:. Racing .:. 2005/07/23 - Time Trials #3
Results: HERE and HERE
The Best Days Ever
After a week of cold, crisp-aired October weather, the racing gods smiled on us one last time to race at Second Creek, and the Friday/Saturday/Sunday weekend stayed warm and sunny throughout, with not even a hint of wind or rain. Perfect racing weather, and suitable that it should be so - for our event marked the first ever SCCA Time Trials National race.
Friday
My racing weekend started on Friday, as I took an early day to head out to the Kart track at IMI to do a bit of refreshening with the car, and perhaps to tinker with the suspension some. Also, I wanted to scrub in my last set of new R35's that Hasty had given me with the car, since I'd been saving them all season for this race.
Friday was completely uneventful for me. I ran about 20 laps or so, beating the last (slidy!) laps from the R25's that Bob Schader gave me, and scrubbed in my R35's. Jeff Brauch was there in the maiden voyage for his newly 2002-Suzuki powered Cheetah, but it was having problems - culprit turned out to be a plugged injector and a mis-wired tach, unfortunately not found until Tuesday.
My only note for the day was that my laptimer was not triggering off of its beacon, but I assumed it was just not getting the right angle. As it turns out, it was broken, so I spent the entire weekend without any knowledge of my in-session laptimes.
After dropping off the trailer at a friend's house, Liz and I had dinner in Denver at "Montana Ted's". I cashed out early.
Saturday
Saturday started "Dark and Early", with registration closing at 7:45, since we had a long day with 4 heats planned. Folks were pretty excited to see that they got spiffy badges and a free T-shirt - it was, after all, the first Time Trials National, and we were stoked to have gotten it put together. Big thanks to Josh Hadler and Gary Phillis, and all the rest for letting us come race!
Saturday we ran the track counter-clockwise, which is the nonstandard direction. As it turns out, Steve Ott holds the track record for DSR in this direction with a mid 1:07, set back in July when he was renting my car! Pretty amusing. I did just a few parade laps in the morning, just enough to ensure the car was feeling happy, and parked it.
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Qualifying went well, given that I'd never driven the track this direction before, I did a 1:10.57, which seemed about right. I was lifting at Kamikazee, and the back esses, which turned out not to be necessary.
The one-hour lunchbreak was fun, as always, with Cajun Mo providing the eats. That's a tradition I will miss!
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The actual timed laps were great fun. By the end of the session, I was flat-out through Kamikazee and the back esses, both of which were absolutely terrifying and great fun. I finally got into 5th gear several times before braking hard for turn 1 (after the esses). In short, that high-speed corner was fantastic fun. I was holding on for dear life, feeling the car grip, and grinning like an idiot inside my helmet. Absolutely tremendous.
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Of worthy note is that back in July, when Steve ran this car at SCR counter-clockwise, the bump into the entry of Kamikazee was upsetting the car pretty visibly. Driving it this weekend with the newly softened shock valving, the bump caused only the slightest wash of the front, and little more. Hooray for better shocks!
Also fun was getting the hang of turn 7, which is sharply downhill, and to the left. I kept going through faster and faster, but still never ended up using all the track. While a bit loose on turn-in, the car would get heavy and just HOOK-UP at the exit, so the turn was very deceiving to get right. Great fun though.
Without the benefit of the in-car timer, I was concentrating just on trying to get corners right, and without the disappointment of not seeing nubmers going down, I was having a heckuva lot of fun doing it. So, while I had great fun, I didn't turn out to be all that fast - only a 1:09.77 turned out to be my best lap, somewhat over 2 seconds slower than Steve was able to do in an arguably slower version of the car. However, goal of fun was most definitely achieved - I was laughing to myself inside my helmet down the straights - what a RUSH!
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The rest of the day went along quickly enough. The weather was clear enough that we could clearly see the entire front range on the horizon to the west, stretching as far as you could see to the north and south, still dusted with snow from early season storms. Truly gorgeous - I love Colorado.
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Saturday evening, in apparently similar form to how club racing doubles go, was a paid-for-by-SCCA dinner. Mo brought us delicious Cajun BBQ meatballs, and some other sweet sauce, along with greens and toast. Naturally, a beer keg provided fun too - what a great evening of food, drink, and camraderie! Erron spent no small amount of time convincing me that he was allergic to barley, and *that* is why he couldn't drink the beer. Hah!
Sunday
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Sunday also started bright and early, just as beautiful as Saturday had proved to be.
Again, I just did a few parade laps, although this time out of concern for the car. Out of nowhere, the water temperatures showed up at 220* and climbing, despite the ~50 degree cool of the morning. I parked the car, let it cool off, and then checked it later. I added a small amount of water, but I was quite concerned that I might have somehow hurt the motor the day before.
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Qualifying was largely uneventful, and the water-temp issue did not reappear. I ran two fairly conservative laps, and turned in a 1:09.8, only about 0.3 off of my previous best! This had me very encouraged for the possibilities of hitting 1:08's, and maybe, as I had hoped, 1:07's.
The only other noteworthy event of the morning was a huge "moment" I saw Steve Thomton have at the exit of Kamikazee. He dropped a wheel off in his C5, and had a huge slide across track. It turned out to be an unfortunate omen.
