I had great fun. Now that I’m no longer doing 2 events/month, I’m reminded anew at each race weekend how good it is to see my buddies again and go racing.
No videos yet. The Sunday video isn’t playing well with TraqStudio so I’m having problem getting the dashboard on it.
Qual Saturday was my first hot laps in RR’s. I found myself agreeing that they are 2sec faster.
In Saturday’s race I started to realize that RR’s fall off awful damned fast. After 7-8laps, they don’t seem faster to me than RA1’s.
My excitement in Saturday’s race was trying to avoid hitting anyone in the Patton-Bauguess scrum. Cars were spinning just after the kink as I was setting up to enter the kink. I was pretty committed so I didn’t have a lot of choices. I decided to head left for the dirt, was only barely maintaining control, when Nash started coming back on track from the dirt…not realizing that I was barreling right for his path. Solely by charisma and force of will I made my car skitter across the grass with a bit more “righty” in the vector back towards the track, just enough to avoid smacking Nash. That put me back on the track, wheels sliding as much as rolling.
Me re-entering the track, or sliding across it if your a pessimist, caused problems for folks behind me, but screw them. 1) It’s all about me. 2) I was trying like hell to avoid killing Nash. 3) Those guys behind me were getting reaction time that I’d not had. And 4), it really is all about me.
Sunday I didn’t do all that well. I didn’t get a clear lap for qual, the power-on oversteer problem I’d been living with was getting worse, and I rear-ended a gts2 e36 going into 14.
The power on oversteer problem was bad. I was getting tons of wheel spin coming out of slow corners. The was a couple times I had 180deg of left steering input trying to keep my rear under me…that’s as much turning into a slide as I’ve ever had to do. But I was working with it, catching it, and accelerating out of 12 and 14 just as hard as I could. I had it under control. Until I didn’t. I spun it coming out of 14 and suddenly I was DFL. Shit.
The hit on the gts2 car was my fault. It seemed to me like he braked awful darn early going into 14, but unless the video shows him backing up into me, it has to be my fault. He was following Patton into 14, I made an estimate of when Patton would brake, when the gts2 car would brake, and when I’d need to brake. The same kind of thing that we all do every second. Which is when I hit him. The gts2 driver and I talked later. He was pissed.
Tonight I looked at my rear sway. When I installed it last Winter I’d set it on it’s loosest position so I’ve been thinking for some time on what I was going to have to do to make it looser yet. All my options were ugly, but I figured that either I needed to loosen that sway or I needed to pull out some rear camber.
So armed with some ideas I got under the car tonight to finalize the plan on just how I was going to drill the hole necessary to make the “full loose” rear sway, looser yet. Which is when I realized the sway was set to full tight, not full loose. Ah, well, that problem’s figured out.
