got 6 runs.

STR ran heat 2. Coming into heat 3, I knew STR was down in the low 31s. Run 1 I ran a 31.9 with some pretty obvious mistakes, which allowed me to take a breath (i.e. I was in the ballpark) and calmly dial it up for run 2.

I hit a 31.3 on my second run - slightly slower than Marcus but good at the time for second in PAX.


Run 3, I overdrove into the first fast lefthander, hit some cones with the back of the car (much more fun than hitting them with the front of the car). Run 4, kinda overdrove everywhere. Run 5, I was up .190 from my best run at the halfway point but got sloppy into the second hard braking zone and tossed the gains away. It was hot and I was a little frustrated so I ended up not taking my 6th run. My second run was still good enough to stand as 2nd in PAX, 3rd fastest raw (behind a shifter kart and Marcus). Also finished ahead of Ken Houseal (who just won the ProFinale in STR).

This was a really good datapoint.. I’ve had a couple top PAXes but usually at smaller events. I was less than a tenth of a second away from top PAXing this event. (I finished the event with 3/4 of a tank of fuel, too. Doh.)

So, things that went well:
* Getting a quick run on run 2. Even though I’m not autoxing anywhere near enough, I am at least comfortable enough with the car that I can get up to speed quickly, which is some combination of me and the setup being fast but not totally knife edge dangerous.
* Car was balanced really well. It got through the slow speed stuff well but also didn't kill me in the high speed stuff.

Less well:
^ I didn't really do this at the event. Really all I needed for that extra half-tenth was to not bog the (uphill) launch which I didn't do until run 5. I also was thinking I wouldn't be able to top my 2nd run in the heat w/ the Yokos, but the data said otherwise - my 5th run was faster at the halfway mark but I couldn't close it out. Curious what experiences people have had here but I was spraying the fronts (not the rears) and it /seems/ to have been effective.

Generally I didn't use the data for enough when I was onsite. I could have evaluated my 4th/5th runs more carefully and figured out where the gains and losses really were.

I signed up for the Charlotte Tour in October. I have no idea who's going to attend (right now STU is just me) but if it ends up being a decent sized class I'll go.. otherwise there's a local that weekend that I'll do instead.

 

Event 6: WDCR SCCA @ Summit, 2022-10-08

Weather was in the low 50s and pretty windy. Since the interval was good, they ended up giving everyone 6 runs which turned out to be incredibly useful.

Changes for this event:
* Track-ish pads added - ST43 pads front, Hawk HT10s rear. This was in preparation for a track day on 2022-10-15… which might not be happening because due to instructor unavailability I got moved to the wait list.
* Finally an external mic for my GoPro so that my video isn’t just wind noise.
* So yeah, nothing serious.

STU ran 3rd heat. There were only two of us in STU (Sean, silver Evo 8 was the other). It had been 7 weeks since the last event at Ripken due to conflicts and goofiness of scheduling.

I had only run the car at Summit once before and it was mid 30s, so I started off really soft on the shocks and IIRC 35/32 for tire pressures. The tires were just starting to retain some warmth across the last couple of runs; mostly they were quite cold.

I was looking at XSA’s times as a benchmark, with Brian Karwan in a turbo K-swapped S2000 on 295 A052s leading with a 38.3xx. I’ve been able to hang with XSA locally so far.

First run - 40.4+1. Then 39.6+1. Then 38.7… +2. At this point I had the raw time to take top PAX but was still dirty mostly due to hitting cones in a series of mildly unpleasant (for my car) offsets. 4th run - any better? 38.7.. +1. F***. I had been reviewing Solostorm in between runs and was trying to clean up a spot where I was underbraking. 5th run - 38.4 clean, woot! Good enough for top PAX by about .3 - serious load off my mind getting a clean one in (though obviously not great having to wait until 5th run out of 6 to do so). My last run with the slightest little bit of heat in the tires - maybe - I was able to get down to a 38.3 that was lower than Brian’s and take FTD.


I am giving the cones particular in the offsets a pretty wide berth - primarily because I had murdered so many of them in my first 4 runs. The hairpin I had tried a couple different lines on, but it didn’t seem to matter too much since there was plenty of room to scoot out of there and still make the next turn gracefully. Still some understeer towards the end and that was primarily due to my conservative setup choices - the rear shocks were still almost full soft because I was focused on keeping the car controllable.

Another good data point for sure, but it will be hard to say how good until I get to something national level.

I had signed up for Charlotte - and Chris Mayfield was signed up in a borrowed Evora which would have been a great datapoint - but some friends had planned the annual Race Wars event for that weekend (kind of like a very tiny One Lap but for the DC area… named after the Race Wars from Fast & Furious) so I ended up withdrawing from the Tour. Race Wars is a multisport event over a few days:
Thursday: car show
Friday: karts in the morning, drag strip in the afternoon
Saturday: HPDE
Sunday: autocross

Each of the 5 events is scored (the car show is judged) and then whoever does the best wins the belt. It’s kinda a WWE style championship belt, very good trophy / bragging rights.

