In retrospect I probably should have started a thread like this back in 2009 when I first discovered GRM and got semi-serious about working on my cars. But that didn't happen, and all this time I figured this would be a nice place to do a running summary of what we've got here in our crowded little driveway and what kind of fun we're having working on them and enjoying them. So while there's a decade-plus of missed history, maybe we can make up for lost time with frequent updates going forward.
We'll start out with introducing the fleet, and #1 on that list is Captain Slow, a lovely 1990 Miata
I bought Slow in September 2008. It as a super clean rust-free car that the previous owner did a lot of work to, including pulling the engine to do all the belts/seals/stuff, detailed the engine bay, reassembled everything, and then had his basement flood. So I bought an 18 year old car that I pretty much didn't have to do anything to right off the bat.
Slow joined a fleet that was made up of my super clean '99 Sport, which the wife handed over to me after my first Miata, a decent '96, was totaled in an accident. She liked the '99 but really wanted a Mazdaspeed Miata. While looking for her dream MSM, she found this '90 and figured I should get it. I fought the idea, saying there was no reason for me to have two while she had none, but since she never has a bad idea I eventually came around and got it. I didn't have it long before I found a British Racing Green hardtop for it, and decided it needed BRG stripes to go along with that.
Slow was my weapon of choice when I decided to try autocrossing, but was shelved in favor of the '93 Ugly Duckling when we really got serious in 2011 because I didn't want to take the roll bar out... made a lot more sense to just build another car than decontent this one (nobody said I made a lot of sense). But when we realized that the rules prevented us from legally adding a VLSD to a '93 base model, I decided to bite the bullet and make Slow the serious STS car. The roll bar came out, all the good stuff from the '93 moved over, and it turned out to be a decent car. It went to Solo Nationals three times (2014-2016) with a best result of 36 out of 63 in 2015.
We switched to STR with NCs for 2017, so Slow got retired. I never took any parts off of it, so it was always ready to go if the mood struck me, but it didn't get to play that often. That changed after I did a handful of Refrigerator Bowl trackcrosses in a friend's car and decided I'd like to do some track stuff. Shame I didn't keep the roll bar I took out of Slow back in 2014 (it sold FAST, oops). The wife got me a new roll bar for Christmas and I ran my first Track Night in America in spring 2019, where I earned my first talking-to after managing to fall off the track in a tight corner at Dominon Raceway.
I found Slow to be a fantastic track car. It did nothing wrong, never surprised me, was very easy on tires and brakes, etc etc. I wound up doing four Track Nights at Dominion in 2019, and threw a Torsen into it for 2020. When autocross pretty much didn't happen last year, I doubled down on Track Nights, doing three at Dominion as well as doing one each at VIR, Lime Rock, and PittRace. Lime Rock was a blast, but I was underwhelmed at VIR and Pittrace as those places, for the first time, brought home the fact that I was driving a Slow Car.
At the end of 2020 I got talked into going to SCCA's Time Trials Nationals in lieu of the cancelled Solo Nationals, despite the fact that I had never done a time trial before. Initially they slotted me into the novice group, but I whined about that and got moved to advanced, where there were four groups sorted by theoretical car speed. I was in the slowest of the four groups, and they regridded each group based on best lap time, and by the time the last session was gridding up on Sunday afternoon, I was the last car in grid. Slowest driver out of 120+ Advanced drivers. Slow was certainly slow, and I wasn't helping it. Still it was a good time, four days on a pretty nice track, but I had no hope (or ambition, to be honest) of being competitive in class.
I consider Slow to be my "forever" car, one I can't fathom ever selling, always fiddling with, but keeping it true to its '90 Miata base model philosophy. With no A/C, no power steering, and no creature comforts, it's just an honest little car that I can toss around with abandon and have a big old grin doing it. We make beautiful music together.
We must have missed each other at Dominion last year. I was out there a couple times with TNiA. While there were a few Miatas, I don't recall this one. Plans for 2021? I'll be at Dominion in April, VIR in May and probably back at Dominion in June.
. That is my watching dot.
In reply to infernosg :
I'm planning on being at all Dominions (might have to skip one but can't remember which), Lime Rock and VIR in May. Switching to a NC if all goes well.
