Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

The attitude didn’t change much, but the springs rates did. Our Civic, now on Ground Controls.

The Civic spent much of yesterday in the shop.

And here’s a close-up of the front suspension. Upgrades now include Ground Control coil-over hardware and springs, race-valved Koni sport shock absorbers, Hawk HPS brake pads and Russell lines. For track use, we’re going to run Hawk HP Plus pads.

The Civic got some much-needed attention yesterday. The car definitely needed a new master cylinder and brake pads, but we decided to upgrade things a bit.

In addition to a new (well, rebuilt) master cylinder we also installed some Russell brake lines, Brembo OE front rotors and Hawk HPS brake pads. We’re running Valvoline’s synthetic brake fluid. The final verdict? Hey, the car stops, and the brake pedal no longer sinks when we’re sitting at a stop light.

We also installed some new suspension hardware, as we’re now running one of Ground Control’s coil-over setups. Our rates are 450 lbs./in. up front and 340 lbs./in. out back. We’re still waiting on one more suspension piece, and we also need to corner weight and align the car. Then we can’t wait to run it hard. We have two autocrosses coming up soon.

And time for a little mid-season update. By our account, we’re leading the Street Touring S points race for our local Martin Sports Car Club. In Central Florida Region SCCA points, we’re in third. Having two local events canceled kind of hurt us.

Um, lunch was good. Okay?

Now granted, David is complaining about the saltiness of his food, and as one who did used to eat the rock salt off her street when she was a small child (and who always wondered why the gravel was only occasionally delicious, since I sampled it year-round hoping to get the tasty variety), I’m not necessarily a good authority on what is and is not too salty.

Nevertheless, my lunch was good. I don’t mind Coke in a can, and my quesadilla was yummy. In fact, everyone at my table–including Noelle, whose mom is Mexican and who should therefore know about these things–pronounced their food yummy.

I don’t know what that *other* table is talking about.

Before any of my coworkers can say anything to the contrary, let me go on record and say that today’s lunch was truly bad. And I usually like Mexican.

Perhaps my first clue should have been that the place was located in the check cashing/empty storefront district of Holly Hill. The second was that they didn’t take credit cards. Third, no lights were on in the place. Fourth, not too many people were there. And fifth, the menu only had four or five items. A Mexican place with only five items? Usually there’s two dozen lunch specials alone. I’ll have a number 18 please, is my usual.

JG, Noelle, Gabe and Margie were at one table and said their food was great. I sat with Per, Bill and Bryce, and I’m still wondering what was in my burrito. I ordered chicken, but it didn’t look, taste or act like chicken. It was also salty as all can be. I once accidentally ate a huge ball of salt that had somehow gotten into a bag of pretzels, and this sensation was similar. Those at my table who also ordered “chicken” were equally perplexed. We often joke about mystery meat, but today I experienced it. I don’t think it was, but it reminded me of calamari. (And I bet it wasn’t even kosher.)

The drinks were sketchy, too. I ordered water, and it came in a Styrofoam cup. I didn’t mind that, but I don’t think I was the first person to use that cup. Seriously. I have never been handed a beaten-up disposable cup before. At least Per’s can of Coke seemed safe. (It was warm, though.)

The final kicker? It was a cash-only place, but they were out of ones. Doh!

On the plus side, their hot sauce was good. Still, I don’t think I’ll be going back.

The GRM virtual office tour has been updated. The tour is free, and we won’t even make you pass through the gift shop to get out. The tour can be found in the “Meet and Contact Us” part of the site: Tour

If the first frame of the tour shows a gray building, clear your browser cache. The building is now tan. Place your cursor over each photo to get a discription of what is going on.

Look for Scott at this weekend’s Champ Car World Series’ Inaugural Taylor Woodrow Grand Prix of San Jose. He’ll be there checking out the Hankook USTCC touring cars. If you see him, make sure he’s eating well.

Our $20 hood is looking pretty good after about an hour’s worth of work.

Here you can see that we left a majority of the interior intact. We just removed the carpet and the rear seat. A piece of rubber flooring was used to cover the footwell.

The rear seat was removed and we hosed out the entire interior, after a liberal soaking with degreaser. Yech.

We’ve started the planning phase of our rallycross project. The goal is to build a fun, cheap car that is legal for SCCA’s RP4 class, while also being potentially legal for actual stage rally use. We don’t know if our car will ever make it to a real rally (the closest one is three states away from us!) but it would be nice to have that potential in the future.

The rallycross class that would allow for both is the Rally Prepared category and since we’re using an all-wheel-drive car, that means RP4 is the class for us. An RP4 car is allowed to have quite a number of changes, including wheels, tires and suspension, while not requiring the builder to write a blank check for engine modifications. Rally Prepared cars can also be prepared for stage rally use, and Production GT seems like the best fit for an Impreza. We won’t have the power of a WRX, but we’re new to this whole rally thing anyway, so the horsepower would most likely just get us into trouble.

From here, we intend to finish up the body work, paint the nose of the car and start the transmission swap. We’ll need to source a clutch before that happens, but both RP4 and PGT allow aftermarket clutches, so we’ll probably upgrade that area. We’re also looking at a viscous lsd or a Phantom Grip conversion on our extra rear differential, either of which would be adequate for loose surfaces.

It looks like there is a rallycross event here in Florida in August. We might make that one, even if we’re still using the automatic transmission and stock street tires.

Here are some links from our most recent websurfing:

NASIOC, the best Subaru site we’ve found.
SCCA, our source for rallycross rules (you can download the pdf)
Rally Rebels, our local rallycross nutjobs. We can’t wait to join them!

While we’re at it, we’ll admit that since we’re new to the dirt, we’ve been asking a bunch of stupid questions. Paul Eklund of Primitive Enterprises has been answering them patiently. We’ll be sourcing our skidplates and underbody protection from his company. Paul is also our rally editor and supplies us with most, if not all, of our professional rally coverage in the magazine.

Primitive Enterprises

An extra set of 15″ “holeys” allowed us to mount up some Falken RT615s. The 5.5″ rim is a little narrow for the 205/50R15 tire, but it’ll get the job done.

Kim and I have been in a small dilemma with this MINI. Kim realized that she was just 2 events away from having enough points in STX for a year-end trophy. As a first-year autocrosser, Kim is understandably psyched about this. Of course, I had to go an sell the SE-R which throws a monkeywrench in the works. We came up with a pretty easy solution. We mounted up some leftover Falken Azenis on the extra set of 15″ MINI wheels that I found online. This will allow Kim to run a few more times in STX (an HS car on “street touring” style tires is legal in HS, STS, STX) while I can see how it compares on PAX index as an HS car. After Kim finishes up her two events, we’ll be switching over to R-compound tires.
Falken Tire

Appalachian Tire–a great place to get tires shaved!

Look for official details to be released in a few, but soon we’ll be giving away a free Simpson helmet to one lucky reader. It could be you.

We have a few finishing touches to put on the October issue, and then it leaves for Publishers Press. That means you guys will see it soon.

All mounted and ready to go.

Funny how much wider a 225 race tire looks than a 225 street tire.

Our friends at Granada Goodyear swapped off our street rubber in favor of the Hankook Ventus RSS Z211 tires that we’ll be starting off with. The Volks look much more appropriate with a big beefy race tire on them. Total weight of a wheel and tire is 31.75 pounds.