I had a plan for all of these.. bought Kartkraft for the sim rig, spent a lot of time researching proper shift points for drag racing, etc, but getting waitlisted for the track day means I’m basically hosed as far as “winning” so it’s just going to be hanging out with car friends for a weekend. I do want to see what the car can do at the strip with me driving.

New driveway partner

I’ve been watching “Race for the Championship” on USA. It’s basically Drive to Survive, but about NASCAR instead of F1. As someone who doesn’t currently care about NASCAR at all, it’s been interesting. Like I didn’t know they actually ran on dirt occasionally. It was on Youtube TV on demand, so there were only like 3 advertisers. One of them was Carvana. On a whim I decided to see what Carvana would pay me for my 2016 Focus ST. I paid 18.6k for the car back in February of 2018. Carvana offered… 18.3k. Cool

I’ve been monitoring Focus RS prices for a while because I really like the ST’s interior, seats etc but it could use two more driven wheels and an extra 100 horsepower. A 2018 popped up in red at a local BMW dealership and after validating that the car was stock, I bought it. I might autox it a couple of times but that’s not its job.


Here's hoping the Evo survives the drag strip!

 

Yeah, you tore that up! Nicely done. Scared the hell out of those corner workers lol (That was their error. They should not have been there!)

 

Yeah I think the previous car had done some damage in the slalom. The surface there crests so it's hard for the starter to see all the way to the other side.

 

Congrats on the RS. I wouldn't mind picking up an RS as our secondary (daily-driven) car, but finding a good one for sale at a reasonable price has been impossible so far.

I wish they would have built it for just a couple more years.

 

Yeah, the pricing on this car wasn't awesome, but the sales price for my FoST was ridiculous so I figure it works out. I had someone look up the wholesale prices for a 2018 FoRS with similar miles and they were still high. Generally they seemed to be holding their value well, particularly the 2018s. The #1 thing I like about the 2018 is that it's not competitive in street class It's also straight-to-SST in street touring, which is downright silly now that the 2016-2017 cars can add a front diff and probably can't really replace / upgrade the rear or center "diff" stuff because it's goofy/fancy.

I'll start a thread about the Focus over on focusrs.org one of these days. I need to write up last weekend (Race Wars 5) first, though!

 

Weird. I didn't know the 2018 ended up in SST. Does it actually perform that much better?

 

In SST trim, I don't think there's any way the 2018 would be faster because the 2016-2017 cars can add the same front diff that the 2018 comes with. For street class, there isn't a lot of data.

Here's Trevor Jones arguing that it's not helpful in street class
https://www.focusrs.org/threads/the-...5#post-2243661
Ken Houseal saying it's more likely to matter on asphalt


Other than that, the 2018s have shocks with better ride quality but that's all legal to replace in ST anyway.

 

Race Wars V: Spookyspeed

I ended up not getting off the waitlist for the HPDE which meant my overall chances were kinda doomed. The path for me doing well in this event would have involved doing really well in drag + autox and just not totally sucking in the other events. It is generally a happy go lucky, non-SRSBSNS event. 20 total folks entered.

The scoring for a given event is very topheavy:

P1 2500
P2 1800
P3 1500
P4 1200
P5 1000
P6 800
P7 600
P8 400
P9 200
P10 100
P11 90
P12 80
P13 70
P14 60
P15 50
P16 40
P17 30
P18 20
P19 10
P20 5

So if you can’t finish at least top 10 in an event, it really hurts.

Friday: karts

We went to Autobahn near BWI:
https://autobahnspeed.com/locations/...door-go-karts/

I was really struggling at first. I asked Brian Karwan about whether he was driving with a lot of slip angle or not that much. He mentioned that previously he noticed he was slower than some other folks and he asked them about what they were doing, and that their advice was “drive like an a**hole”. I tried that in my next session and went from 19th/20 on the right course to 8th/20 on the right course, about 2 tenths out of first (~26 second lap). I never got a chance to apply the “drive like an a**hole” philosophy on the left course, so I ended up 19th on the left side, and finished 13th overall.

 

Friday: car show

Everyone gets a clipboard and 19 score sheets, then we go through the parking lot and everyone does a quick speech about their car and folks ask questions. I did originally have a livery planned but decided to save it for RW2023. I showed up with the car dirty AF and ended up 14th.

 

Friday: drag strip

Back at RW1, at the drag strip, I had run a 13.2x, and then three 13.1xs. This was good for 2nd overall, 1st being a Viper. I found out later I should be shifting at ~7k or so rather than redline. The scoring system for RW5 was different - we were doing brackets rather than just best time. If you lose, you go into the loser’s bracket, and if you lose again you’re out.

My first pass in 2022 was against Ata in Danny's old Supra.



