The 2008 season has begun, and once again, I'm driving the ol' girl, thanks to Mr. Pickles. Our first few events have been good ones. Mike is finishing strongly, and for the first time in a few years, I actually beat him on raw time. In our most recent event, we cot some in-car video, although unfortunately, it wasn't either of our best runs.

More to come!

Solo nationals was a 100% forgettable experience for me this year - the car had issues every day, unfortunately, and I certainly didn't drive my best. Rain the first day, and a ABS failure resulting in brake lockup during my third run on the second day. Yeuch. Had fun hooting and hollering on the top of Ian's toter home, though.

The only saving grace is this cool series of pictures, showing the spin on the West course. Notice how the tires stop spinning, spin again briefly, then lock up completely. Yikes.

Not quite an update of mine, since the car isn't mine anymore, but Grant Barclay took some video with his camera on the car at the June 6 Solo, and I've put the videos Here.

You will need the Samsung Codec to view these, available Here. (Or search on Samsung's site for "Codec")

·It happened much quicker than I thought it would, but the Corvette is being sold to my good friend, fellow co-driver, and fellow Left Hand Racing driver Mike Feldpusch. Mike and I will be co-driving next year at national events in the Corvette, while I get the New Project, a Radical put together and sorted out. It's the best of all solutions - both of us getting a new car that we love, and I get to keep a hand on the 'vette, which is still a special car.

For sure, it won't be the last Corvette I ever own, but for now, the race car will be a fun next step - you only live once, and this opens up lots of doors for me. So, Onward, but this time, not without a glance or two back to appreciate the car being left behind.

·No, I haven't forgotten the nationals writeup, just haven't had a chance to quite get to it yet. If I haven't posted it, video an index of images and video is available here.

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2004.10.04
Not so bad this time, only one month in between updates.

·For Sale!

·Well, it took a lot of convincing, but the Corvette is for sale. It hurts a little bit to sell it, but the prospect of doing some road racing next year while still focusing primarily on Solo2 with a D-Sports racer is just too much fun to look past. With luck, it looks like the buyer may be Mike Feldpusch, so that means it'll still be around for me to see as a good, happy autocross car.

The clincher was getting 5-6 laps in a Stohr DSR at PPIR. I keep thinking about ripping down the back straight at 125 mph with your head out in the wind...it was absolutely awesome. There are so many fun new roads to explore with the new project, it makes the sadness of selling the Corvette not as big a big deal in comparison to the anticipation!

·Racing + Updates:

·Nationals! Mike and I took the Corvette to Topeka for the 2004 TireRack Solo2 Nationals, and had a great time - read all about it in our writeup for the racing section. OK, well, it's not quite up yet, I ran out of steam tonight. But probably this week, along with video, which you can see at here.

·Finally updated the racing section from July 3rd event on, which you can see in the Racing section. This includes our video and whatnot from nationals!

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2004.08.30
Well, this weekend was preeeee-ttty cool. I finally got a chance to drive Jeff's DSR Cheetah, and despite some rough edges, it was quite an experience. The handling was absolutely astonishing, to say the least, and I spent most of my time just hanging on for dear life! I think I miss the torque/sound of my 'vette in the car, but the speed and cost is hard to argue with.

It definitely piqued my interest enough to find out more, so I'm going to be in touch with the traXstar guys, and maybe at some point one of the Cheetah or Radical folks.

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2004.08.25
OK, so a lot to share on the racing front!

·Racing:

· Well, the changes that I made to the car made a HUGE difference in the car's handling, along with the new tires. At Saturday's 8-21 BMW event, I took my first ever FTD, and even had the top PAX'ed time as well. Yahoo!

· Even better, at Sunday's SCCA event, I scored 4th overall, and had 990 points! This is far and away better than I've ever done before - my previous best was 951 in the 'vette, and 955 in the GSX 2 years ago. The only folks to beat me were John Ames, Bob Tunnell, and a fellow named Paul Leonard, also on new V710 Kumhos. This could be fantastic news for nationals, maybe one of us has a shot at a trophy now? We'll see!

·Mod Updates:

· Well, the new 17's are great. They rub just the tiniest amount in the rear with a 1/8" spacer, but not enough to be troublesome. They also look fantastic - so, all-in-all, a great change.

