Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

The thicker glue residues like the ones on the roof will respond best to liberal use of lacquer thinner.

In addition to the glue, the paint itself was kind of funky from being parked outside under trees for so long. The Honda paint is pretty good on our Civic, so a claybar sucks out all the impurities and will leave us with like-new finish.

From the front, our Civic looks pretty good, though we’re not used to seeing it with so few decals on it. Now we’ve got to start thinking about how and where to remove weight, and what kind of mods we’re going to want to do to prepare the car for road racing. Then it’s time for a cage…

It’s taken liberal use of lacquer thinner, rags, soap and a clay bar, but we’ve finally degunked and revitalized the majority of panels on our Civic Si. Only the roof and rear hatch remain to be cleaned. For whatever reason, when we removed the vinyl on those panels all the glue stayed on the paint. The decals on the roof were so brittle that peeling was useless, and they had to be removed entirely by razor blade. The car is also sporting a staggered wheel setup; we’re going to use the lightweight and strong forged Volk TE-37s for our race tires, and the blingtastic chrome monsters as our trailer/intimidation wheels.

We went to a very fast, but very rainy autocross this past Saturday in St. Augustine. Despite the rain and the 1/4 mile (honest) straight, we finished first in STX, beating three Subaru WRXs. What we lost in the straight, we made up for in the sweepers and tighter sections. Our time put us third on index. Results are here.

To preserve our autocross tires as much as possible, our Civic is now wearing a set of Rota Auto-X wheels wrapped with BFGoodrich g-Force T/A KDW tires. Yes, the tread’s pattern looks like a Klingon’s forehead

The Civic was off this weekend, as we passed on a local Buccaneer Region autocross due to rain and prior commitments. While we didn’t race this weekend, the car did transport us to one, as we attended the National Bicycle League’s Easter Classic BMX race in Orlando on Sunday. Since this was an Elite Series and UCI points event, the pro class was pretty well stacked. Acura NSX driver Jason Richardson looked fast. Since we realize that not too many of you are into BMX, keep an eye on http://www.istv.com for details on the sport. (The site goes live next month, and fellow car nut, friend of the magazine, and retired BMX pro Craig Reynolds is involved in the project; speaking of Reynolds, he gets his new MINI Cooper S today.)
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Here are the results from this past Sunday’s autocross. Deland Event #6 The Pax scores are here.

Kim was actually 2nd out of two in STX (not three as originally reported), but she was 12th overall on index. Good job Kim!

Here’s a page of the 2005 PAX/RTP indexes: Chicago’s RTP/Pax Page The PAX index helps autocrossers judge their performance by handicapping the classes based upon potential.

This past weekend we ran our first autocross on our BFGoodrich g-Force T/A KD tires. What a difference, especially under braking. The car now actually stops when the middle pedal is pushed. Turn-in and power delivery were also much better. We’ve said it before and it warrants repeating: Tires make the biggest difference in performance.
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We call this "old school datalogging."

According to SR20DE gurus Mike Kojima and Clark Steppler, the air/fuel ratios that we’re seeing on the Dynojet are invalid. So, we welded an oxygen sensor bung onto our header to see how the a/f curve looks on our Innovate Motorsports wideband. You can see there’s quite a big difference at full throttle around 4000 rpm, at least a half point, the differences are similiar across the board. Further buggering up the typical sniffer type A/F ratio testing, our car still has a catalytic converter, which acts as an oxygen source.

Story by John Pentelei-Molnar Jr.

If you remain in racing long enough, there’s probably going to come a time when you need a proper tow rig and trailer. If you do find yourself searching for a towing package, there are a number of factors you need to consider to ensure that your trailering needs are met accurately and safely.

Proper towing requires three things: the right trailer, the right hitch, and a vehicle in good condition and rated for the load it will be towing. The last requirement is fairly easy to research, since every automotive manufacturer publishes trailer weight maximums for its new cars each year. But finding the right trailer and hitch combination is not quite so simple.

Actually, there is a fourth item required for safe towing: a brain behind the wheel. Towing is serious business and should be approached with the same attention to detail required for racing.
Never fear, though: we’ve researched the topic for you. The first part of this article will focus on the types of trailers available, the things to look for when purchasing a trailer, and proper and helpful trailering tips. Next, we’ll look at the different types of hitches, and the factors involved in selecting the right hitch for your needs.
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story by j.g. pasterjak

The SCCA’s Solo II Stock and Club Racing Showroom Stock classes are designed so folks in off-the-showroom floor cars can compete in racing with a reasonable amount of success-no trick engines and no full-race suspensions, just stock production cars. That’s the theory, anyway. In reality, the SCCA rules leave open a few areas where a smart gal or fella can pick up a few horsepower. And in a sport timed to the thousandth of a second, every horsepower counts.

We’ve had quite a few opportunities to sample a variety of Stock-class-legal modifications over the past few years as part of our testing on the chassis dynamometer facilities of Performance Dyno in Edgewater, Fla. Just about all manner of cars and parts have passed through our “Dyno Days,” and we have found that the dyno gives us real-world numbers that quickly separate fact from hype.

We know our readers are always eager to find out what works and what doesn’t, so we’ve decided to open the archives and give you the results of some of this testing. The power figures quoted here were extracted from tests performed on a Dynojet Chassis dynamometer. The figures are for horsepower at the drive wheels, which, due to parasitic losses, is typically 15 to 20 percent less than flywheel horsepower numbers.
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We dynoed the car again today to see how the Magnaflow high flow catalytic converter performed. The stock set up was a little odd, as the SE-R uses a very large 2.5" inlet and outlet catalytic converter. The exhaust passes through a 2" collector on the header, to the 2.5" pipe, then into the 2.25" of the exhaust system. We thought this was a little strange, so we went with a 2.25" high flow cat, theorizing that this would keep the exhaust gas velocity higher through the whole system? While the gains weren’t immense, we did get about 1 horsepower and 1 lb.-ft. of torque.

We talked with Clark at Jim Wolf Technology today. They’re going to program a ECU for us that will improve power across the board. We’ll by dialing back our timing as the ECU can bump the timing by differing amounts across the entire RPM range. We’ll also be comparing our "Cheap Bastard" intakes to their propietary MAF adapters called "POP Chargers"
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We’ve been doing some tweaks to our SE-R and had a blast on Sunday at the Central Florida Region Solo II. It was an “up and back” airport runway autocross with slaloms and offsets in both directions with a long sweeper at the turn-around. Out of about 80 cars, We believe Per was the 3 fastest time of the day….34 seconds for a shifter kart, 34 seconds for a F500…and 35.6 for the Sentra on street tires.

The car just feels “right” in the offsets and has plenty of forward grip coming out of sweepers. We’ve got some seat time in one of the fastest STS cars (Chris Shenefield’s Civic) and while this doesn’t have quite the same mechanical grip yet, it’s got more forward gumption… credit the real LSD for putting it down. This was one of the first real offset and slalom intensive courses we’ve been on with this car and we “get” slaloms. Most of our local courses are short sweepers followed by long straights…course designers at the local level try to make things easy for the newbies. That’s why it has been hard to get an idea of how this car was working. Sure, a prepped WRX can out accelerate us in a straight..what does that say about anything?
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