:. Racing .:. 2005/03/06 - Autocross
Results: Here
Writeup/Notes:
What a strange day - this is the day that my first outing should have been.
After a nearly flawless first outing, I was very encouraged to drive the car a bit more, and start
getting a better feeling for the handling. Problems are behind me, right? WRONG!
The course for the day was a Paul Leonard construction. A fairly open 270* start, followed by a wide 180 sweeper, into a hard left hand turn that fed you into a right-hander over a monstrous asphalt patch that turned out to be my nemesis. After the patch was another slightly-more-than-90 left hander, into a tight 180 that exited onto a 2-cone slalom, itself exiting onto some very wide/open offsets. These terminated with a left-hand offset that left you with a good sized straight. The straight ended in a series of left/right box turns. The course finished with three consecutive, very bumpy 180 turns that finished with a small 2-cone slalom.
The day in grid started badly, with me warming up the car. After a while, I noticed the car had died. Turns out,
it was a double-whammy. The alternator I thought had been working was not charging, so the battery had run down,
and, it seems I'd gotten myself quite low on fuel again somehow. After a hasty battery switch and a splash of gas,
I was good for my first run.
Unfortunately, the massive 4" high asphalt patch I'd worried about on the course walk took off my splitter on the very first run - just absolutely demolished it. I'm going to have to be cautious of course features like this in the future, especially given the fragility of the Radical splitters.
After returning to grid, I was able to patch up the splitter with Barry Ott's help, and a bunch of multi-colored tape
from Ric Walford - thanks guys. The next 2 runs were relatively uneventful - the usual oversteer/understeer balance the car seems to have. By the end of the third run, it seemed that I was getting some heat in the tires, but the awful bumpiness on the back half of the course where the series of 180's lay was absolutely killing my times. The car was porpoising awfully, to the extent where my foot got bounced off of the brake pedal a few times on the bumps. Yikes. Barry said that it looked about like it felt too.
The last run, something else odd happened - the wing support broke on the left-hand side somewhere during the run. The right-side looked as though it was about to go too. Bizarre. One more thing to repair, and just another insult to end a fairly discouraging day.
Unlike last time, I was nowhere near Jeff and Evan - Jeff beat me by about 1.8 seconds, and Evan ahead of him by another 1.8 or so. However, this time my effort was good enough for 919 points, my first 900+ score in the BM class. Hopefully that won't be a fluke!
A lot of work to do to the car, it seems. It's not handling bumps well at Solo speeds, and it seems to have a push, even considering having some non-grippy tires. With about a month of time between this race and the next, hopefully I can sort out a few details about the car's setup, and get a little bit closer to the Brauch's.
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