Another quick update from CA…
In short, the Fontana Pro Solo was a miserable experience due to some of the worst weather I’ve seen at one of these events in years. Cold, rainy, and windy. Yuck.
When we arrived on Friday, it had already rained and practice starts were an exercise in futility. We did find that revving the motor to about 2700 RPM and then releasing the clutch in a deliberate manner would provide a zero-slip start, while minimizing bogging of the motor. Anything more than that and the tires would spin forever.
As for the competition itself, each day we ran in drying conditions and each day the second driver of our competitor’s car put down the fastest times. In the end, we had fast time on one course, but finished second on total time by a solid half-second. While its rare that conditions improve that much between first and second drivers, this weekend it happened twice. Running in first group seems to make this more prevalent.
Due to the weather conditions, we did not change any of the alignment as we had planned to, instead softening the shock settings to full-soft for the slick surface. This worked reasonably well in the inclement conditions.
One more teething problem reared its ugly head in the slick conditions: brakes. The fronts are locking up horribly. We noticed a little bit of this in the dry at San Diego, but in the wet its ridiculous. A cursory inspection reveals some weird wear pattern on the rear rotors, so it may be a frozen caliper from sitting unused so long. Or maybe the aggressive pads I was using for CSP are just too much for the street tires. We’ll mess with that one soon, too.
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