Congrats to Uncle Catch for a fine 3rd place in ITC. Some very fine driving!

Any1 have inside info from post tech shed? Stretch's SM didn't make it out of the shed AFAIK. What about the E36s in S? Last I heard an APB was sent out for a large sample of stock parts as evidence! Hracer's DA broke? Any details? Enduro results?

 

Way to go, Scott! (I know him.)

K

 

I go more in detail later, as I'm fairly exhausted now. But I will say that I had a great time. The sprint race was INCREDIBLE. 20 laps of pure craziness, but a totally clean pure craziness. I qualified 4th and was anywhere from 1st to 5th at various times during the race. The front 4 were swapping a postion in pretty much every corner for the entire race. We were told at the awards ceremony on Saturday night that the corner workers gave ITC the Race of the Day award.
Everyone that watched it said it was completely insane. To that, I can only say "You shoulda seen it from where I was sitting."

Unfortunately I was more nervous than I've ever been at a race on Saturday morning and I forgot to put the camera in the car. But Will Perry did run one, and has promised me a copy. I'll share some of that if/when I get my hands on it.

Fortune didn't smile on us during the enduro though. I put the car on the class pole, but a series of on and off track misfortunes got us out of our pit sequence, resulting in a final stint that was too long and hampered late by an evil fuel starvation. We lost the lead with 5 minutes to go as I sputtered through turn 7. Finished 2nd in class, which is good, but we let the win get away from us.
As is so often the case, the two fastest cars on track did not win. Reynolds/Puckett had a terminal mechanical failure about 2 hours in and we basically ran out of gas. Thus are the fortunes of endurance racing. We WILL be back again next year though!

Big thanks to Ryan and Karl who played the role of crew lackies. Zsolt helped a little, but we couldn't even get him dirty (as usual).

Scott, who says the ARRC ain't for the faint of heart (or wallet).

 

I believe all of the ITS cars made it through tech. I heard Stretch's SM didn't however due to a compression issue. Only rumor though so probably worth about $.04.

It was great to see some people again who I hadn't in a while and meet a lot of new people. I had an absolute blast this whole weekend and am thrilled with how my car did. 7th in ITA my first time on Road Atlanta with a 1st year car - not too shabby. If I only could've held onto that 5th.......oh well, I'm still happy.

I don't know Scott, the ITC race was pretty damn good but that ITA one wasn't too bad either.

Kevin Ruck - in the bright orange #73 ITA Integra

 

<grumble>three accidents and a 3-out-of-four lane closure later, I'm home, after 1:00...Scott, I wouldn't do these things for many people...<grumble>

Of the sprint races, the ITA and ITC were among the best stuff I've seen. C was just ridiculously good, with Scott's crew (that would be me, Ryan and Zsolt) at times unsure what the heck just happened. The four lead cars were basically always together, but in a different running order every time. And all we could see is T12 through T1 and part of T2.

The A race was also a heck of a thing, with Serra and Stretch battling it out up front, krbobcat, RacerBowie, Alex (until he broke), and a couple other Hondas that I'm just too tired to remember the drivers of. Let's just say it was good stuff.

ITS I didn't pay all that much attention to after the lead E36 checked out by several seconds. Whittel and Stepp put on a clinic.

In the "Wings and Things" group, the Radicals walked away from everything. I will say no more

Overall given the "seriousness" of the ARRC and the sheer number of cars, the racing was clean, close, and a lot of fun to watch.

--Karl, who intends to be out there next year, impossibly slow but learning...

 

Good stuff, Uncle Catch. Congrats!

 

What a blast!!! The test day almost got rained into uselessness, but 3 sessions in it was finally dry enough to heat cycle tires.

Fri AM qualifying was nice and cool, and I turned my personal best to put the car in 6th.

Fri PM qualifying was warmer, so I put old tires on and just played a little, trusting my first time.

Ended up 6th on the grid, very happy with that.

Race time!!! We sat on the grid FOREVER! I bet I had to pee 5 times. A Wreck Pinata had destroyed the timing loop in the wall at start-finish, so things were delayed. Then we did 2 pace laps to see if it was fixed, then the race was on! Had a great battle with Jason Adamski and Kevin Ruck (krbobcat) for most of the race. finally Jason got some breaks with lapped traffic and checked out on us. I was faster than Kevin in the twisties and he owned me on the straights (Miata versus Integra, who woulda thunk it?!) I had a fairly large bobble in 1 and he got me, then I got him back somewhere, then he went for a pass in 10a...I got onto the gas early and got him back coming out of 10b, then sacked up and ran one of the best trips from 1-5 I have ever done, opening up a big enough gap that he couldn't draft by me on the back straight, checkered flag, game over.

