Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

….go check out Loud Park 06. A total metal feast. Interestingly, this is being held in the same center that hosts the Tokyo Auto Salon each year. If only the flight there wasn’t so long.

The other night, we used the Civic to run the puppies to the pet store. A little while after returning home, we noticed that the Civic’s taillights were on. Weird. Turns out the brake lights were on. And didn’t want to go off.

The answer was found on the floor mat: The crumbled blue remains of the pedal stop. It looked like someone had crushed up a blue crayon.

This isn’t the first pedal stop to disintegrate on us, so we’ll grab a few extras when we visit the Honda dealer. (For now, the brake light fuse has been pulled, and the car is parked.)

In autocross news, we ran the car this past weekend with the Central Florida SCCA. Since the last few autocrosses have been wet-weather affairs, we tried a different strategy: Run suitable tires.

We ran on our daily-driver BFGoodrich g-Force KDW tires and prayed for rain. Well, despite a favorable weather report, the skies were blue all day. On the plus side, the BFGs were strong under braking. They did get a little greasy, however. We finished third out of four that day—not great, but still fun.

I came home from work today to find a little present on my front lawn: Two gigantic sets of tire tracks sweeping across a good portion of the grass. Turfers. It’s amazing how 15 seconds of idiocy can so completely foul someone’s mood.

Our house is somewhat in the country, meaning it’s in a 25-year-old subdivision of acre-plus lots just past the outskirts of town, and turfers are a regular nuisance here. I dunno what ever happened to the more wholesome countryside activities, like mailbox baseball; I guess maybe today’s delinquents are too fat from all the fast food to actually lean out of their car windows.

I’d spend more time plotting revenge or setting up some elaborate trap to catch these evildoers, but thinking back I do remember a few incidents from my past that involved some irresponsible navigation and even, a couple of times, the improper handling of dairy products. So I’ll just grit my teeth, plug in the divots, and wonder what’s wrong with kids these days.

As of 10 p.m., Ormond Beach, Fla., is still standing. Take that, Tropical Depression Ernesto!

Well, actually changing the oil isn’t too tough at all, once yu get the handy pieces built that make it easier. After all, it is a Corvette. If it was easy it wouldn’t be any fun now, would it?

Anyway, I was getting ready to change the oil in the Vette when I found out that simply jacking the car up is a little more complicated than ramming a jack underneath and pumping away. The factory service manual lists a few preferred jack points which aren’t all that easy to reach, and are also aluminum, meaning that they could crack if too much direct force is applied. For this reason, we built some simple lift saddles that not only aid in jacking the car, but make great places to put jackstands.

Yes, the Corvette also has the rail-located “puck holes” where you can insert jacking pucks and lift away. We have a set of these pucks, but remember that this is NOT a factory authorized lifting method with a floor jack. The puck location are only specified to be used when raising the car on a four-point lift. Take that into considering when doing your own jacking.

Anyway, here’s a little video explaining the building of the ramps and lift saddles and where to put them. Hopefully it makes your DIY maintenance a little easier. Heck, if I can do it, anyone can.

I’d certainly also like to give a lot of credit to the knowledge base at http://www.corvetteforum.com If you own a Corvette, join the forum there, it’s a huge help.

Here’s the movie

Then plug in your headphones and check out this site: Super hero theme songs

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I guess it’s a dream come true to watch (and help of course) my son, as he begins to build his first car. I figured, since he has been hanging with me and helping me with cars, since he was old enough to walk that he could handle the mechnical end of it. What has impressed me most, is his clear lucid writing style (must take after his mom), as he updates the project on the Classic Motorsports website all by himself.

Almost six years ago, me and Gabe made a little movie with my improv group. It’s been languishing on a backup hard drive all this time, and I recently stumbled upon it again and decided to toss it up on YouTube, since that seems to be the cool thing to do these days. It’s kind of funny, in a sort of funny way, so if you have ten free minutes, give it a look sometime. Of note: Bill Cefalo, star of the feature, went on to leading roles in such crappy, straight-to-video hits as “Deadly Species” and, well… that’s pretty much it.

I say it’s better than “Transporter 2″ only because I’m watching “Transporter 2″ right now and it blows. “Transporter 1,” which is usually just referred to as “Transporter” or simply “Transpo” or “Tr” was way better.

Here’s the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-2URh08kpU

In most any large city in America, you can get pretty much any kind of food delivered. For most of us, though, we have only one choice: Pizza. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love pizza as much as the next guy, but why must this be my only choice for delivery.

Yeah, sure, some pizza joints are offering salads and breadsticks and other related foodstuffs, but the truth remains that if youwant food delivered, you have to call a pizza place.

At one point I thought that maybe it had something to do with the intrinsic nature of pizza, being a “mass” of food with no real set serving size. Okay, fine, then why can’t I get a bucket of fried chicken delivered? Why not a big plate of wings or some other mass quantity of food?

I sense a conspiracy, and I can’t really be too sure how high it goes. If this is my last blog, you’ll know why.