Not much has been happening on the autocross front for me lately with the wedding only days away now. I missed Philly Event #8 at Warminster because Irene and I had too much on our todo list for that weekend. Doug borrowed the car and won STS2 with it again. His time was impressively close to perenial front runners Scott in an STS Civic and Cy in an STX Civic. Doug also confirmed that turning down the front shocks helped the car at Warminster.
Event #9 was at Boeing on September 7th. Really no need for a race report there. The Boeing courses are always a compromise and this event was no different. There was a very tight hairpin built in that I was downshifting to first for on most of my runs. Most of us STS2′ers tried it both ways and there really wasn’t an advantage to either. I drove well enough to not be crappy but not up to my expectations. I ended the day 4th out of 7 in class, 0.5 seconds out of 1st. My PAX ranking was 16 out of 67.
Event #10 was a Warminster event that I wasn’t sure I was going to make. I could use the fun and relaxation of thrashing the car about but our wedding todo list was still high. Irene and I kicked butt on Friday and Saturday so I woke up early on Sunday and headed over to Warminster as a walk-up entrant. Normally Warminster events are pretty busy and hectic for the chiefs because it draws large numbers of entrants. My plan was to show up, work a normal shift, run, then split. This event turned out to be pretty low key due to the fact that it rained all weekend. Doug texted me as I was leaving to say that he was sick and wouldn’t be making it. I thought about bagging it since I hadn’t pre-registered but I wasn’t going to let the rain spoil my fun.
The course was FAST and the Miata handled great in the rain as it had before. I had the front shocks turned down 5/8 of a turn from full stiff. Each bump on the Koni Sport adjust is 1/8 of a turn. Although steady state cornering and braking grip was lower from the rain the transitional grip was unbelievable. And you needed it. There were 2 very fast slalom sections were I just below the limiter in 2nd. My times didn’t bear out how I thought I was driving though. I ended up dead last out of 4 in class. The course ended up being kind of cone intensive due to the reduced grip and a couple of right angle boxes and I was no exception to that. But even if you discount the cones I still wouldn’t have moved up. Boo. I was 27th out of 80 in PAX.
There won’t be a whole lot of activity in the coming months. I’ll be off on my Honeymoon for 2 weeks. After that there are just two Boeing events, and maybe some NNJR ones to attend. Then the long break for the winter holidays. No word on a possible winter series yet. I am looking forward to getting some much needed work done on the car over the off season. Details to come when I actually get around to doing it. For now I leave you with an action shot snapped by Bob McMillan.
In my last post I mentioned I was updating some software. At work we use Autodesk Inventor 2008 for our 3D design & modeling. I was applying Service Packs 1 & 2 to that and the AutoCAD that comes bundled with Inventor. I am the CAD manager for my small little group and had disributed the service packs to the other users and managed not to install them for myself. After the program kept crashing while trying to a simple task I decided to check for hot fixes for the issue. That is when I realized that I wasn’t up to date with the service packs. And wouldn’t you know it after updating the problem went away. Stay up to date people.
Shortly thereafter, and now at home, my Windows XP laptop told me that Service Pack 3 was availible and it would like to update it. Service Pack 2 for Win XP included a lot of big changes so I did some Google searches and read around at winsupersite.com about it first. There isn’t any drastic changes in it, mostly a round up of hot fixes. But one unintended side effect is that the update wiped out my patched uxtheme.dll file. No more custom skins until I re-patch it, which I haven’t yet. Also when it rebooted with Win95 looking windows I went into the display properties and reset the Theme back to WinXP. What I should have done is reset the Apperance because resetting the Theme cleared out my custom icons. And my trial of Icon Packager was up a long time ago. So I’m back to a stock looking WinXP for a while. Boo. Hopefully someone else reads this and doesn’t make the same mistake.
And speaking of updates there is two pckages of software I like to use on my Windows computers that always seem to have updates. To the point where it is annoying. Filezilla (an FTP client) and Paint.NET (a lighweight graphics program). It seems like everytime I go to use these programs there is an update availible. Can’t you limit this to once every three months or something. Both come with one click updaters which is nice. Filezilla’s update is fairly quick and painless. But Paint.NET’s takes forever. It’s always stuck on “Optimizing for your computer”. What does it have to optimize for 5 minutes? It’s a 3 or 4 meg program. Must be related to the .NET framework.
Why don’t I try to get some blogging in while waiting for some software updates to install on my computer. This is a big and special “must do” event for the Philadelphia Region each year and this year no different. In fact we upped our game as far as I am concerned. However due to a scheduling conflict with the Northeast Divisional (we announced the date first) and being late with the final details and opening registration we had less then stellar turnout. The team rallied and came up with an alternative format that would fill in the day and keep everyone happy. Instead of 7 runs for the weekend we were looking at 9, with potential for a few more. It didn’t work out all that rosy for me though.