Then, Lucho DeCastro (The Crazy Spaniard) who usually drives an ITS Prelude that had broken in Qualifying came up to me and said "Your car is fast, we should run the enduro." I told him I was broke, and he got this look like I didn't get it and said "Why do you need money, I will pay for it." I consulted the wife, she then gave me a "Why the hell didn't you say yes right away dumbass" look, so I told Lucho to sign us up. 4 new Hoosiers, new brakes all the way around (one of my rear rotors had cracked, explaining the rear lockup I had been getting late in the race), and a heat sheild for the driver's foot later, we were set to go.

I went out in qualifying to bed the brakes, heat cycle the tires, and turn a fast lap. Not a big deal, right? "Oh by the way, you have 5 laps, then Lucho needs to get used to the car." Well, lap five was my new fastest ever lap. Put us 2nd in class, 8th overall out of 68? cars!!! Cool, but scary since Lucho was starting the race, and having never driven the car was about 4 or so seconds off the pace.

First few laps were a real nail biter, as Lucho got absorbed by the faster cars. Fortunately he got through it with only a donut on the passenger door, staying on the track and not losing much time. After about 50 minutes, he pitted and the car was handed over to me in 5th or 6th place. I was given the mandate to "Go like hell" and sent out for my hour and a half stint. So for over an hour I drove as hard as I could drive. Passing cars left, right, and in the grass. 4 wide down the back straight, passing in 1, 2, the esses, it didn't matter.

I should have pitted when I saw the VW wrecked just off the track at 5, but didn't and got caught out in a full-course yellow. Pitted right after the yellow, giving Lucho the car back in 3rd place, but the battery had died and the car wouldn't start!!!!! Bah! 10 minutes or so later the battery was replaced and we were back out there, finishing in 7th (I think).

Lots of fun, too bad about the battery. I can't wait for next year!!!!

 

Bowie, you lucky F***. did you have the david rhodes oops, belt came off alternator or too much sitting up not being used?
WIshed i could have been there; back put me down for the whole week. Congrats on your new best times. the ARRC seems to bring out the best in some, and the worst in others

 

Yea, Bowie's light and nimble little car on its home track would own me in some of the twisties. Eh, no big deal, the back straights coming up soon enough - haha.

Bowie - like I told you, the last lap you ran to keep it ahead of me was phenominal. Great job and congrats on a fine race. I'm scared to see if you get that extra power.

I need serious 10A & B help - I suck there. The Integra was great under brakes but just wouldn't want to turn once it got in. My only hope was to throw it in hard enough and trail brake so the back end would slide around.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by krbobcat &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Yea, Bowie's light and nimble little car on its home track would own me in some of the twisties. Eh, no big deal, the back straights coming up soon enough - haha.

Bowie - like I told you, the last lap you ran to keep it ahead of me was phenominal. Great job and congrats on a fine race. I'm scared to see if you get that extra power.

I need serious 10A & B help - I suck there. The Integra was great under brakes but just wouldn't want to turn once it got in. My only hope was to throw it in hard enough and trail brake so the back end would slide around.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Thanks for the good words! It was fun racing/hanging out with everyone. I now have to figure out if it is possible to make the extra power I need, or if I am beating a dead horse.

Should be another expensive year next year either way.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by o-man &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Bowie, you lucky F***. did you have the david rhodes oops, belt came off alternator or too much sitting up not being used?
WIshed i could have been there; back put me down for the whole week. Congrats on your new best times. the ARRC seems to bring out the best in some, and the worst in others </TD></TR></TABLE>

Too much sitting up. I noticed the tach not acting right during my stint, but filed the info away for later use. Then, pitted and had nothing. Oh well.

We missed you down there man! You got you a good ITA car, you should get your license and come play!

 

too late. if i play scca it will have to be SPU. I'm trying to put Jack's future child through college, and then will try to help Schimmel's grandchild the same way. I think you may be beating a dead horse. don't see how you can get "legal" hp out of that miata. may be time to come back to fwd fold?

 

Wow! Now if only we could have this ARRC thing more than just once a year!

