long day, so this may be somewhat incoherent.
short version for those that don't like to read: the autocross was great. had a blast, and was quicker than dad.
left out this morning at 7AM, chasing the sun. nice drive down to Maxton, NC. about 1.5 hours each way. light traffic, highway sparkling in the sunrise, good air, great tunes on the radio. we got there as they were still setting up. registration and tech was a breeze, and we ran into a couple of guys we knew. also a bunch of guys that just wanted to check out the bright red duster with the nasty exhaust note.
drivers meeting was at 10AM, and we did the novice course walk. during that, we realized just how bad the track surface was. LOTS of sand/gravel. also, very rough as far as chuckholes, etc.
dad had the recommendation that we tape the car to protect the paint. so, we begged/borrowed/bought 4 rolls of 1 inch wide painters tape. took about 30 minutes of the first 1 hour run session to do it, but I'm grateful that we did.
over the course of the day, i got somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 runs in. only thing i did to the car was check the fluids and torque the lug nuts. just wanted to get a feel for where i was starting from.
the last session, i started "timing" the field. since this was a test and tune session, there was no timing equipment set up. so i used my CD player, where it read the seconds into a song. started the song when a car left the line, looked at the time when it crossed the finish. the RX8's and Mini coopers were running 28-30 seconds. dad was running 31-34 seconds. i was running 29-30 pretty consistently.
the car has a few kinks to get worked out. under-steer is fairly significant when its not under throttle, it runs rich, there's no turn in, i flop around inside like a drunken fish, and fuel slouches down the car from the filler neck, even with only 1/2 tank. its geared right, plenty responsive to throttle, and an absolute HOOT out there. i was actually running up to 50 at some points on the track.
heres pics, to prove that it happened.
michael
Welcome to the wonderful world of getting to know your tire sales person on a first name basis. You will get the setup figured out, but the curse of driving a big old rear drive car is always in the transitions. I fought that for years in my Camaro.