· Unfortunately, it appears that as grippy as they are, these V710's aren't going to last as well as the Ecstas I had on there previously. After 19 runs, they are almost down to the 2/32 wear bar (I believe they start at 4/32 vs 6/32 on the V700), so 40 runs may be their limit. At about $850/shipped a set, I'm not sure that'll work for me...

· Another slight downer is that even though the car feels amazing at its new lowered ride-height, it's also become almost unusuable on the street - I cannot get in my driveway without scraping, and several roads in Ft. Collins are no longer passable. This could be a real downer, but I am loathe to compromise my race car for street driving!

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2004.08.20
Wow, so, um, two months have gone by without an update. I've got an excuse though: Lots of racing, and my own wedding and honeymoon, so there. Most races still have their writeup and video in the racing section though.

·Racing:

· With 7 events now under my belt, I am officially the Rocky Mountain regional Street-Modified 2 champion for 2004. Hurray!

· Have had lots of races since mid-June. The new VBP spring is working wonderfully.
· Mike and I did a T&T and really got the car dialed in very well, we feel. We started out with the shocks at full soft on bump and rebound, then played with them from there. We settled on -3/-6 on the rebound, and 4/4 on compression. The car is still perhaps just a touch loose in the rear-end at higher speeds, and on very bumpy surfaces, as in Wendover, we turned the bump down to 3, and the car settled down very nicely.

· As mentioned, Mike and I went to Wendover and placed 5th and 6th out of 7. We had some redlight troubles due to figuring out the center spoiler (duh!), but very nearly caught the slower RX-7, which means we made great progress from last time.

·Mod Updates:

· I have now eschewed the 18" CCW's in favor of some 17x11 and 17x11.5's from Gary Thomason. Not only does this make tires cheaper, it makes more Kumho compounds available to me for use, and the New Wheels look very mean on the car. They are now shod with Ecsta V710's, which should really improve over the Ecsta V700's I've been running previously.

· From talking to folks at Wendover, I have lowered the car quite a lot - about 0.5" front, and 1.25" rear, which may help take some of the car's looseness on turn-in out of the equation. Or, it could still be rear rebound issue.

· Also for this upcoming weekend (8/21-22), I'm finally lowering the shock pressures to 110psi, which seems to be the happy medium for these Penskes, and that may help soften the overall response just a touch. We'll see.

·Misc Else:

·The top decided to start leaking...argh!

·The rear-end diff seal leak which *covered* the back of the car on the way to Wendover has been fixed, along with a new driver's side axle...for only $600 *sob*.

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2004.06.15
·Mod Updates:

· The new 961# VBP spring is here and installed - despite how hard it was to wait until after this weekend to do it! The car feels absolutely wonderful on the street - much 'quicker' to respond, and with no noticable degradation in ride quality. I only wish there weren't 3 weeks to wait until I can race it again!

·Racing:
Had two good races this weekend. No video or writeups yet, as I'm awaiting the camera's return from Texas...

·Had a RMC BMW event Saturday. Had FTD until Feldpusch stole it from me in his M3...ah well. Got to drive a Z4 as well for having quickest time in my run group - nice car. Again, Feldpusch beat me on his drive in the car too....argh!

·Sunday was a great Corvette course at the World Arena. Scored a personal best 952 points, even despite blowing my best run at the finish turnaround. R-rated video commentary for sure...all of it now up in the racing section.

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2004.06.01
·Racing:
It's been a good month of racing, here's the rundown:

·We took champion of SM2 at the RMDIV divisional, and had 2 930+ point days.

·Won again on the 22nd with Mike's car, due to a broken rear Kumho from TireRack

·Had a great time and did reasonably well at the Farmington ProSolo in early May.

·Mod Updates:

·The Hotchkis bars have been great so far, but the rubbing is back in the front, so I need to start looking again into either installing a bumpstop on the shock, or trying to run a stiffer spring up front, or perhaps a spacer. At the divisional, I tried checking/bumping the pressures to 140/130, from their (random?) settings of 110/130(R) 120/120(L), but it didn't seem to help the rubbing any.

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2004.05.06
·Racing:

·We're on the eve of my first ProSolo ever in Farmington - tomorrow I leave for the event with Mike, and then Saturday and Sunday we pit ourselves against a couple of real bad***es, so we'll get our butts kicked, but it's going to be a blast!