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Although the 1:09 from Sunday felt pretty good, I was still a tad upset at having been so relatively slow to the possibilities yesterday. I talked to Bill Lamkin, who said I pretty clearly wasn't using all the track - a fair assesment, given my lack of confidence as of yet! Gary Phillis took me on a slow-speed run of the track to point out a few tricks - among them a better entry into turn one, an appreciation of just how much of the track I should plan on using, and the notion of "letting the car ride" as muhc as possible - avoiding drag due to turning tighter than is necessary. I am certain these tips turned out to be helpful. Having specific goals is better than "go faster!"
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The timed laps, as on Saturday, were incredibly fun. The only slight downer was that they were in late afternoon, and were on a noticably slippery track, along with 25* warmer temperatures. While driving, I thought alternately that my rear tires might be going off, or that perhaps I was just finally driving harder, but Bob Tunnell confirmed my impressions by saying that he put in what he had thought was a helluva lap, and only went 0.5 seconds faster than his 1st-lap-cold-tires qualifying time. When I checked hot pressures after the session, they were 19F and 20R, so no big changes from normal there. So...whatever.
We only got a foreshortened session - 20 minutes - as the unhappy event predicted by my forementioned bad omen came to pass: Steve Thomton went slightly wide on the exit of T1, hooked a wheel, and spun his Corvette into the inside wall. Tore a corner off of the car, and in general, damaged the car pretty badly. Steve went to the hospital with some broken ribs, and was a little banged up.
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It's the first time I've ever had a real (non-internet) friend hurt racing, and it's amazing how your first, immediate thought is "I hope he's OK", and only once that is answered in the affirmative do you even *think* about the car. Steve will be back at it, although I'm not sure if "61 White" will be.
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At any rate, after our unscheduled break, our session continued. I finally managed to just lift into Kamikazee, rather than brake, and the resulting exit speeds were tremendous! The car just dug in and "bit", and just very gently drifted from time to time. No huge push, no oversteer like I had feared, just very nice behavior. This tells me that hopefully the shocks and springs are now working together pretty nicely.
Pushing harder into the turns, I was occaisionally in a position to run out of track on exit, but just slight lifts of the throttle were enough to tuck the nose in when I did make a mistake, and the confidence of knowing that I could save myself from a lack of judgement helped me go into more corners harder and faster the next time around. Driver confidence is everything, and I really built up a lot of trust and happiness with the Radical on Sunday. Fun!
The only annoyance of the session was losing over half of my hotlaps to cars doing cooldown laps - especially to Captain Cooldown, who spent semmingly his whole session circling the track at 40mph ...rgh. Ah well - nothing to be done 'bout it I suppose. For its own part, the Radical showed no further complaints about water temperature, and oil hung out around 235-240*. Still high, but not worrisome. Hopefully the new oilcooler setup will get these closer to the 200* range.
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The end result was a new (and final) best of 1:08.95. Not the fastest anybody has ever gone by any means, but not bad from my initial outing doing 1:12's back in February. The 1:08.9 was backed up with a few 1:09.0's, so I know it wasn't just a lucky fluke. Alright! For a first season - not bad. That's about 2.5 seconds back of the track record, so I feel like I'm at least driving adequately at this point. Better and faster next year!
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As a final note, being the only yearlong competitor in the B-Mod class, I guess that makes me the Rocky Mountain region B-Mod/DSR time-trials champ. Heh.
Changes For Next Time...
I suppose a lot is going to be different over the winter, but I think now the suspension performance of the car is good enough that I don't think I am experienced enough to be able to make much in the way of productive changes. Since the car finally feels quite good - We've gotten beyond "dreadful" - now the chance of me making things worse with future changes, at my current level of expertise, is getting close to 50/50!
The zero-droop front with significant preload has good response, and good feel. That has really made the previously "funky" front-end respond and feel like I had always thought it should. The 400/600 spring balance seems to be close to neutral steady-state, and also seems to be a good balance (for now) between response and bump-compliance. The rebound damping (rear only!) seems to be about right for stable turn-in, and my adjuster has plenty of room in either direction. The only real handling problem of the whole weekend was the brake bias too far towards the rear, making the car just a hair squirrely on turn-in, as I came off the brakes. That's just a matter of adjustment, though.
As far as making it better, I don't think I can make many further intelligent suspension-related changes until I'm faster with the car, and can start forming some more opinions about where it might be deficient. I still don't really understand how to tune bump damping, and the spring balance, even if it is still slightly understeer biased, means it is safe for me to learn driving at higher speeds, without being put-on-a-pot-of-coffee understeery everywhere else.
So, at any rate, the winter is mostly going to be about maintenance, reliability, weight, minor aero, and user-friendliness improvements.
So far as driver goes, I had a few folks watch my laps, and the consensus seemed to be that I'm not terribly deficient in any one area, that it's just going to be a matter of practice to get the next tenths from braking, lines, aggressiveness/confidence, track-out, and the rest of it that will lead to lower laptimes. By leaving the car mostly alone for a while, I'm hoping that will assit in helping the driver get better, faster!
Onward to 2006 - what a season 2005 was!
NEW CHANGES:
- zero-droop front
- 600# rears
- new shock valving
Media:
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