Grassroots Motorsports: The Hardcore Sports Car Magazine

Well, this sucks. I brought in two Amy’s Black Bean Vegetable Burritos for lunch the other day. They’re kind of small, so two make a nice meal. I went to eat them today, and someone ate one!

I saw the two otters this morning on my walk with the dogs. No gator though, I think he left the pond.

A little later, on my run, I saw a squirrel running from a dumpster with an entire onion ring. If a squirrel could look joyous, it did.

when I was in Los Angeles last week, I saw 4 Datsun 510s, a few older Toyota Corollas and a Volvo 122. I also saw a lot of Subarus. As I heard more than once out there, Subarus are the new Hondas. Good for them.

Speaking of California, I went to some restaurants that we don’t get here in FL. I started out with a trip to In&Out, followed by a great teriyaki place, a ramen restaurant and a Japanese restaurant that had great udon noodles. Yummy.

What a difference a week makes! After a grumpy couple of days on the beach in San Diego pondering everything that went wrong last week, we came back with a vengeance this week with a lop-sided victory at the El Toro Pro Solo. That makes it eight in a row for Pro Solo wins starting from early last year. Not only did we win the class, but we went all the way through the Super Challenge competition to the final four, only to take ourselves out with a brain-fade red-light. Doh! With a win in the consolation round, though, we moved up to third overall for the event.

Class winner and 3rd Overall at El Toro

So, what did we change? Not much, really. We went back to our 16″ tires all around and left everything else the way we had started the prior weekend. The extra grip of the surface at El Toro moved our Miata from an oversteering beast to a very balanced car. We also worked hard on staying hydrated and fed, and getting our head in the game rockin’ out in grid with some musical inspiration.

The course itself had a wide variety of elements and was very fast. We were well into third gear with our short 16″ tires. But the shorter gearing helped us dig out of the slower sections and the upshift was in a relatively straight section, so it was the right thing to do. In the end, we put 1.7 seconds on the class and it could easily have been 2.5 as we intentionally gave up our final right side run time that matched our best on the left. The other good news is that we were right there with the leader in STS, even though the results don’t show it.

Next stop is Atwater. First for a regional event and then for the National Tour. In the meantime, we’ll be putting our dual-purpose Miata to good use on the canyon roads along the Pacific Coast Highway. The infamous Mulholland Drive is just down the road.

–Andy

Kim and Per went up to the Buccaneer Region event in Green Cove Springs. The course was tricky with a lot of tight/close offsets that really allowed the car’s rear to step out on the slick surface. We found that the car only became balanced if we stopped cooling down the front tires, essentially “killing” the front traction to keep the car better balanced.

That could be because of a few things, either our alignment needs to be tweaked or the fact that we are running rear tires that are now nearly one year old.

The result of all of this is that we wound up 7th on index and felt that we were at least a second or more off the pace of what the car was capable of. We’ll work on that!

While the WRX is still mostly stock, it’s still getting regular workouts. Recognize these number panels? Obviously we needed some new class designations.

So, you’re probably asking yourself, “Self, when are they going to start with the WRX updates?”

Well, they’re coming. The car is going to be part of a top-secret, super-duper editorial exercise, and we’re waiting for warm weather up at The Tire Rack.

In the meanwhile, we have been autocrossing the car in stock form. Well, not totally stock. To preserve the original tires, we bolted on some tires and wheels from our most recent STS tire test—some Bridgestone Potenza RE-01R tires mounted on Rota wheels. Tires always make a huge difference in performance, and these are no different. The increase in grip has made the car fun to autocross. Our best times seem to come when we push the car a little beyond our comfort zone.

Locally we’re running the Street Tire Street Mod class with our Martin Sports Car Club and STU with the SCCA. In both cases, we have to face the Impreza WRX STI. That’s rough. Still, we finished about a second behind the lead pack (but not the overall winner) at our last Martin event, and we took a win at this Sunday’s SCCA contest. We’re currently leading the STU points race.

The next event with the car will be the early-April Mini Prix, a high-speed autocross event.

Traditionally, we’re at the Amelia Island Concours until the very end. This year we drove up in the Miata. We had no trouble finding it in the parking lot for the drive home.

And we took the scenic route home, including a trip over the St. Johns River Ferry. It’s easily worth the $3.50 toll for the trip.

Two weeks ago we were in Amelia Island, Fla., for their concours. While some people break out the Rolls or Benz for the trip to the show, we took the Miata. We’re probably the only people who drove there on R-compound tires.

This evening, while straightening up the kitchen, Aimme, our little puppy, got into another hissy fit with a chair. She dragged it almost a foot, which is good for a little puppy. Yeah, she has scratched up the leg a little bit, but the entertainment is worth it.

