THSCC Forums

You could've been in 4th if you were there yesterday.

On Sat, our Miata tapped the rev limiter two places on instructor runs, once going into the turnaround, and again thru the finish, but never hard enough to even think about up shifting. Maybe had we put the A6s on or ran later in the day we might have needed an upshift. This was only the second time we ran the Miata in over a year and had reset the shocks the nite before and were running on a 1 1/2 year old set of SO5s so we were being a little conservative.
None of my student's runs needed a 3rd gear shift, the STi has a short 2nd? I had suggested to Ashraf to give the students a little "thinking room" between elements, which probably resulted in the instructors being able to let it hang out a little more. There were surprisingly few spins and even fewer offs that I saw so I don't think it was too fast for the students.
A slightly shorter course may have given a couple more runs each tho.

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SPIN or WIN!
there's no glory for going slow.

Stock tires ~ 56mph and takes maybe 2.5s to go through the gear.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.

Ashraf:

I had a good time instructing and will gladly participate again if you want me back I think I instructed better than I drove. Maybe it helped as I was cone and spin free Sunday. I would request next time though we get car wash girls to help clean up after the mudbaths

Feedback from my students was good. The two that counted had a good time and appreciated the track time and instruction and will probably come back.

Thanks for putting on the event

Rob

Both my students (Chris Peterson in my former Miata and Jay New in the red Lotus of Durham Elise) had to shift to third twice. Chris was on some Avon r-compounds that I promise couldn't have been as good as your S05's (these things must have 150 runs on them now) because they didn't feel nearly as good as my Yokohama street tires I had on the STi. Jay was on pretty well used Yokohama 046's, which are the tire on the *base* Elise (the sport package gets a stickier street tire, so these things really aren't great). Anyway, I agree with you that the thinking time areas were good (particularly on a 60 second course), they were just a little too long, IMHO.

I'm not complaining about having to shift the STi to third since yes, it does have a low top speed in second gear. I just don't like having to do it five times.

As for the comment about a shorter course getting more people through, I agree. Normally the length of course doesn't much matter since it's the overlap that counts, but in our case we were limited in overlap because we just didn't have many course workers and with that many newbies on a faster course we did have a lot of cones hit. The course design didn't allow for much overlap due to the pivot cone way far into the course, but even that didn't matter as there were *several* times we sat at the line not able to go until well after the previous car was out of that feature simply because people were still setting up cones. I still say the course design was good and not particularly bad for hitting cones, it's just that we had a big course and with not many workers on it, so sometimes the run for cones was a LOOOOONG one.


--Donnie

I could have done it four times (into the 2nd Chicago box, heading to the "pivot" cone, on the taxiway heading to the 2nd slalom and at the finish), but that's probably due to the difference between the diameter of the 13s and those of the other drivers.

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Has no responsibility whatsoever.

Wes - I could have shifted to third in the same places. I did shift before the 2nd Chicago box and before the pivot. I hit limiter going into the second slolam on the taxiway, but not enough to warrant a shift. I also shifted at the finish, but only when I came out of the aforementioned slolam correctly (which was probably less than half the time.)

I had a great time on course - really helped shake the cobwebs loose.

All the results are finally posted, for you instructors wanting to take a look at how your students did (and see your times):
http://www.msccnc.org/events/ax06/results/

Regards,
--Ashraf