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.

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.

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!

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.

My first run as usual wasn’t anything special at a 66.x but on my second run I was able to improve to a 64.x. My main goal was to be aggressive with turn-in in the fast stuff and try to sting together fast segments. And then not kill myself on the slow stuff. Doug was making up some time by doing a not entrance to the three cone slalom on the way out and doing that netted me some more time. I got a little too aggressive with the slow stuff on the third run and didn’t improve. Doug was dirty on most or all of his previous runs but he laid down a 63.0. Eek. He still wasn’t happy with how he was doing the slow stuff and said that I was doing that part better than him. I tried to put it all together my fourth run as well and was surprised with a 63.3, which even more surprising was good enough for a second place! I don’t know what happened to Dan the Man but I had heard that he was battling with Justin Stone, who was on some new Toyos, so I thought we were behind those guys. But we were in the lead.

The bigger surprise is after packing up and doing back to the truck George was joking around about me sabotaging my co-driver. On the results Doug had a cone on his last run so I was in 1st!! I don’t remember the cone but wasn’t going to question it too much and I took home my mug. Two days later when the results came out that cone disappeared. It wasn’t on the cone confirmer’s sheets so Doug took the 1st back from me.

I played with the MaxQ data some when I got home. Some of Doug’s runs have bad GPS drift so it’s tough to compare exactly. But I was able to watch Doug’s and my runs together in real time and see who was faster in which section. I also got to make some cool color-coded course maps using gpsvisualizer.com and Google Earth. I was worried about the 20 mph auto-logging speed being too high because of my experience at Boeing. At Boeing manual recording might be needed but at most autocrosses the default settings worked just fine. I manually recorded my first run and then tried it with the defaults after talking to some others who have the same unit. Setting it up for two co-drivers was a breeze one I figured out that you had to hit the down arrow on the PocketPC to switch drivers. I was frantically flipping through the manual in grid. I’m very happy with that purchase. I haven’t had time to look at other people’s runs due to being busy with the wedding. But I think that will be a big help to my driving too.

Out of order? Fuck! Even in the future nothing works. - Spaceballs

P.S. - Thanks Uncle Sam for buying me some cool Data Aq stuff, even though the economic stimulus ain’t gonna do squat.

So on to the important stuff. The course was fast. And fun. But I wouldn’t call it technical. There wasn’t to much wondering how you were going to drive certain parts of the course. Only wondering if you could flat foot it through certain parts. Some we could and others we couldn’t. What’s interesting is that the Miata could flat foot it through parts that more powerful AWD cars couldn’t. The airfield is three runways crossing each other in a triangle. The courses were 59-62 seconds long. A lot of slalom elements. A lot of offset slaloms.

Doug traveled up with me in his car and also brought my tires up since I haven’t committed to get a tire trailer yet. We met our roommates Scott and Sal at the hotel, through our stuff in the room and headed over to the site with a quick stop for something to eat. There was some trouble finding the entrance but we managed to find the correct road. I swapped to our race rubber while Doug got the contingency stickers. Then I spent what seems like forever putting all the stickers on the car. But now it looks really good. Then it was time to get the car through tech. We covered up the hole in my fender with some borrowed blue masking tape b/c SPS screwed up and sent me orange racer’s tape instead of red. THEN it was time to walk the course.

After all that we went out to get some real dinner. Scott and I wanted a good burger and we found a bar & grill next to the hotel. It was then that Doug got a call from his wife and there was apparently some family drama going and he eventually decided that he would have to drive back home on Saturday. Earlier in the day Scott’s Civic, which he just put repaired after spinning a bearing, spun the bearing again. He was considering running the car anyway but had an offer to drive in an RSX-S that the owner is trying to come to grips with the setup of. Sal didn’t have a ride, but with Doug leaving I let Sal co-drive my car.

As I mentioned the course was pretty straight forward. My first run it was so fast I was unsure if I had stayed on course. The elements were just flying past you. A check of the course audit sheets revealed I was on course so it was time to just put my head down and drive harder. Sal didn’t have much trouble getting used to the car. He has done some go carting and said it was very go-cart like. It is also somewhat like the Civic in that you can unsettle it in turn-in and then use the gas to straighten it back out. He was about two seconds in front of me and the only advise I got all weekend was to just to push harder and to throw the car into the corners more aggressively. I guess that is my lesson from this weekend. On day two I got within a second of Sal, but was still 4 seconds off the top runner Ian Baker.

Another thing that was solidified this weekend is that I am going to buy a MaxQData GPS based data acquisition system. It’s what most autocrossers are using and has some real promise to make me faster. We stayed just long enough for Scott to get his third place trophy and then began the long trip home, but not before stopping for some pizza and gas. I managed about 28 mpg in the Miata as near as I can tell. Haven’t filled her up again yet. I need to get her inspected. Overall the event was great fun. The heat made working on course and working on the car hell. But the course and competition and comradere was worth it. I’m bummed that I won’t make the DC Pro and can’t wait for my next national event.

I’ll end this post with a picture of me hustling the car through the very fast finish section on Saturday. Doesn’t she look good with the paint (mostly) fixed and all stickered up? The picture is courtesy Keith Casey of the New England Region SCCA and has lead to my new banner. Click to see two more pics from that run.

The paint on the hod came back better then I thought I would. Especially since I didn’t really know what I was doing. It still has some dull area, along the edges, around the hump in the middle of the hood. And there seems to be something funky on the drivers rear fender b/c it’s pealing off in spots. The door and the other fenders brightened up real nice too. I was not able to do the back or the lower valances due to the fact that they were dirty and I was loosing daylight. The next day was an event at Warminster. Race report coming up for that soon. So in the next three days I need to finish buffing the car, put a coat of wax on it, get it inspected (yes I realized yesterday the inspection is up in May!), put the baby teeth and rear tow hooks back in, and steal the front undertray from Irene’s car and put on my car. Makes me tired just talking about it.

As a teaser here is an action shot from yesterday’s very fast course, courtesy sc2pete:

The car was a handful on the first run, very loose. We softened up the rear shocks as much as we could and ran the fronts at nearly full stiff. It was manageable for me but you had to keep in the back of your mind that it was a little loose. The event wasn’t that memorable other than that stuff. I managed third in class out of 8, half a second behind Doug, and 32nd out of 127 in PAX.