In reply to xflowgolf :
Evo 9 1:35.6
S2k 1:35.9
Mustang 1:36.6
STI 1:37.2
S2000 1:37.2
Then us at 1:37.6
In reply to xflowgolf :
Evo 9 1:35.6
S2k 1:35.9
Mustang 1:36.6
STI 1:37.2
S2000 1:37.2
Then us at 1:37.6
So I still have this car, in fact I’ve been pretty busy with it lately!
earlier this spring I got invited to an event called UMI’s King of the Mountain. In Clearfield PA.
its a 100 car, 2 day autocross invitational. The kicker? After 2 days of autox 32 cars are selected for a shootout under the lights. 10 fastest time of the weekend cars, 10 of the cars with the least variance between runs and 10 cars with the highest trap speed measured somewhere on the course. Plus 2 event host choice cars. Those 32 cars go into a single run elimination style bracket and the winner takes all! Which in this case is.....$10-12k depending on tire selection.
yea, $10k prize for an autox? I’m in.
Winning won’t exactly be a cakewalk with names like Danny Popp, Sam Strano, Brandon Ranvek, John Vitamas, Danny Kao, and Brian Peters on the entry list.
The rules for the event fit on a 3x5 index card: “must have 200tw tires and driver must wear a helmet”
if you run the viper acr tires (which are labeled 200tw and considered to be around 60tw in reality) you can win $10k. If you use any other tire, you win $12k.
My experience with autocross has been that tired are the answer to life, the universe and everything so let’s get some ACR’s mounted up and see how hard they are to fit.
Because these are oem on a viper they only come in 2 sizes. 355/30/19 or 295/25/19 I’ll try to squeeze 295’s under the car on 19x11’s. I normally run 18x11 with 285 so hopefully it won’t be too much difficulty.
Turns out.....it’s not, as I already suspected once mounted on the same size wheel the width is virtually identical:
So there’s that sorted, except the 19” wheels don’t clear my front brakes so I’ll need some 3mm spacers to make them fit, no biggie. Amazon prime to the rescue for $10 with some 3mm hubcentric spacers delivered next day.
For gridlife street mod I normally have to run a full front interior. Since this event has no such rules I set out to shave some weight.
The factory doors fully dressed with mirror, glass and door panel weigh 80lbs! And that’s after I’d already removed the speakers and heavy door pull handle. A bit of work with the cut off wheel later and I’ve shaved 110lbs from the car:
You can see in the second photo I was also in the process of pulling out the radio harness which is a massive stand alone harness that runs back to the trunk for the cd changed and gps system, rear subwoofers/amp and rear door speakers etc. all told that harness was 10lbs! And since the radio has long been gone itnwas on my list of stuff to pull eventually anyways....except you need to remove the carpet and dash to do it. Well, I don’t need those for this event anyways!
While doing that I discovered where the lingering burnt smell from last summers grass fire is coming from. That burnt sound deadening is just extra weight anyways! It’s much harder to heat and scrape out after it’s partially melted but eventually it came out!
Without the dash I have no way to mount...well anything really. But I need the gauge cluster and traction control buttons so I had to put my rudimentary fab skills to the test:
Very racecar! Lastly the headlight lenses on my car are pretty pitted from the track, and one had a decent gash in it from contacting the wall at Road Atlanta last year. So I ordered some replacement lenses for the headlights and made blanks from the old ones:
All told the car weighed in at a “svelte” 2872lbs which sounds heavy until you consider this car competes in gridlife 328lbs heavier and stated life over 3400lbs on 8/9” wide wheels with 225/255 tires and I’ve added aero, a intercooled supercharger and a rollbar.
There’s easily another 100lbs in the car between factory hvac system and a not 35lb battery. But considering I’ll have 10 days to get the car back into street mod trim before the gridlife championship I had to pick a quitting point and this was it.
Tomorrow morning we head to PA, I haven’t gotten a test event on the ACR tires yet but I did go out and scrub them in at a nearby parking lot and they feel pretty sticky.
Did you buy ACR take-offs from a gridlife competitor?
Zip tied instrument clusters will alwys get my approval. Nice.
Sweet work on adding lightness. Good luck!
sleepyhead the buffalo said:Did you buy ACR take-offs from a gridlife competitor?