·Finally got a writeup and videos of the April 18th racing up in the racing log.

·I'm getting some skoolin'! RMSolo is holding a 'advanced' autocross school for those of us mired in the 900-950 point range, so hopefully I'll pick up a lot of good tips there, and if nothing else, some good seat time in the car as it's set up right now to learn it a bit better for the season.

·Website:

·Been working like a madman on the C5 FAQ in the Misc section. It's more complete than it was, but it still has a long way to go. Hopefully it'll start providing some help to CF members in return for all the knowledge I've been able to gain along the way.

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2004.04.25
·Racing:

·Racing went reasonably well at the first event of the season. I won SM2 by a large margin, which at least fits one goal. I did my second two runs left-foot braking, which is another goal. However, I was off my normal pace by quite a fair amount, getting beat by all my normal benchmarks by 2 more seconds than last time. Ouch. Part of that is attributable to the left-foot braking, part to them all having new tires, and part to just plain not driving the course well.

·Mod Updates:

·After my shameful 896 point display at this year's first race (albeit, left-foot braking), to add insult to poor performance, I noticed a *lot* of rubbing on the fender wells in a long sweeper that we had on the course. So, I decided to add Hotchkis swaybars to the car to see if I can keep the car off the fenders. The bars are on, and feel just fine. Hopefully they'll add enough roll stiffness, and on the street, they don't seem to cause any noticable detriment to the ride.

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2004.04.11
·Mod Updates:
I'm finishing off the last few things I have wanted to do for this autocross season on the vette:

·Installed a set of Kooks Headers - 1 3/4" with cats. Took some work getting them in, but fitment is good, the sound is good, and the power is there too - I can't wait to see what it dynos.
· I installed a Hawker/Dynabatt/Odyssey racing battery, and did a little writeup in the projects section, along with the Kooks writeup and the Hardbar camber shims writeup.
· I also installed Hardbar's camber shims in the rear of the car to try and get a bit more camber. I was able to get 1.2 on the left side, but only 0.8 on the right, so I installed a different shim yesterday, and need to remeasure. Hopefully I can get them fairly even. A writeup for that will be coming soon as well.

·Other News:
· I got back from the "Advanced Autocross School" in Farmington, NM a week ago. The weather was awful the entire time, but that made for a good instructive surface - being rough with your inputs is doubly worse on wet pavement, and that seems to be my biggest problem.

Tom Berry took my car for a run and showed me what can really be done with the hardware I've got....Wow. I've got a long way to go. Gotta thank Paul Brown for letting me into that on short notice, as well.

On the downside, the trip was pretty rough on the car. The paint took a beating, the windows have some deep scratches from rocks in the window up/down guides, and the crack in the right front fascia near the running light is even bigger than before. I will spend some time trying to nurse it back to health today, now that the mods are mostly complete.

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2004.03.16
·Mod Updates:
It's been a slow few months, recovering from all of the various (car and non) related things I bought in October. But, there are a few things I've done:

·Removed the T1 bars for the Z06 bars - ride much improved, and much more civil day-to-day. Am happy with that decision.

·Replaced the stock shift knob with a hardbar Delrin "race" knob (the tall one). It definitely shifted nicer than the stock knob, but effort was still a bit high. It also caused the infamous Hurst rattling, for whatever reason. I currently have my old Eclipse knob in place, that I rethreaded (9/16 x 18TPI) to fit, and it feels good, but is about an inch too tall. The search for the perfect knob continues...

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2004.03.15
·We're back from San Diego!

Mike and I went to the San Diego national tour event, and got absolutely killed. 15th and 18th, respectively, out of 21. But, it was a blast, and we learned a lot. We've got a ton of video and a few pictures that you can see in the racing section.

·Stan Whitney sent me four 285/30-18 Hoosiers to try on the front of the car, so hopefully that will solve the rubbing problems once and for all.

·I found a pair of black leather seat covers, and along with shampooing the carpet to clean it up, the car is completely transformed on the inside. It actually looks *good* now, and isn't embarrassing anymore. pictures are in the projects section. As a result, the problem list for the C5 is just about down to zero!

·The regular season of the SCCA RMSolo autocross season is just around the bend - only one more event upcoming here on the 22nd until the summer series starts. I've posted some season goals in the racing section - it will be interesting to see how well I keep to them...