I ran a 13.138 (GAHH), 1.9 60 foot. No trap speeds though because that wasn’t working. The launch was fine - I got a good amount of wheelspin, which was the goal, and everything was going great until I tried to shift to 4th and it ground like crazy. This is the whole “4th gear in the 6 speed sucks at any kind of load” thing. Looking at the data, my mph was flat for 1.6 seconds while I was fighting with the transmission trying to shift 3rd to 4th. But Ata redlit, so I advanced. For comparison, it took about 0.4 seconds to shift from 2nd to 3rd. So if you conservatively assume I’m competent enough to shift 3rd to 4th in .6, I would have spent an extra second accelerating instead of being stuck at 75 mph. That doesn’t translate into a 1 second faster ET because I’m still moving, just not as fast as I could be, but still, disappointing.



Round 2 - against a C7 Vette, not optimistic. He redlit too. I bogged the hell out of my launch because they had done a lot of track treatment, so there was no wheelspin; it just hooked up and bogged. I ran a 15.0 with a 2.4 60 ft 😛

Round 3 - against a stockish Civic Type R (FK8). Again.. I bogged. I was not learning. I almost ran him down anyway because a modified Evo is faster than a stockish Civic Type R, but ultimately lost, which pushed me into the loser’s bracket.

Here’s a video. Like I said, ugly


Round 4 - loser’s bracket against a 2015-ish WRX. I bogged again but still won.

Round 5 - slated to go up against Brian Karwan in his borrowed turbo+Kswap S2000. We decide to flip a coin rather than racing, in the interest of not breaking anything. He wins the coin flip, I’m out. I end up finishing 8th in the drags.

I have still managed to dodge running a 12.x in this car (which with someone good could probably do a very very very high 11.9x). It’s irritating me enough at this point that I might just go to the drag strip some night and try again. Back in 2018 I did four launches off the two step no problem without bogging, but they were doing some sort of grudge match money-winning thing at the strip this night, and they were expecting a lot more high horsepower cars, so they were prepping the surface (making it stickier) early and often.


Friday wrapup: 13th in karts, 14th in show, 8th in drag racing.

 

Saturday: HPDE / TT

Since I was waitlisted for the HPDE and didn’t get in, I brought my FoRS in the interest of having a more comfortable car to do the trip to Summit Point in. The Evo still had the track pads and they are godawful on the street. I did get to do parade laps at lunch but that’s it. Danny Kao was 1st in his 2019 911 and Brian was 2nd in the S2000.

Satuday: 19th at track (bc I was present, at least)

 

Sunday: WDCR/Philly SCCA @ Ripken

Having not done particularly well on Friday, and having gotten basically a zero at the track day, pretty much all my points were going to come from the autocross. Eric Simmons did the course, and made really good use of the real estate.

We were all running XSB so we could run together, same conditions. We ran first heat, and it was cold but dry. We did have to do some amount of course sweeping. (technically, the car is not legal for XSB.. I dunno why we didn't all just run XSA.)

This was my 7th event this year but it was the first time only having 4 runs. I had kinda forgotten about that aspect of the sport, and it’s a good reminder headed in to 2023 to be able to get up to speed quickly (especially if I plan on doing tours!).

1st run - I was leading XSB after first run, good sign. 51.7 clean.
2nd run - There was a really big bump at the halfway point, crossing from the first half of the course to the second half. I was hustling pretty hard on run 2 through here and spun. 56.6 + OC.
3rd run - wait, what? I only have 2 more runs? This run started out really well but I really screwed up the last sector. I was up by seven tenths compared to my first run, but entered the final slalom really badly, and was behind for the rest of the course. 51.8+1.
4th run - is this pressure? I was able to collect the best parts of my previous 3 runs and get a 50.7. I finished 3rd in our group behind Brian K (S2000) and Marcus (STR BRZ). Still time on the table for sure, there was definitely a level of "dial it back to get a clean one in since you had banked enough tenths on the first part of the course" here.

Here's run 3, which started off fine and then turned bad after I botched the entry to the last sector and kept scrubbing. The GoPro died before run 4, of course..


Results -
https://autox4u.com/phillyscca/results/2022/event15.htm

PAX wise, if you move Marcus out of XSB into STR, and me out of XSB into STU, he would have been 4th (behind Ken Roller) and I would have been 5th (out of 145).

Another interesting datapoint - Aaron ran a 50.3 in the same heat in his XSA car (same car that usually runs SM but on street tires). To be .4 off psushoe in the same conditions was a good sign, especially if I want to do KoTM, Optima street car, etc etc and not get totally embarrassed.

I finished 11th overall. For 2023 if I can do this again (schedule, etc) I’ll do some more karting practice, get the car detailed beforehand, do the livery I planned for this year but didn’t do, and.. Probably skip the track day. The more I think about it the more I think this was a blessing in disguise.. I have always been skittish about taking this car on track mostly due to the fear of stuffing it (or hitting coolant, etc) but there’s also the oil starvation thing.. I dunno. I haven’t ruled it out but my inclination is probably to not track it. Gears & Gasoline is not helping things there