Nope, these are brand new sticker tires from Tirerack. I actually noticed they had some old 2016 stock tires on the website so that is what I ordered because they were 35% cheaper. But then when they arrived 3 tires were date code 51st week of 2018 and the 4th tire was the 42nd week of 2017.
295's was way too easy. Next time 355's. 
In reply to xflowgolf :
But easy was part of the point here. He's still gotta put ALL of this back together for Road America in 2.5 weeks.
The car didn't stop being a gridlife TT car.
http://live.axti.me/live/590a692714bc340f00cabac3/5d5eb46dcf73f8c405cfb560
Live results for King of The Mountain. Finch is hauling the mail!
In reply to spacecadet :
Thanks for the link, I'm going to leave that window up. Impressed with both of the drivers to be honest. That's a thick field of talent.
In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :
I hadn't seen Yonkers post a time before. Yeah he's doing awesome to be hanging in the top 10.
Klodcrawler holding onto 11th and his hired gun holding onto first right now..
That car is FAST and they are both properly wheeling it!
This event is wild. And proper nationals level split. I coned away a 29.7 which would’ve landed me in 6th. instead I’m sitting one spot outside the brackets sitting on a clean 30.0
Finch is doing Finch things which is why he’s the hired gun. Both he and Ranvek took 4 runs of an available 14 and saved tires.
The rest of us mortals ground away tires trying to even get within a second.
tomorrow we do the same thing again for a whole day before the top guys get to compete on the shootout for $10k
oh....and these acr tires are absurd near Hoosier levels of grip.
In reply to klodkrawler05 :
You successfully made my morning completely unproductive following the live results.
You guys are kicking ass and It's awesome. There are a lot of ultra capable names lower than you on the time sheet.
Well Klodcrawler and Finch drove their asses off and Finch made Top seed for the Final 32 battle and Klodcrawler made 9th seed.
They fought hard. But finch went out with 2 cones against the well driven Tesla model 3 in the (3rd or was it 4th?) Round and Klodcrawler went out in the 2nd round. They bought fought hard and the game is still the game.
Props to Klodcrawler for building a car that changed a lot of perceptions. And then wheeling the snot out of it.
The event was a ton of fun! Autocross events where you never have to shag cones leave so much more time for hanging out with all your friends, making car adjustments, eating food, applying sunscreen etc.
Friday day 1 there were 3 heats for each of the 2 run groups resulting in up to 12 runs if folks wanted to take all of them. Because Ryan and I were worried about tire wear on the ACR tire and knew the course would be changing for Saturday's shootout Ryan opted to only take 4 runs while I took 10 trying to ensure I secured a spot in the top 10. At the end of day 1 Ryan was in 2nd overall while I sat on the bubble in 11th.
Saturday day 2 was a bit shorter day because the UMI staff needed time to calculate who made the shootout under the lights. So 8 possible runs total. Ryan's first 4 runs in the morning had him sitting in 1st overall but as the course rubbered in and the corvettes started figuring out where to use the power he dropped to 4th overall for the day. That's fine, it's still qualifying, just need to make the top 10 to secure a spot. Inspecting the tires at lunch time we decided they weren't wearing as fast as we had feared and Ryan opted to take 2 more runs purposely pushing a different section on the track to see what he could get away with. Both runs resulted in cones and no time improvement but some hopefully useful data for us heading into the Shootout.