OK after a longer weekend than I planned I am back to pick this up again. Continuing on with the introduction of the fleet, next up is the 2010 MX-5 PRHT known as "Bruce." Bruce showed up with little warning. Danny Kao had done all the hard work of prepping it for STR and put it up for sale right about the same time we broke the '08 NC we were running in STR. Initially I resisted buying it, thinking that going from the wrong car for the class to another wrong car for the class wasn't going to be a move in the right direction, but it was certainly the easy button as I didn't need to do anything to it to start competing with it.
Compared to the NC1, Bruce was significantly better prepped. Danny built it with MCS singles, Karcepts sway bars front and rear, OS Giken diff, and a stout tune. Despite weighing in 120 lbs heavier than the NC1, it was more competitive right off the bat. It went to three Solo Nationals, with a best result of 29/57 in 2018 (some day we'll find our way into the top half of our class).
As STR became spec ND we kept fighting the good fight with the NC, and when we ran Tours and Pros we were usually the best non-ND in the class. This didn't mean much since that usually meant we weren't in the trophies, but sometimes we could sneak in and surprise some people. I had an epic first day at the first Charlotte Champ Tour where I ran a time that put me 4th on day one, and we were having a grand ole time whooping it up and high-fiving, then later discovering that run had a cone on it. Oops!
Me and Bruce had a fantastic weekend up north in 2018. I towed it up to western Massachusetts and unloaded it there, leaving my truck and trailer in my sister's driveway. First day, me and Bruce took on Mount Greylock which has a couple fantastic winding roads going up to the summit. I didn't get arrested but a cop did stop by when I was taking a breather and shooting some pictures, warning me to "keep it under a hundred."
The next day I went to Lime Rock Park to run an "autocross" on the kart track hosted by the Nutmeg Miata Club. I hoped to do well but wound up with FTD on the day. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Lime Rock tracks all the times people run on their kart track during the year and invite the top 30 back for a no-cost end-of-year shootout to decide that year's champion. The time I ran with Nutmeg put me in the top five on the list at the time, and I only fell to maybe eighth or ninth by the end of the year.
The day after Lime Rock, I went to the Museum of Transportation in Brookline Massachusetts for Miata Day and entered the car show on a whim. Imagine my surprise when ol Bruce got the second-best NC award in the popular vote.
Since I earned a spot in the end-of-year Lime Rock autocross shootout, I trucked up there again in October. The day turned out to be super cold, windy, and rainy. I put on half-worn RE71R and spun about 25 times in practice, but got fourth out of the 17 or so who showed up (of the 30 invited), one out of the awards naturally.
We've done some cosmetic improvements to Bruce that I really like. A couple years ago I had the roof, windshield frame, and mirrors painted black, and it transformed the car. I've gotten a lot of compliments in grid at various autocrosses, which would be great if we were at a car show, but unfortunately there are cones and timers and stuff that make the car a little less impressive. But I enjoy it very much.
But Bruce's days of serious autocross car were numbered. Our co-driver bought a 2019 Miata and we prepped that for STR almost immediately. We've had it out a handful of times and that car is just stupid fast, and we're enjoying some success with it, and while we haven't run it back-to-back with Bruce it's obvious that the NC is going to get absolutely crushed by the ND2s. So Bruce is more or less put out to pasture in that arena.
But Bruce will be back! After seeing how slow the Captain is on longer tracks, I'm curious to see if Bruce will be less of a rolling chicane. I'm in the process of installing a Cybul roll bar in the car, and will be installing a race seat as low as possible to get under that (it's a bit of a challenge in PRHTs, but it can be done). With track-friendly pads we'll be ready to give Bruce a maiden voyage at Dominion Raceway in mid-April. If all goes well, it'll also make the trip out to NCM Motorsports Park to run SCCA's Time Trials Nationals in June.
Nice job on the two-tone. That looks really nice.
So many RPF1s!
People have said that NCs should have come with RPF1s stock. I've had a bunch. After buying our first NC, I found a ratty set of 17x8s locally. Put them on the car and hated them (they're very different than the 17x9). Sold those pretty quickly. My first set of 17x9 were SBC finish which I love, and I had to go to Connecticut to get them. When we decided to give STR a try, I got a second set, in silver, plus a set of filthy PF01s and a cheap set of 6ULRs that I wound up not liking and sold them without ever using them.
When we bought Bruce, it came with a set of black wheels. It made things easy to keep straight which were the newer better tires vs the older ones.
As we got out of serious STR with the NCs, someone locally bought a NC that came with SBCs and he didn't like them. He made a post looking to trade them for silver or black straight-up and I swapped the black wheels for them. So we have one set of silver and two sets of SBCs. I sold the PF01s and kinda regret that now since I wouldn't mind another set of 17x9 for track wheels as I have a pretty good stash of half-used RE71R with nothing to put them on till I start wearing out some of the ones on wheels now.