It's nice seeing people from far away even if only once a year, and it was just as nice meeting new folks. You had a great run Kevin, way to go. The car looked good and so did you. You only got faster and faster as the weekend went by. Looking forward to seeing you again soon. Bowie Bowie Bowie, you are really getting that pumpkin moving. I would not be betting against you if we had a contest of the fastest ITA Miata out there. Great ITC race, too. For most of the race it looked like any one of the 5 top cars had a chance. Too bad Chuck broke while in the lead, but he was literally driving the wheels off that car.

The weekend for us went relatively well up until Saturday afternoon. On Thursday, thanks to Walt's (metalworker) 7th sense in knowing how to set up a car, Teggy finally felt much more composed than it did a month ago and I could feel the shocks were definitely working for us. We got down to a 1:45.0. We still had some left, but rumor later that day was that Anthony Serra driving the red Integra already turned laps under the 43.9 track record he set last year. This was going to be a tough weekend! Friday came and it was time to qualify and finally see who's got what. Walt made a final change on the rear bar and on the front shocks. I went out and left nothing on the table and to our delight we managed to grab the provisional pole with a 1:43.47, but this was only 0.02 ahead of Anthony and 3 tenths ahead of Stretch. I think this also happened to be the fastest any ITA car has ever lapped Road Atlanta, up to that point that is. The car handled perfectly and it's a distinct pleasure to drive something that does everything just as you want it and when you want it. Not to be outdone and be demoted to the 2nd row, Mr.240SX went out in the second qualifying session and dropped 7 tenths by setting a blistering 1:43.0 lap and getting pole, while Joe Moser driving a CRX got 4th behind Anthony. I am still amazed and excited at how fast ITA was this year. When a 1:43.8 only gets you 4th on the grid, that's saying a lot. And the times continued to drop during the race.

Saturday, and it's finally time to race on a very nice and sunny day. At the start I was lucky and got on the gas a hair sooner than Stretch and with the help of a little tap from Joe Moser, I went first into T1 and more importantly came got out of it first. I tried all I could to build a little gap before the backstraight, but by T7 I only had about two car lengths on Stretch. He was closing in on my rear bumper and I moved to the middle of the track approaching T10, but I would have had to do a lot more than that to prevent him from pulling along side with his speed differential. He made a clean pass in T10. Anthony then got along side me going up the hill exiting 10b and went by in T12. I then had a great view of the fight for first. Serra got out of T7 on Stretch's rear bumper and pulled along side him early on the backstraight. Serra is making incredible power out of that Integra and he passed the 240SX with Stretch then quickly moving in Anthony's draft. At the same time that I was admiring this drag race, the yellow CRX of Joe Moser goes by me and is comfortably ahead by the time we brake for T10. A couple of laps later Moser tries an inside move on Serra in T1 but Serra closes the door. No contact but Moser gets sideways and I am able to scoot by him going into T3. Back to following the Stretch/Serra fight, but not for long because I loose the position again to Moser on the backstraight. By about lap four, I am noticing a couple of potential problems building up. Something is wrong with the brakes as they are getting weak really fast and I am also starting to have trouble putting it into 4th gear (a problem that started to surface on Thursday). A few laps later, and the situation is not looking good. The car has popped out of 4th gear three times, twice in T1 and once in T12, and I was having a hard time getting it into 4th gear on the backstraight. It was kind of fun to get these extra shots of adrenalin (as if I didn't have enough of it!) by unexpectedly hitting neutral in T1 and T12, but the bottom line was that this was costing us time and we were now racing Beyersdorf for 4th. This was a lot of fun, but finally it came to an end going into the braking in T6 on lap 15. I hit the brakes and for a half a second everything was fine, but then it was as if the brake pedal got disconnected and went straight to the floor. I've been off in T6 a few years before and got really close and personal with the cement wall there to crack it, and I did NOT want to have that same encounter again with the beautiful new car! But it looked inevitable. I was coming into T6 way too fast. It was either go off straight and hit nose first into the tire wall, or try to make the turn while scrubbing off some speed and then sliding across the grass and come to a stop, possibly before the cement wall that was farther away. The risk was that there was no tire wall here. I gambled and tried the latter approach and somehow got the car sideways enough on the asphalt to scrub off speed and change the direction away from the wall to just slide across the grass to a complete stop. I was SO relieved. The handbrake still worked, so I was able to drive slowly back to the pits. Upon parking the car in the paddock, the front right wheel decided to throw a little bond fire by burning brake fluid (that we later noticed leaked all over the wheel). So we had a little scramble for a fire extinguisher to put out the bond fire. Something must have been really wrong with the brakes because even after taking the wheel off you could not even touch the spindle because it was so hot. One theory we have that for whatever reason the front right brake could have been dragging from the start of the race, which caused it to heat up this much. This explains the weak brakes and why we were a little weak on the straights. Although we could have probably fixed the brake issue on Saturday, it was the transmission popping out of 4th gear that kept us from running the 3 hour enduro on Sunday, which is unfortunate because I am sure that this came as a disappointment for Walt and Louis who were ready to drive it on Sunday.