Meanwhile I was having my own battle with Eric Flemming and his nasty C6Z track car. We'd been bumping each other out of the number 10 spot nearly every session. On day 1 I was in the first run group so I got to watch as Eric pushed me into the 11th spot with a .3 second lead. For day 2 they reversed the run orders and it was payback time. In Eric's 8th and final run he managed to set a time of 32.0 which was .5 seconds faster than my best clean run at the time and was actually as fast as my best coned run. So heading into grid with 4 runs left and needing make up a total of .8 seconds to secure a spot in the shootout I took run 1. The ACR tires really don't like being cold, but they felt like they still had a bit of residual heat in them from Ryan's 2 runs because I managed to just beat my best time from the morning session with a 32.4. Ok, off to a good start, do the same run, but with warm tires, stay clean. Run 2 was a 32.0 alright! shoot, I hit a cone on that run, I must've run the sweeper line just a touch wider than usual because I hit a cone that I hadn't bumped all day. ok, 2 runs left, time to keep everything clean and tidy. tight tight tighttttt and across the line! Woo! a clean 31.8! adding fast times from both day 1 and day 2 showed that Eric was still in the lead by .002 seconds! ugh! I have to drive even faster, clean, and on the final run of the weekend. No pressure. I tried to do exactly the same things I did on run 3 keep it tight as much as possible but jumping back to throttle a bit sooner as many times as I could. When I crossed the line initially I thought it was potentially the best autox run I've taken all year. then when I saw the timing board showed 31.4, darn, I knew it felt slow but more than half a second slower than the previous run? ouch. In my head, I thought dang, I ran a .8 earlier, so a .4 I must be a full second off.....And then as I'm idling through grid back to my pit spot I see Ryan running towards me hands in the air, while the RS motors guys are clapping from their pit spot, I had done it! I managed to drop another .4 seconds from my previous best run! Pulling out that flying lap out not only secured me a spot in the shootout but actually bumped me all the way up into 9th for combined time of the weekend and 8th for the day!
So now onto the shootout. 32 cars are selected to run under the lights in a single round elimination. There are 4 ways you can get into the shootout, finishing in the top 10 times (combined from day 1-2) these were the 1-10 seeeded cars, finishing with the top 10 fastest trap speeds (combined day 1-2) which were the 11-20 seeds, being in the top 10 most consistent (combined from day 1-2) which were the 21-30 seeds, or 2 presidential picks where the UMI president picks any 2 entrants to get in as seeds 31-32.
There was some seriously fast hardware/drivers at this event. For reference, despite having the lowest ET of anyone, Ryan's trap speeds were a combined 13.8mph slower than the fastest trap speeds of Jeremy Swenson.
After announcing the 32 cars in the shootout UMI had several hours open where they allowed spectators to walk through the pits, they gave away over 2000 tickets locally for the event and it was pretty cool to chat with local car enthusiasts about autocross. More than one kid sat in my car and got to check things out from the drivers seat.
At 8pm the lights went on and we got ready to run. The course was mostly the same as the one we ran during the day but the finish section had been lengthened and 2 more chicanes added so that we finished on the oval finish line in front of the grand stands, Which the Corvettes really seemed to enjoy but we struggled with. The advantage of Ryan seeding #1 is that he got to take the first runs of the evening while there was still a hint of daylight left on the infield. Setting a time of 43.0 Ryan won his first round. As rounds went on it looked like that would be a pretty solid time with very few folks even cracking into the low 44's. Plus it was getting darker and darker which made the infield part of the course harder. Finally I'm up for my 1st round, I'm strapped in, waiting to be told to head up to the line when I hear tires squealing, crowd shouting and look in the rear view mirror to see Ryan drop to the ground behind my car, instinctively I try to duck as well. (unsuccessfully thanks to the harness) as a Corvette smashes into the metal guard rail right behind my car. Thankfully the driver was uninjured and the car was not completely destroyed. The incident was cleaned up and I finally head out for my first round, where I managed to win with a time of 44.0
Ryan's second round went smoothly too with him running a safe and clean 44.2 (getting darker meant times for most started slowing down) but Suddenly in the midst of the second round of the brackets several Corvettes figured out the course and 42's began showing on the timing board! yikes! We're not too worried though, the temps have been dropping pretty quickly and having 2 drivers is giving us an advantage by helping keep the tires warmer. We've been letting the car idle between runs while having the car wrapped in metal bubble wrap insulation stuff to help keep heat under the car/in the tires.
I hop in to take my 2nd run and my heat sinks when I see the coolant gauge is deep into the red and the warning light is on. A quick glance around tells me that the radiator fan hadn't been switched on for Ryan's second run. Crud! so I kill the car, turn the fan on to move air through it while it sits. Unfortunately gutting the car meant I didn't have my HVCAC controls in the car or I could've put it on max heat to help shed temp quicker. Ryan is flustered, he's apologizing up a storm, I tell him we just have to see what happens now. Finally I'm ushered out to staging, I fire the car, the temp gauge has moved down to the edge of the red. ok, this may be ok. I pull up to staging, shut the car off and wait until my bracket opponent finishes their run before firing the car back up and pulling up to the line. Ok, the coolant warning light is off. Whew! we're gonna be ok. I get the signal to go, and launch......Crap.....the car is way down on power, somethings wrong...Ok, maybe it's in limp mode? I'll just run the course so I can keep air moving through the car to help cool it faster, We'll scan codes when I get back to grid before Ryan's next run. I'm up against Jeremy Swenson anyways and he's running low 42 second laps against my 44 so I'm bound to be eliminated this round anyways....Halfway through the course as I'm checking the gauges again I notice the traction control light flashing at me......OH SON OF A BISCUIT! I hit the traction button and immediately the car is fine.
