SOLO2.ORG Ultimate Autocross

Steve didn’t get a whole lot of sleep Friday night but was excited and ready for Saturday. With the new springs, we decided to back the Konis off to the medium position in an effort to control things a little bit and give us a middle of the road setup, set the tire pressures on the Toyo RA1's to 35 all around and planned on running 5 laps, then come in for temps and pressure readings just to see where we were.

As Steve headed out onto the track and began working some heat in the tires, he could tell immediately that the car was rotating very well. BUT, what is that noise? Turns out the exhaust tip worked loose and was dragging the ground on right hand turns. Back to the hot pits for Scott to fix the problem and head back out. Another first, having a “pit crew “ on pit road and not having to drive back to the paddock.

For anyone that hasn't run GIR, turn 6 is deceptively tough as a decreasing radius and we've had a lot of difficulty with it in the past. The Neon would just plow the front end through the corner no matter what we attempted. With the new suspension, the car is totally different. Steve was able to make the car rotate with either throttle/brake/steering input. He played with all 3 for the first 5 laps and then came in for the tire temps and pressure check. Pressures were good, but tire temps in the front are all over the place. WAY to much camber on Drivers front as we had nearly a 50 degree range across the tire. Pass. front was w/i 15 degrees. The back tires were very even (especially since they're just along to serve as weight . 

Steve went back out and got back in the rhythm of driving again and running with a couple of other ITA cars, getting faster and faster, experimenting with lines and such, when he came off of turn 7 (hairpin turn onto NASCAR oval) and saw what looked like an alternator in the racing line. He moved out to the right of it so the guys behind him can see it as well, glanced in his left mirror in order to move back into the groove when BAM! something hit the right front underside of the car really hard scaring the Bejeezus out of him. We later found out that the hit was so hard that the video camera skipped during the recording. Having already passed the pit road lane, he pulled down on the inside and used the pace car escape lane and everything seemed fine. Back in the paddock we began looking it over. We crawled all over the car and only saw one little shiny area on the right control arm where something might have hit it. On closer inspection, the tie down hole in the subframe is now concave instead of convex, so whatever it was that Steve hit bent that area a lot, but didn’t affect the overall shape of the frame. We don’t know if that caused the camber to go away as well, but basically we went from ~2.5 deg to 0 deg of camber. Turns out that it was indeed an alternator laying on the track and Steve aparently hit the alternator bracket.

Qualifying wasn’t quite what we were hoping for as Steve was 8th out of 9 drivers in the class but he felt pretty comfortable in the car. At the start of the race he got a decent start and passed a couple of  ITA cars and got into a pretty decent battle with an ITR Mustang for about half a lap, but then he had an off and never saw him again. After that he had a great time battling an ITA Miata for probably 8-10 laps of side by side, on your bumper, filling your mirror type clean racing. Steve passed the Miata once and then missed a shift a few laps later and the Miata regained the position. With only a few laps remaining Steve managed to squeak by him again for the position. Ended up 4th out of 9 in ITA and was pretty happy.

The important part was that now the car does not have the understeer that it used to have, which means we are heading in the right direction.

Stay tuned for Sundays recap and some video.