:. Racing .:. 2005/02/19 - Autocross
Results: Here
Writeup/Notes:
So, after two months of hard work to get the car back together, a first outing is always going to be frought with various teething issues, right?
Well, that's what I thought, but fortunately, none of that happened. For a first outing, the car was absolutely flawless. Only my Mom and Dad were (fool?)hardy enough to come out for the first outing, since I'd told everybody to expect some form of breakage. They took lots of shots, and as it turns out, it was a fantastic day!
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We had some great warm weather - pretty unseasonable for the middle of a Colorado February, but nobody was complaining. Especially not the guy on year old R35 tires at an autocross! The course was one designed by Mike Feldpusch, the new owner of my Corvette. It started off with a few offsets, and a smallish slalom. Exiting out of the slalom was a rather wide series of left/right/left turns that got progressively wider, until they ended in a wall of cones you had to make sure to stay left for. Following a short straight was a long left-hand sweeper back up the 'hill' towards the start, that tried to suck you in more than was optimal. This sweeper exited into a slalom starting the *other* direction, so patience and backing off at the end of the sweeper paid off. Lots of folks got lost here. After a deceptively short slalom, there were two hard lefts, a hard right, a 180, and one more hard left into a 2-cone slalom to the finish. Phew!
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Launching for the first time demonstrated the poor state of tune the engine is apparently in - it bogs below around 6000 RPM or so, then takes off like a rocket. As a result, there's not much for the launches. I noticed this initially, driving the car around for the first time ever, but thought it was just due to the car not being warmed up. Prior to lubing the chain, the car oddly locked itself in place after some initial tooling around the paddock, but it hasn't happened again, so I'm not sure what the cause was there.
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As the weather was still fairly chilly - 50* or so - and the old, cold tires being what they were, the car had hardly any usable grip at all. This was poor for lap times, but an absolute bundle of fun, as the thing oversteered everywhere on corner entry, and made for some very fun slide catching. To that end, it's encouraging how easy this car appears to be to drive - much easier to gather back up when it starts going wrong compared to the Corvette.
As far as general observations, corner-entry oversteer and mid-to-end of corner understeer were the orders of the day. Again, this has to be mostly due to cold and old tires, and perhaps a setup issue here or there. Also, it seems as though the car is a bit stiff over a few of the bumps, so perhaps some softening of the bump or rebound is in order.
Final results were a 880 point score and a second place finish - not bad, really.
What a great bit of fun this is going to be!
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