I get back to my pit spot, obviously eliminated, Ryan having watched my run with something clearly wrong is in a full panic thinking the car is wrecked. I assure him the car is fine, I just failed to setup for the run properly. Now coolant temps are back down to normal and with so few cars left they're already telling Ryan to get in and prepare for his next run. So Ryan straps in and prepares to head out against John Laughlin's Tesla The Tesla runs a clean 44.8 which is quick for how dark it's getting, but still well within reach given how hot our tires are after me just taking a run moments earlier. Ryan should have this easily covered. So he heads out, and I can tell as soon as he headed into the first fast corner that he missed his braking mark. The abs is working and the car is pushing wide. Ryan hits a cone. Crap, now obviously pushing Ryan rips through the rest of the course trying to make up enough time to cover a 2 second penalty but then clips the last cone on the course as he trips the timing lights. Eliminated just outside the final 4 and our weekend over.
Ultimately Jeremy and John wind up being the 2 guys who battle for the $10k prize. As an added twist, instead of announcing/showing the times right as each person came across the board they left the timing lights off so that the person who ran second wouldn't know what the first person had run. Up until this point the Tesla was hovering around mid 44's while Jeremy had been clicking off 42 second laps. So the Tesla goes first and as he's moving around the track the announcer states that the Tesla has hit a cone! Oh no! This means Jeremy heads out for a victory lap. However with the timing boards off he has to assume the Tesla ran approximately a 46 second lap after the cone.
Well........The result came down to .008 of a difference! The Tesla clipping a cone early went into full send mode pushing every part of the track as hard as he could and wound up running a 42 second lap! which meant he landed at 44 with the cone. Jeremy having no way of knowing this heads out to land a safe comfortable lap. The faces of both competitors after they brought them out and said that the time difference was less than .008 was so intense. Ultimately Jeremy did wind up winning the $10k but I think that was significantly less margin than he might've expected.
I'm still a little disappointed in our bracket performance but knew all along that it was a long shot, and qualifying #1 overall was honestly far better than I would've expected so I can't be too upset about the weekend. Plus a Friday of autocrossing beats a Friday at work!
For you math types that want to compare things here are the full results:
https://www.pro-touring.com/threads/132005-UMI-King-of-the-Mountain-updates
If you TLDR'd to the end, here's some photos!
Finch and I both coned away our fastest runs of Friday’s layout. So here are those runs. Waiting for Saturday runs to be posted after Finch gets back from solo nats
Ryan:
Me:
For an event that is “run what ya bring”, and “no rules”... it seems like some pretty tame aero setups.
Thanks for the write up!
I’m chuffed to hear how well y’all did, and how well you wrote it up too!
Aside from 2-3 cars that don't usually run ACR tires using ACR tires I think my car was the only one that was changed at all compared to how it normally competes in other arenas. In a world where I have more time and money I would've loved to tweak the aero and do some even more extensive weight reduction. Instead I had to settle for putting the wing in it's highest setting 1" above roof level and extending the splitter back beyond the middle of the car.
Thanks for the compliments! Despite my disappointment at not winning the $10k if I'm totally honest I'm still just blown away that we even qualified 1st overall.
This past weekend was the Gridlife Championship event at Road America. I'd only been there once before and when I was there we ran the motorcycle bypass course which cuts out all the big straights and pretty much gets rid of the scary stuff....the full course with kink is proper scary.
152mph top speed for our car with the other 2 long straights approaching 150 as well. In comparison to the other fastest track I've been to Rd Atlanta which only sees top speeds around 140 ish. it was a bit shocking how much faster that extra 10mph feels heading into a brake zone.