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2004.02.13
·I Installed a Hurst shifter last night, and so far I love it. The Crunchiness went away in the shifts, which is good. A few days before, I also flushed the transmission and put new ATF in. Shift effort is a bit high, so I might try finding a taller shift knob to reduce that somewhat, or hoping it goes down after a few weeks of use. Tunnel noise seems almost nonexistent, but I may experiment with quieting that down some if it gets worse.

·On a different note, I am starting to think that the T1 bars might not have been a good idea. The car rides extremely rough, even on only mildy broken roads, so I am going to remove them and put the Z06 bars back on. I'll be keeping the Penskes and the T1 front control arms. To skirt the rubbing issue, I believe I'll replace the front Hoosiers with 285's, and hope the 1" less rubber, along with the 1/4" less offset will keep the car off the fenders. I might try the Hotchkiss bars in the future, as I've talked to a few national-level autocrossers that are using those (and think the T1 bars are too large)

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2004.01.20
·Dyno Time!

I got the car dyno'd last Tuesday on Dragon Race Engineering's mustang dyno. 296rwhp/314rwtq. He mentioned that most stock LS1's put down closer to 280 or so, so the Z06 exhaust, Gears (minus some) and the Blackwing did help pick up some. More importantly, my motor seems to be in reasonable health, so I can start with some mods, versus having to rebuild a 80K engine. See the graph at my dynochart site Here.

·Added the 1/11/04 autocross and video in the racing section.
·Ordered a set of T1 swaybars to try and counteract the wheel rubbing, and see if it'll make the car quicker.
·The LGM Headers are only 2 days from being here. Found them new for $1,000, and can't wait to get them on the car. Few things to take care of first...

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2004.01.02
·First update of 2004 - yay! Not a heck of a lot to post, just two more race days in the racing section. The new Penske shocks and CCW's made for great handling, and I'm hoping that I'll get to try it all out on a warm course (with warm tires!) to see how it feels in a week or so.

·Had a blast at the Second Creek free week, and set a new best for myself, consistently in the 1:19's. Only three seconds to go to get to my number from the GSX - it'll take some horsepower to do it, methinks. Did a TON of laps back-to-back with Paul Rask, with both trying to shake the other, it was a blast.

2003.11.10
·Boy, been a while since the last update.

·The racing page has been updated, but with no media, due to me leaving my camera at an autocross. Need to retrieve that soon.

·Added the misc section with info on model year differences, some useful calculators, and wheel bearing replacement instructions. Click the link 'misc' above.

·I added an images link so you can peruse the various shots I've got up on my site. See link at top (images).

·Some great mods are on the way, in the form of CCW 18x11.5 wheels with 305 Hoosiers, Penske Doubles, T1 control arms, and a Halltech TRAP. Going to be eating Ramen for a while :-\

·The PAX information for 2004 has been released. SM2 dropped to 0.849, versus 0.851, and ASP went up to 0.848, from 0.846. So, that means I will run SM2 next year. Yay head and cam packages, here we come!

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2003.10.20
·Distaster! I wrecked the car at my last autocross - some bent suspension parts, but thankfully no body damage. Hopefully this won't turn out to be too big of a problem :(

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2003.08.29
·Some updates for you. Updated the racing page with the latest BMW Autocross which went very well. Swapped my stock plugs and wires for NGK's and MSD's, along with some heat socks. With nearly 80K on the ticker, thought it might be time to replace them. Both OE plugs and wires looked darn near new, and the plugs read perfectly, which makes me very happy.

·Continuing the Maintenance front, I had to replace the front crank seal, which was leaking. Turns out there was a groove in my harmonic damper, so the final total was $685, having the dealer do it. Not too bad, given the amount of work involved to get to that level.

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2003.08.17
·Hey, finally got this main page up, after only 4 months of owning my car.

·Lots of stuff already posted in the racing section, including lots of pictures and in-car video from autocrossing and Second Creek.

·There won't be quite as much in the way of projects for this car I'm sure, but I've got some pictures on removing the front fascia for a Z06 front duct install.

·Of interest to those of you considering a Magnusson Supercharger is my collection of pictures of the Caravaggio hood that John Caravaggio hood is putting out. See those saved here.

·Lots of delightfully self-serving pictures of my car and Rolando's 2001 Camaro SS here.

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