SDAD Championship 8-2-2009

Today's event went by pretty smoothly. It was Work 2 Run 3 for my lineup today. I arrived at Qualcomm Stadium and headed straight to Registration. After that I set my car up and waited for Ken Motonishi to arrive. I had promised him the night before that i would help him with his alignment.

Run Group 3; I had allowed Marco Vasquez to co-drive with me today. It would later on shoot me in the foot, but thats okay. My fastest run was my first run of the day (after Marco's first). And it was good enough to be 2/10ths away from Ken Motonishi's fastest. IM STOKED! so i let Marco finish up his runs so that I could spectate everyone else's run... especially Ken's.

Unfortunately I should of just finished up my runs first because the REAR tires heatcycled out after my first run. Oh well, thats life. I could no longer reach the 76 second range and had to stand on my first run. Which by the way was CRAP. I mean i had a decent line, but i KNOW that i could have gone faster by tightening up my line.

Rear Tire Carnage (230+ Runs)

New Front Tires (10 Runs)

Well! here's my video for you viewing pleasure.

CASOC Championship 7-26-09

July 12, 2008

Beautiful morning. I woke up ready for some action. Run 2 work 1 was the order and was already running late the moment i woke up. Not that i woke up late, I actually woke up at 6. I had a light breakfast and took off towards the stadium. There were 3 things i needed to do.

Buy 1 quart of oil

Withdraw 40 bucks

...and fill the tires with air

TOTALLY things i should of done the night before, but was too tired and lazy to do all that. Turns out i was able to do everything just shy of 5 mins before running. So based off yesterdays evaluation of how much grip is left in the tire I decided to run RE01R pressures. My reasoning is because of the HIGH pressures i was running previously. I didn't want the worn center section of the tire to mess with my performance... so i lowered the air in order to utilize the outside edges more. BOY was it a great decision because my first run out was AWESOME!!!

It wasn't my fastest run but sure did it allow me to trust the car even more for my next few runs. I am very pleased and proud of my setup change. A lot of thought and testing was done (almost 7 months) but it was worth it. Testing out only 1 change per event can take a long time but it is well worth the time spent as I know exactly what change caused the car to handle a certain way. Jason Flores and Stephen Yeoh also got a chance to test out our final setup settings and they LOVE it. Im happy...

Anyway back to my runs. My fastest was a 60.7xx (dirty) which was 1 tenth faster than my fastest class run. I was quite pleased especially with the tires slightly down on grip. I ended up winning the class by .6xx and took fastest ST time in both class and PAX. I think i placed top 5 in PAX today. I'll find out when the results are up.

July 11, 2008 - SCAT Practice

So i pretty much played hookie from work today. I needed a break bad from that place but it pays good money. Anyhow, I woke up this morning about 5:45AM. For some reason i just did...i guess i was excited to finally do some real racing. Adam's Kart Track is getting tiresome and boring.

Some key things i found out today. My labeled REAR (used in front) set of tires was DEAD. Well it turns out the middle section of the tire had heatcycled out because changing pressures from 42psi to 34psi made the tires grip more. Turns out running the higher pressures for so long had killed the center section. NOTE TO SELF... do what the pyrometer tells you and not what feels better.

Well in the morning I ran a 58.873 clean for my 3rd run. Good enough to be well ahead of other drivers and thats with the tires falling off big time. In the Afternoon, I thought i would try rotating the tires in hopes that only 2 of the tires were dead. My assumptions were correct and only 2 tires were dead. My guess is from the times i ran staggered.

Anyways in the afternoon i was able to consistently clock the same time around ending with my fastest 58.4xx. I then backed off and went home since of course i needed good tires for the championship the next day.

June 14, 2009 - DCCSD Championship

I thought i would start a new blog. I didn't like what i did with the old one and its too much work to try and change it.

Run 1st

Work 3rd

Today was a cloudy overcast day. Not much Sun but you can feel the UV rays making it a bit humid outside. The course layout was awesome today. I can't remember a time when the course was setup so well for the powerband of the civic. There was only two things I can think of that needed changing. One was the Sound Meter. Because it was an overcast morning, i decided to leave the full street exhaust on the car. The sound meter was located near the fence (Qside) so i knew sound would be an issue today. The second thing would be the use of cones. AGAIN they decided to use the tiny cones for setup. This bugs me because the tiny cones make it hard for me to judge exactly how close i am to the cones.

Anyways, my first three runs had sound meter encounters. My first warning was a 91.8 db. This was with full street exhaust and my CAI. Second warning was the same setup but with a 92.5 db. I decided to make a change and ran to grab my modified stock intake. Third run in and i came with a 91.5 db. Quieter but clearly an issue with where the sound meter was located. The way it was positioned was fine... about 50ft... maybe a little bit more out. BUT the issue was that the meter was positioned almost 10 ft elevated from where the cars were at. This means that the sound meter would be picking up resonance and different frequencys than what we normal measure. Oh well.

Today was a highly anticipated day for me. I wanted to try my new alignment setup in order to get the car to be more loose. I overexaggerated my targeted spec in order to find the limit. Looks like what i did was more than i needed for todays event. Sure the car was the loosest its ever been midcorner, but transitional elements were sacrificed as it became a bit snappy in transition. I guess thats what */*" toe OUT does. =P

Time to back it down. Anyways i took first today and won't be seeing another autocross for another month. =(...