SBC is the best. I had RPF1s on my old car and I wanted SBC, but they didn't come with that finish in the specs I needed. They look great on the Miata.
Back with another introduction of the fleet. This one is our first NC, a 2008 named "Sloppy."
I had zero interest in NCs, even when this one showed up at a WDCR autocross with a for-sale sign on it. It was rough: interior plastics missing from a roll bar install, dented fender, and generally beat up all around despite having very few miles (26K in 2015). Danny Kao bought it and quickly addressed the interior and the fender, but then he put it up for sale.
The wife called me from work. "I never do anything for myself," she started. I knew where this was going but played dumb. "What do you want?" "I really want Danny's NC." Anyone who knows us knows that the wife gets what she wants, so the car came home pretty quickly after that.
The car came on lowering springs with the black stock shocks, but Danny included a set of near-zero-mile Bilsteins that he was going to put in. The weekend after the car came home, we put the shocks in. The joke going around was that we were finishing what Danny started, and the car was affectionately known as "Danny's Sloppy Seconds," or Sloppy for short.
I took it to an autocross the next day and was surprised at how well it performed. But after that, I tried to disassociate myself from the car. It was her car, she was free to drive it as much or as little as she wanted and do whatever she wanted. This lasted maybe two weeks. She had to have her left ankle operated on, which meant no clutch for a while. I drove Sloppy around to keep the rotors from getting crusty and found myself really liking the car. Then the parts started showing up: RPF1s, exhaust, Ohlins, and even a hardtop that we bought cheap from a crashed race car. I had Little Mike Snyder tint it and make a quasi Club stripe for the bottom of the door.
I committed to run STS for 2016, but dabbled with Sloppy in STR occasionally. Our big adventure was doing the first "Cars & Cones" road trip put on by FM3 marketing. It was a five-day autocross odyssey that started Monday at ZMax near Charlotte, then went to Smokies Stadium in Tennessee, and two days at NCM Motorsports Park. The thing was geared way more to the Pro Touring/Corvette/Camaro crowd, but there were a few of us running with our little foreign cars.
The tour didn't run anywhere Thursday, and the organizers arranged a bus trip for everyone to go tour a bunch of distilleries. I don't drink so I skipped that. I left after dinner on Wednesday, crashed at a Motel6, and was at the Tail of the Dragon early in the morning. It was a chilly misty wet Dragon but I had the place to myself and it was EPIC. I took ten passes total and made it back to Bowling Green in time for dinner.
Sloppy also got to go to Connecticut for the get-together that Nutmeg Miata Club put on. The highlight of that was "autocross" on Lime Rock's kart track, my first time there, where it got FTD by a fairly large margin.
For 2017 we decided we'd give serious STR a shot. I put in a header and arranged to have a remote tune by Moto East. The car didn't seem much more lively after that so I went and got a real dyno tune at PTuning in Virginia. They asked me what to set the rev limiter to and I did a quick Google to see what others were running these at. I think I said 7800 RPM, which in retrospect was probably too high. I also had them add launch control.
First time out for Sloppy after that was the Toledo Pro. Co-driver Trevor brought the car back sputtering, and it would barely run for me. We were done for the weekend. I thought it was really done for, as I was told of timing wheels on camshafts needing repair after other cars failed similarly. OBDII reported a code for the cam angle sensor, and I took a chance on seeing if replacing that sensor would fix it, and it did. But people said the car would keep breaking like this, or worse, if we kept bouncing off the rev limiter, so Sloppy got retired and that's when Bruce the silver car showed up to take over.
Sloppy's had a pretty boring life after this. When Kate got her yet-to-be-introduced NC Club in early 2020, Sloppy surrendered its Ohlins and exhaust for the new car. I got a set of used springs and shocks for it to ride on, so it doesn't have silly stock NC ride height, but it's no autocross car anymore (even though I took it to one just a couple weekends ago since it was raining and I knew we weren't going to go fast enough to get to the limiter). I've been treating it as a around-town errand car since it still drives great. But it doesn't have to be here anymore. When I get a few dull moments I'll start cleaning the car up and see if anyone wants to take it off our hands.