Either way, we will learn a lot from this. We also have several areas that we can improve on the car and that's really encouraging. The bar in ITA has been raised significantly this year from the last few years. But next year however we are going to give it our best to raise it even higher. I already can't wait for next season!

I was in exactly the same situation man! That was a long wait. lol

 

Too bad Chuck broke while in the lead, but he was literally driving the wheels off that car.


Absolutely. Chuck is a great driver and that car has serious power for an ITC car. At one point all three Hondas hooked up in a draft down the back straight and we STILL couldn't get by him. If they can figure out how to make that thing actually finish a race, it'll be very hard to beat.

 

Congrats Scott, I wish I could have been there to see the A and C race.

Ivan

 

Hracer,
Glad to have finally meet you. Also, I was wondering why I didn't see you during the enduro and now I know why. Hopefully your transmission problems aren't that serious.

 

Hey Richy, I'm glad to have finally met you. The tranny is not too hurt and it still goes into 4th gear if shifting carefully. We could have attempted a fix at the brakes on Saturday, but being a new and pretty car, we just elected to not take the risk of running the car for 3 more hours with it randomly popping out of 4th gear. If it wants to go home, well we'll take it home.

Hope to see you around soon!

 

Here's a couple of pictures from the weekend. I didn't take any, but I'll post as I stumble across them on the web...

These are from IT.com regular George Roffe.

Alex's (Hracer) beautiful new Integra.
Started outside row 1 but had mechanical issues. Next year...



This is an interesting picture because it was snapped about 1 to 2 seconds before I got punted into the pea gravel in the foreground. If you look closely you can see that the "ATI" Miata is already countersteering and is about to spin. I've identified this and am checking up. The guy behind me... Well... He didn't check up.


If you've never been to Road Atlanta, just look at those esses in the above picture and ask yourself why the hell not.


Lucho DeCastro's Prelude (Formerly Fowler's but still prepped by OPM). The amazing thing about this car is that it did a barrel roll at Roebling 3 weeks ago. I don't think there was a straight panel left on the car, and the wheels weren't really pointed in the right direction. Now look at it, just a few weeks later. Unreal.




Modified by Catch 22 at 11:20 PM 11/10/2004

 

j00 linked the same picture twice.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Sean O’Gorman &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">j00 linked the same picture twice. </TD></TR></TABLE>

LOL, I was trying to figure out what was different between the two. Then I was thinking WTF to what scott was saying.

 

Do the IT7 guys make their cars look horrible on purpose?

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by krshultz &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Do the IT7 guys make their cars look horrible on purpose?</TD></TR></TABLE>

The fast ones actually look pretty good.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by krshultz &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">Do the IT7 guys make their cars look horrible on purpose?</TD></TR></TABLE>

It is a mystery.
Maybe Cousin Crack can help us out with that one.

Scott, who upon giving it some thought says "Hmmmm... There really doesn't seem to be such a thing as a pimpy IT7 car."

PS - Speaking of pimpy... Paul Degionne's new ITA Integra is Pimpy with a capital PIMP. That thing has more effort in the gauge panel than I have in my whole car.

 

Anyone have some video of the ARRC they could share? I'm curious to see the track...

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by Catch 22 &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">

It is a mystery.
Maybe Cousin Crack can help us out with that one.

Scott, who upon giving it some thought says "Hmmmm... There really doesn't seem to be such a thing as a pimpy IT7 car."

PS - Speaking of pimpy... Paul Degionne's new ITA Integra is Pimpy with a capital PIMP. That thing has more effort in the gauge panel than I have in my whole car.</TD></TR></TABLE>

Sure, Vicini's most recent IT7 was quite nice ... 4 seconds slower than the nappy last one. Dobson's is always in nice shape too. Carlos Garcia's looked pretty good at the 2002 ARRC IIRC as well. But by and large, using Crayon to pimp up an IT7 does seem to be the general M.O.

Speaking of pimp, 42.7!!!

Too bad the old #02 had to leave the building Friday - I'll miss that car :sniff: