Patrice,
It went well. Some serious cars showed up for the thing. Fastest 1:28 - Slowest 1:54 for lap times. I did a little write up on another board that I will copy below...
Well the 1st GRM Ultimate Track Car Challenge has come and gone. I have to say that it seemed to be nothing but a big success from my standpoint. The event was well run and organized, no doubt from the efforts from the GRM staff, and Jon Felton and the NASA crew. Several manufacturers ponied up some nice prizes for those fortunate enough to be in the top three in class.
Speaking of winners, congrats go out to both John Whitaker and Chris Drabouski for winning their respective classes. I think all the fellow sandboxers had a pretty good day as far as reliability and any other issues went, which was not true for several others. The attrition throughout the day was interesting to see.
As for the event itself, it probably could not have run much smoother. I had some worries going into the thing about weather some folks might act like jerks, or get to red misting real bad. The speed differential in cars was also a concern…26 seconds from fastest to slowest as it turned out. I chose to wait and see before making any judgements and was pleasantly surprised. Everyone’s conduct on track was really good from my perspective. Some folks in the faster cars choose to have a cool down lap in front of me right after they blasted by on the front straight, but it was no big deal, because there was plenty of opportunity for clear laps in each session. After each session, the cars were gridded by time, so generally traffic was not a big issue as the day went on.
There was simply some serious hardware that showed up for this thing, and horsepower seemed to be the name of the game. It was frightening to see many seconds just slip away as cars got real small in front of me on the front straight. Grassroots wanted this to be a showcase of trackday cars that turn up at DE events regularly, but honestly, I have never shared the track with so many rocket ships at once. What was the fastest time? Tommy Archer ran a 1:28.4 on the North course in the Competition Coupe…holy crap, give that man the BMF wallet! There were 12 cars that ran under 1:40 as well.
So how did I do? My best official lap was a 1:43.2 for the timed sessions, which was a personal best for anything I have driven around that joint. That was good enough for 20th overall (out of 36) and 10th in class (out of 18 ). The car had lots of new stuff in it as well as new (different) tires. For the most part, the car drove like total ass and we chased it with adjustments all day. My good friend Alan was crew chief and coach for the day and he helped me stay motivated and we learned some things and documented them about the car. Basically in the first warm-up session the car was wicked loose, especially on right hand turns. We attacked it pretty aggressively with a combination of jacking some cross-weight into the car, shock adjustments, and air pressure adjustments. The car got better throughout the day, but unfortunately the track seemed to get slower and slower as it heated up. So the times really did not come down in any significant way. Actually, I ran about .8s quicker in the warm-up when the car was at it’s worst. So, I am convinced that the track got worse from then on.
The other thing that I fought with was the brakes. The new rear end got some nice upgraded Wilwood calipers and larger rotors compared to the RX-7 stuff that was on the other axle. Well, I never thought that brakes could work too well, but they do. The rear is real easy to lock up and I ran my balance bar to the max for front bias to compensate. It was still touchy but manageable most of the time. Looks like a M/C resize is going to be in order there. Too bad I did not have a chance to sort anything before hand, because I am fairly sure there might have been a couple of more seconds to be had in an earlier session. I am not making excuses, we did the best with what we had and I am happy about that. On the positive side of things, the new rear end works great. The TRD LSD seems to work well, and the new gearing is awesome. Now I can keep my foot in it all the way down the front straight till time to hit the brakes. It also still seems to pull just as hard as it did before. I do find myself using more gears than before in a lap, but that is probably a good thing. All in all, I was happy to be a part of it, but was a little disappointed that I did not bring a better knife to the fight…a dull blade will lose every time.
Based on the entries for this event, and how well this one went off, this might become a regular thing kind of like the $200x challenge. It will probably alternate between east and west coast tracks of it does continue. Let’s hope it does.
Of course no report is worth anything without video…so here is some from the 2nd session of the day. I only took video for a couple of sessions, and this one seemed the most interesting. I think that I may have worn out my steering wheel on Friday…
http://www.project-seven.goof.com/videos/GRMUTCC.wmv
_________________
-Jeff
R1 Powered Locost 7
ITB '90 Honda Civic under construction
2004 F250 Super Duty
http://www.project-seven.goof.com/
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