Ultimately about like we expected, we didn't have nearly enough HP for this track against the big hp cars in our class. we finished the weekend with a best lap of 2:26 which was good enough for 5th while the fastest guys in our class used their extra 200hp to run 2:21 
Friday/Saturday were a normal time attack event, we finished 5th there. Points from that event got added to our season total to determine seeding for the brackets on Sunday. 2 cars get paired in the bracket and head out lead/follow for a lap. If you are the lead car the goal is to stretch the gap, if you are the follow car your goal is to close the gap. The format is best 2/3 so you switch roles after one lap. We were pretty excited about this part of the event because the starting gap was measured at Turn 5 and the finishing gap was measured at turn 13 which effectively cuts out 2 of the longest straights on the track and the only remaining one has the kink as turn 1 where we were gaining some serious time on basically everyone in the class. We advanced through the brackets pretty well but eventually wound up falling to the eventual season champion. We still wound up placing 3rd overall in Street Modified for the year, which I'm pretty happy with considering we did next to no development on the car this season.
Now the car gets a long winters nap while I sort out what tweaks I want to make in preparation for the cars swan song event: OLOA 2020
Oh, I was fairly proud of this, after gutting the car for king of the mountain I ran out of time to get the interior all back together, well, the SM rules state that the car must have a factory dash....it doesn't say where it must be, so a buddy gave me a spare tan dash and I cut it up and threw it in a bin in the trunk. Technically legal and saved me a lot of work 
It did also move our weight split from 53/47 to 52/48 so in theory should have been a performance gain.
This should be quite the OLOA car.
RA is a crazy big track. As long as you respect the braking zones it seems quite safe for someplace with that many walls. Of course I'm not at all fast there and it probably feels different with the extra speed.
In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :
Funny thing about not being fast, that's probably faster. Matt and I were running within .2 of each other, which usually only happens at new tracks. Once we have seat time he usually puts a second on me. Then Matt hopped into a GLTC car (e36 with a stock motor) and came back saying how much more he saw on the track in that car. Then proceeded to hop into the M3 for the next session and put a nearly 2 seconds on me.
Slow cars for the win!
So anyone following Klodcrawlers other thread about the gastropod E36 knows we decided to bail on the challenge effort because his road trip compatriots bailed. So we've spent a bunch of time talking this week commiserating on not getting to hang out and do fun autox stuff. And out of left field Klodcrawler made the offer that I could drive the M3 at the autocross he had to chair on the 26th up in Michigan. Which I told him I appreciated and probably couldn't do and we said maybe sometime in 2020.
went back to work for a bit and then decided to pull up google maps and run some logistics in pair with Google flights.
Turns out by being creative with flights I managed to find a flight to Chicago for the weekend that was cheaper ROUNDTRIP than every one way flight home from the challenge that I was looking at last week.... $137 with fees and everything. AND I conned my parents into coming up to Grand Rapids with me from Chicago, for the day, so I don't have to rent a car! Double win!
Friends are awesome. 2019 is officially the year of the fly and drive: arrive and drive for me. This is the 3rd time this year I've done a fly and drive.. which is absolutely hilarious to me.
Look forward to getting to drive this INSANE machine and compare it to all the other stuff I've driven over the past few years!
And a big thank you again to Klodcrawler for the awesome opportunity to drive with him.
Flew up to Chicago, and then drove to Grattan for the day.
Grattan is a really neat track. The blind corners take some getting used to, and they were made easier by the cone placement.
I was told coming in that the car is easy to drive and this is absolutely the case. Cold tires at the launch I went to shift to 2nd gear and got aggressive with my throttle input and the rear end stepped out on me. Immediately let completely off the throttle and car calmed right back down.
This is my 2nd run after klodcrawler showed me what the car could do. I was still like 8 seconds off his pace here.
4th and 5th runs the steering started feeling weird right as I was getting the car under me. But we just decided to put the M3 back in the trailer before anything went wrong at speed.
So mission success. Car went back in the trailer the way it came out, undamaged and under its own power.
Thanks for coming out and wheeling it! Hopefully it was a decent consolation to not going to the challenge. I'm bummed we didn't get to give it the full 6 runs so you could really attack with it.
and thanks for helping ensure it went back in the trailer the way it came out :)
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