I seriously don't know how my wife puts up with me. I took Friday off to run another shakedown track day at Bremerton (which was great), and I was a co-chief both Saturday and Sunday at a two-day autocross our club was hosting. Basically, I spent all three days playing with cars.

Friday's open track day went really well and I think I have my brake issues sorted. I ran a new set of Hawk Blue's, fresh rotors and the recently finished brake ducts. I spent the night at Nash's house on Thursday since he lives so close to the track and bedded in the Blue's on the way there. The car ran flawlessly all day, and I never had a ounce of brake fade. The track is normally set up with 10 turns (runway roadcourse with return road as the main straight), but this time the host club decided to add a new "twist" and make the track into a fun-filled 16 turn layout.

They added a chicane 2/3 of the way down the straight, and added a bunch of staggered offset sloloms on the back section. It was sort of like a big fast open autocross. The one time I looked at the speedo before the chicane, I was just at 100mph, and then you haul it down to about 25-30mph for the chicane. This is opposed to standard configuration where you're (I'm) about 110mph before T1 that's a off-camber left-hander at about 45mph. The new layout offered plenty of opportunity to test the brake ducts.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but previous autocross experience defenately paid off on the new course. Nobody in the "B" grid could touch me. The car was handling wonderfully and I passed just about everything in our grid (not once did I have to give the waive ) We shot 20 minutes of incar video, but had the camera mounted too high, so there's 20 minutes of my rearview mirror with small bits of the track peeking out the sides.

Saturday was another long hot day. My group ran in the morning and I was lucky enough to manage a second place (of 11 entrants) finish by 2-tenths. Spent the entire day at the event site and am now an official racoon (sunglass tan). This was my first time autocrossing the new car and it performed very well. I'm actually suprised how well the 188,000 mile motor is holding up.
Sunday, our group ran the afternoon where I managed to open a can of whoop-*** on my last two runs and take the win by about a second. My wife did actually come out in the afternoon to watch, and was really rooting for me to kick some ***. She's great.

I have the next few weeks off from car stuff and need to spend this time getting the car ready for school and my first Solo-I in August. I toasted the lower right ball joint and the wheel bearings aren't getting any younger. I plan to replace the wheel bearings and ball joints in both sets of knuckles before the school, and get it aligned. I have no idea where the alignment is currently, but it's pulling slightly to the left, especially under heavy braking.

If you're still reading all this, here's some pictures Nash took from Fridays' track day.
http://members7.clubphoto.com/john51...24/guest.phtml

These are pictures I took from Saturday's autocross. I didn't get any pictures from today.
http://members7.clubphoto.com/john51...88/guest.phtml



[Modified by johng, 10:45 PM 7/14/2002]

 

Wow, who's black Civic is that??? Sorry, couldn't resist :D Wish I could have been able to attend the autocross. Just glad I made the track day. High speed events are my new found love

 

I am on the internet too much I think, because I actually recognize some of the cars from your autocross pics, and I live in Michigan. Nice stuff. I love your car BTW. Seems like all the hard work is starting to pay off, huh?

Right click, save as!

Ken

 

TRUNKS 'ownz joo'

 

Nice pics, John.

This lady is like me....cleaning off the cone marks as soon as you're done with your runs. :D