We had a great day on Sunday at our local Central Florida Region SCCA Solo event. It was pretty clear that our performance alignment transformed the 2007 MINI Cooper. With a little bit more negative camber and more aggressive toe settings, the car turned in and cornered much better. We found ourselves backing off our typically high rear tire pressure for a more sedate setting close to the fronts. We typically run 45 psi in the front and 55 psi in the rear. After our first run, we backed off the rears to 45 psi and the car was a lot more manageable in offsets. We finished first and fourth on index out of 97 drivers, setting the fastest time for stock class. Here is the results page:

CFR Solo 2 Results

Wow, what happened? One minute we are starting the new season right where we finished last season with a National Tour win at Dixie, and the next minute we are mired deep in the field with an ill-handling car in San Diego. Here’s how it all happened and what we are doing about it.

Ready to run at San Diego

Staggered tires, 15″ in front, 16″ in rear

A week prior to San Diego, we hauled up to Dallas for a test day on a smallish grippy concrete lot. We continued playing with staggered tire setups and found that running the Falken RT-615 in the 205/50-15 size on the front gave us better times than running the 205/40-16 in that position. The car had more grip up front and lost little of its responsiveness. We used the 16” size in the rear for all runs for better gearing and progressive breakaway. Given those results, we used the same setup for the Tour stop in San Diego.

At the Friday Test & Tune at San Diego, the handling was excellent with good balance in the sweepers and good stability in the transitions. Of course, the T&T is held on a different lot than the actual event with a tighter course. The lot used for the Tour at Qualcomm stadium is very unique in that there is a huge hill across which about 80% of the course runs. Every turn ends up having some sort of camber change which alters the characteristics tremendously. The surface itself is fairly unique with old, well worn asphalt that has a lot of exposed aggregate. The aggregate stones, though, are polished from wear. This puts a premium on adhesive grip favoring R-compounds and wider tire widths.

The other unique aspect of San Diego at this time of year is the weather. A cool, damp “marine layer” typically hovers near the coast moving inland as the winds pick up. This can at times keep it quite cool during the day.

The locals, of course, know all of this. Their cars are setup for it and they make sure to have co-drivers to keep some heat in the tires (contrary to some tribal wisdom, our experience is that stone cold Falkens do not work well). They also have the experience of running up and down the hills of Qualcomm, where only a limited number of overall course design flows can be accommodated due to light poles and Jersey walls. See where this is going?

Running 5th heat, we assumed that it would be warm and a co-driver would not be needed. Wrong! Instead, the event ran long each day, and it was quite chilly when our turn to run came. The first day, the car was almost undriveable with major stability problems every time we touched the throttle. Maxing out the front shock rebound and minimizing the rear helped a bunch the first day, but we still had to deal with cold tires. For the second day, we brought tire blankets to at least maintain some heat between runs. We also disconnected the rear sway bar (stock 12mm). This helped some more but was not nearly enough as we ended up way back midpack.

Disappointed in our on-track performance, we still had lots of fun with the comraderie of the STS2 crowd. Sharing setup info, we learned that both of the front-running cars were running the same sway bars and front springs we were, but used 25% less spring rate in the rear (350 vs 450). They also were on relatively full-tread tires which may have heated up faster and been able to get more mechanical grip on the exposed aggregate of the racing surface. For sure, we were out-driven, perhaps because of local lot/course experience and probably just shear talent. Or maybe we just had a bad weekend.

One of the things we teach in our autocross schools is to revel in your mistakes and misfortune because that’s how you improve. If you can’t recognize or admit errors, you’ll never make changes for the better. So that’s the attitude we take as we store away this information and look ahead to next week at El Toro in Irvine, CA. With three run sessions in the Pro Solo format, we’ll have plenty of time to determine whether the problems were a one-time deal or whether something in our program needs to be adjusted.

On a side note, Bridgestone had a major presence at the San Diego Tour, bringing out their 18-wheeler race support vehicle. We spent some quality time with some of their folks who let us know that they are planning to release two new sizes of their autocross and drift-proven RE-01R that will be of major interest to the STS and STS2 crowd. One is a 205/45-16 which is about 23” tall and 7.6” wide (tread), which are similar dimensions to the 205/50-15 Falken. Also, they will have a 195/50-15 with the same overall specs as the 205/40-16 Falken (22.5” tall, 7.2” tread). In addition, they plan to have support at one other National Tour and at the Solo Nationals. All of this is great news for the sport and we look forward to testing some samples of these new tires in the upcoming weeks.

I watched Mike Judge’s Idiocracy last night. I think it’s the most accurate portrayal of the future that I’ve ever seen.

Wikipedia’s entry on Idiocracy