Saturday morning I showed up, checked in, got teched, and walked the course just like any other autocross. But three quarters of the way through my first heat work assignment Irene called me and told me that her wrist was in great pain and she needed to go to the hospital. She had injured it a few weeks ago. It appeared to be a mild sprain. We still don’t know why it got aggravated like it did. But that was the end to my autocrossing that day. Shame cause the course looked very technical and challenging.
Sunday my bad luck continued. The safety strap for my video camera goes into the trunk and around the truck lid torsion spring. While setting that up I placed my keys in the truck and then shut it! Insert failblog.org picture here. I didn’t discover this fact until They were telling us to get ready to run. My poor co-driver had to find a last minute ride, for the second day in a row. I couldn’t believe what I had done, I was devastated. One of my competitors George, realized that his friend and region volunteer Pat was on his way in and lives near me. He was able to stop by my apartment and pick up the spare key from Irene, who couldn’t drive b/c of the splint on her wrist. Thanks Pat!
Pat showed up with my keys with just enough time in the heat for me to hot lap my four runs. That was one lucky thing about the day as it started raining 10 minutes after the heat ended. The region had some more bad luck with our timing & scoring software, AXWare, when someone ran a command that had some unintended consequences for our two day event. Despite three of us working on the problem through most of the lunch break the error was unrecoverable and we had to go back to the old days of writing down times directly from the timer box on paper. I have to say that everything went better then I thought it would with the manual timekeeping. Competitively I ended up loosing to both Doug and George in a lesser prepared car by a few tenths. That really bummed me out too as I thought I had beat Doug (again).
Instead of pictures I offer you a video of my run!
Ever since the first or second event of the season I’ve had a vibration at high speeds. I checked various things on the car and nothing seemed out of place. I took a look at the tires while they were on the car looking for flat spots and didn’t see any. I figured a weight fell off or a tire shifted enough to throw it out of balance and just lived with it since I don’t drive the car that far on my competition tires. I was changing back to my stock tires for the drive up to the Finger Lakes ProSolo and what do I see? A big old flat spot.
That explains that. The front brakes tend to lock up early on these cars and it looks like it finally caught up with us. After my experiences with mismatched tires on the Prelude I realize that I have to replace them in pairs. I hate the idea of throwing out a perfectly good tire so I’m gonna just run on this and keep a close eye on it to make sure it doesn’t cord. Hopefully I can get through August on it. We have the Al Holbert Memorial and possibly PA States that month. Both two day events.
It’s always a struggle with this car and attempting to put a hitch in so I can carry a tire trailer was no different. First of all the hitch I chose is from Hard Dog Fabrication. There are at least two others who make hitches for the Miata, but I chose them because Irene has a roll bar from the same company and it is of very good quality. Plus they are a small company in North Carolina, not a big cooperation. As usual the big problem is rust. The hitch installs were the rear tie downs go. A previous owner took all the tie downs out of the car but but the fasteners back. There is two screws, and two nuts on what appear to the studs per side to remove. One of the nut/studs snapped. One came off. On two others the nut and stud are just spinning. I got three of the four screws out. One of those snapped too. The “studs” are not really studs but bolts that are supposed to be held from spinning by a piece of sheet metal with a hex shaped hole cut in it. They also help hold the bumper on. I was able to barely get a socket up between the steel of the frame and bumper and on the bolt head. But the steel that is supposed to be holding the bolt is place is so mangled I can’t get the socket on the head. And the other bolt is so far up that there is no way to get anything on it.
So I figured that I could take off the bumper and gain access to the bolts. All the screws came out of the bumper w/o breaking to my surprise, but there was something holding the bumper on the car at the top underneath the rear panel. I dreaded taking the rear panel off as I was sure I was going to break a bunch of the plastic clips that hold it on. Surprisingly I didn’t. So I get the bumper skin all off and see that I don’t have any better access to the bolts then I did before. If I can take the plastic frame of the bumper off I can get to them. It appears to be held to the two brackets that are attached to the frame of the car by four bolts on top and two bolts on the bottom. Because you can’t put metal screws in plastic threads on the other side of the bolts are nuts that have clips that again keep them from spinning. All of these fasteners are badly corroded as well.
I tried taking them out but two of the nuts clips broke. Several other bolts started to unscrew but then felt like they were going to snap. At this point I really needed a sawzall to cut through the bolts. And I don;t have one. And I’m sure the apartment complex wouldn’t approve of me using one in the parking lot. So I had to bag trying to put it in. I wanted to carry my tires up to the Finger Lakes ProSolo on the trailer but it looks like I’m going to have to bum a ride for them or just drive up on them. I’ve held up from buying the actual trailer until I got the hitch in. I doing know when that is going to happen. I still have the manual steering rack sitting waiting to go in. And along with that the front alignment bolts need to get replaced. One of them keeps coming loose and banging around. So much yet to do to this car and not enough time.
I was 27th out of 80 in PAX.
After the program kept crashing while trying to a simple task I decided to check for hot fixes for the issue. That is when I realized that I wasn’t up to date with the service packs. And wouldn’t you know it after updating the problem went away. Stay up to date people.
