Alright, before I get started I'll get all my excuses ready. I had not driven the car in anger for years, I was sick all night with a cold, it was hot, blah, blah, blah. Now that we got that out of the way, the car did pretty well. I am still waiting on the results of the whole event, but for the most part it did alright. I have a video of my slowest run. More pics may come if any of the other scca guys post up. I had a camera mounted on the car, but the damn recording device failed on me. I got all the videos copied, but it dropped a lot of frames from high speed movement, so we won't even waste time showing that. Trumanpriest came and took the video below for me. I really need to have a better cam for outside that can zoom.
First lets say the course was awesome. I had not run an autox in maybe 5 years and now they are drawing the course in white lines instead of just using cones. It really helped. The car caught a lot of people's attention and everyone wanted to ride in it. I ended up giving three rides. I am going to try and get Mark to join me on the next one, but only if its a cool day. It was just too hot for us today. They also have a road course on site for other types of PDX events. I might consider running one of these.
I only had one mishap with the car. My fender well plastic on the driver side came loose and was rubbing by my second run. It threw me off and since I did not want to do damage I took it easy so I could check it out. I think I might raise the car another 10mm or so to prevent future rubbing. If I can secure the plastic better it won't be an issue. Since I was not sure what was up at first I turns up the suspension to prevent the rubbing. It was too stiff for some spots, which I am sure was not great for my times. The car did not have a lot of push going into turns. On a couple I had some push, but I think I could had approached them better. The engine did well. It was 88 degrees outside, and I never got over 205 degrees on full blown runs. I think that is good anyway. I normally run about 185-190ish.
The only issue handling wise I had was in the slalom. If I came in super fast the tail got real twitchy. I had thrown the tail out once but did not want to risk the spin so I hit the brakes and countered. I might had carried the drift through if I was ready for it. The other thing I need to figure out is my gearing. I stayed in second gear the whole time. It was too high for some of the slower spots, and there were some sections I could had gone into third, but I was afraid to waste time with the shift. On my last run I experimented and used third, which turned out to be my fastest run.
The great thing is, I got a decent time and I saw a lot of room for improvement driver wise. The car could use a few tweaks but was really strong over all. I think my approach to some of the turns and using third gear would gain me some time. I am thinking that maybe this tire size with a 4.2 FD might give me more low end use of my 2nd gear and I would get earlier use of my third gear allowing me to stay in it longer. I might also put my rear sway bar on the middle setting. I sort of wonder if that is what caused my rear to go out so easily on the slalom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHuvo7l0 ... ature=plcp