This weekend was DC's annual two-day rallycross, up at Panthera. With the weather looking hot but otherwise awesome, there was a big turnout of around 60 cars, and Mod RWD by far the largest class with 16 entries. In addition to the usual bevy of BMWs (e36 M3, e36, and 6-7 e30s) we also had Chris Nonack come out in his rally Merkur XR4Ti, Andy and Mike finally had their 2ZZZ-swapped MR2 ready to run, a turbo Miata was there, another MR2, and a few other random cars.
Upon arrival in Mooresfield, WV at the local Sheetz, ran into Eric and Neil, who inconveniently had their windows down when the sprinklers turned on and sprayed right into the car, lol
Then we all headed up and found the crowded paddock
The course was hot and dry - and DUSTY. There was a pretty good breeze going, but due to the fact that we used the "backside" course, which snakes back and forth up the hill, the main issue was running into your own dust.
From what we could tell, only Adam Kimmett was fast enough up the hill switchbacks that he outran his own dust in his STi. Shocked. Adam can outrun everything, including dust
With the sun and dust blowing, all the work stations and the timing station had their pop-ups in full effect.
The course wasn't all that much to my liking, honestly (we are limited as to where we can run by the terrain there, so it's not the course designers' fault), but still managed to do ok, though with a few cones. At the end of Day 1, I was in 3rd, a few tenths behind Eric Eisele and almost 12 seconds behind Nick - who as usual had his M3 in top form and drove totally clean and fast.
Then we rode around in the dust in the course van and had some beers and picked up cones
Then we cleaned up and went out and drank for a few hours at the local watering hole across from our hotel, minus Nick (who was rumored to be hand-washing his headband and watching saucy videos of his winning runs on the hotel room TV). As you can see, the Subaru (and Volvo) drivers throw down hard...and the bar staff were so impressed with their drinking accumen, they all showed up the next day to watch :)
Day two was a bit cooler (so, low 90s) and there was rain overnight so that kept down the dust but didn't make the course very slick, thankfully.
We used the front side (larger/power course) this time, which is my favorite since it mixes power elements, hard braking elements, and a lot of great-rythm technical areas as well. I got out to a good jump and immediately knocked a couple seconds off Nick's lead, and then another second. But then he got up to speed and basically started matching me for the rest of the morning, hanging onto about 9-second lead.
I mean, he has a headband. What am i supposed to do?
Meanwhile, Kimmett's trunk wouldn't latch, so many straps were used to tie it down since it kept breaking bungees.
In the afternoon I went out fast and got another 2 seconds back, cutting Nick's lead down to 6-7 seconds or so in one run. On the second run got another second back. Then Nick again got up to speed and started matching me. WIth two runs left it was about a 6-second gap. Against most of us, that could be workable due to cone hits and such, but Nick literally NEVER hits cones (none this whole season, at least called!), so the only way was to push super-hard and just try to be fast. I let Eisele ride shotgun just to see if some balance would help things (and really, at that point I was pretty sure it was beyond catching him, and I had a big lead over 3rd place), but I overshot a braking zone and lost some time while also taking out two cones and that was that. The gap went back to 11 seconds. On my last run I decided to just see how fast I could go running really clean lines, and I beat Nick by 3 seconds as he probably took it a bit easy to avoid any big mistakes. Guess I should have done that the run before, and might have gotten very close. Oh well.
Meanwhile, Eric kind of fell apart and I ended up beating him by almost 20 seconds, with Jeremy Sitar moving up to 3rd in his e36 328i.
So, that's that. I usually would be a bit annoyed, but it's hard to be annoyed losing to Nick. He has a very fast car, pretty new tires, and "cares" more than anyone there - to the extent that between runs when we're all goofing around and chatting he usually sits in the back seat of his (air conditioned) car and watches his previous runs a few times - so he KNOWS the course really well. When it's blind, I usually can beat him by a couple seconds a run, but once he learns the course he's at least as fast as me, and never hits cones. I drove pretty well, with a few mistakes here and there and more cones than I'd like (5-6 all weekend, I think), but that's the breaks. Maybe I should check my tire pressures more than once all day, lol.
I also used some REALLY old tires on Saturday that were not very good. I switched to some sharper (but still well-used) tires on Sunday and was quicker. I should have switched on Saturday at lunch, but it was really hot and I'm kind of lazy :) It's the financial tradeoff - I have a set of brand-new tires in the garage, but they're being saved for STPR. So, will continue to tear up mostly leftover tires from the last couple years until all the 14" tires are dead and I'm totally switched over to 15".
Minor side note: for the last couple events I've had a vague gasoline smell from the car, usually after turning it off - not really when running. Today it was significantly more noticeable. So I pulled off my underbody armor on the side with the fuel/brake lines, and there was some gas-saturated mud on top of it, which was odd. The HP fuel line showed no evidence of leak. The return line, however, looks like it's been rubbing against the rocker pinch seam for some time, and basically rubbed a tiny hole in it, which progressively got worse I guess (though still really tiny). Anyhow, when the car was turned off it would drip down slowly on the undertray and cause the smell (no dripping while running). It's nowhere near the exhaust (or really anything other than the rocker panel), so wasn't real concerned with it, but did a quick fix in the paddock nonetheless.
I found a little tiny piece of hose sitting in the trunk of the car and a hose clamp from the parts box and made a temp fix, which seemed to work:
So, I'll get some hardline and bend a new line in the near future. Otherwise, the car seemed to run fine other than the very noisy transmission bearings (still) and some rear-end clunking that I'll have to take a look for. My Dinan chip should arrive at some point, so that will be a 20hp/20tq bump with a bit lower peak torque RPM and higher redline, so that should be nice as well. Rumor has it the next event will be back at Summit Point (probably on the hardpack clay) so we'll see how that goes. We haven't run at Summit since I swapped, and the Barn Course there that we usually use is really suited to more powerful cars, in my opinion, since it has a couple large straights coming off slow turns usually - so we'll see if the M50 does better there than the M42 did last year.
All in all, as usual a fun weekend seeing all the "rally family" and the typical great competition in my class. It's gonna be a long wait until mid-August when our next event takes place. May have to find some other region to go do a tune-up at.