How about another introduction. This one is our 1993 Miata, the Ugly Duckling. The wife found it at a junky used car lot south of town. I went to check it out and it was solid, but unloved. The place wanted $3K for it and I passed. Eventually they put it on Craigslist for $2500, then $2K. I drove it then and found it better than expected, and offered $1500. They countered with $1800 and I bit just because I wanted to get it for under $2K. It got brakes, a timing belt and clutch and it was a decent little car for an absolute base model. July 2009:
The wife used the Duckling for autocross, and we often rolled into events with two cars (this and Captain Slow) mostly because we weren't aware that two people could share a car. Even when we knew this, well, we weren't too good at sharing. She ran STS alongside me even though the car was still box-stock aside from a set of 15" wheels from my '99. It was slow but well-behaved.
The Duckling didn't really have a purpose aside from just being a cheap car. I had Slow and the '99, while Kate had this and her MSM and obviously liked the MSM better. But we're not good at selling cars so it stuck around. Fast forward to late 2010, when we decided we were going to try "serious" autocross despite absolutely no results in anything we ran up to that point to indicate that we were any good at doing it. We set a goal of going to Solo Nationals in 2011 and, since Slow was not really a legal STS car and I wasn't interested in taking any parts off to make it legal or right, we decided to start over from scratch with the Duckling. I got a set of custom valved Fatcat Bilstein coilovers, the big Racing Beat front sway bar, and called it a nationally-prepped STS car.
The car was getting faster, but it was also getting uglier. The dreaded early '90s white paint was coming off in chunks and, in true Parsimonious Racing fashion, I wasn't going to pay anyone to fix it. I decided to tackle prepaing the car for paint myself and have my dad shoot it in his garage. In true Parsimonious Racing fashion, I half-assed the prep and that was reflected in the final product. The car's name was Ugly Duckling because I thought I could transform it into a beautiful swan with paint. But when the paint didn't come out well, the car remained an Ugly Duckling.
We had two BRG hardtops. On Slow, I had BRG stripes put on to match it. Duckling's hardtop was too nice to repaint, so I was limited to painting the car itself a color that would work with that, and I was also not interested in having two white cars. So I elected to go with painting the car BRG and eventually add white stripes to be the opposite of Slow.
Duckling's first national autocross was the 2011 Toledo Tour, and we were way in the cellar of STS. Undaunted, we went to Lincoln for our first Nationals expecting to get boat-raced. And we were (31st and 34th out of 39). It's a miracle that we decided to go back. In 2012 we were 33 and 39 out of 39 (earning the car's license plate DFLNSTS), and in 2013 we were 17 and 19 out of 20 running Rivals while everyone else was sticking with the tried and true Toyos in their last year of 140TW eligibility.
The Duckling was a decent car as we drove it more. I won the DC region STS championship in 2012, going 7-for-7 winning every time out.
But the more we drove it, the more its biggest shortcoming was becoming apparent. It needed a VLSD, and while you could get a VLSD in any configuration from 1990-1992, in 1993 you couldn't get one in a base model like our car. We could do a package conversion to one that would let us put that diff in, but the biggest thing that would involve would be adding power steering, and I wasn't up for that. So in spring 2014 we switched to running Captain Slow and the Duckling was retired.
Since then, the car has been more or less a beater. It thrives on neglect, and I make sure it gets plenty. It still has most of its STS goodies on it, but doesn't get to play much. The last time it saw any real activity was on a test & tune day where I was working safety, and everyone working there used it for a one-run challenge over the lunch break.
The paint has faded quite a bit. I can get it to shine up with enough compound and wax and stuff, but it only lasts a month or so and it gets dull and you can see where the decals used to be. It's getting rusty on the drivers side rear quarter. It needs a lot of gaskets and stuff under the hood too. But on the other hand I'm pretty OK getting in the car and driving it 500 miles to mom & dad's, bopping around town up that way, and going 500 miles home again knowing it won't leave me stranded. It can still keep up with traffic and be pretty entertaining on the fun roads.
I've knocked this car out of commission a handful of times when I needed to steal parts off it for Slow, but always come back to put it back together and keep driving it, even if it's just going to the grocery store and back. It's a great car, even if it's essentially worthless. There's no reason to keep it around but I can't see parting with it.
We're winding down on the introductions, with the last of the current fleet. It's a 2013 Club PRHT affectionately named "Slushie."
I noticed in lateish 2019 that Kate wasn't driving any of the Miatas to work and back, even in decent weather. Then I rode with her on one of her morning commutes, and I realized why. Going from southern Maryland to her office on the banks of the mighty Anacostia just outside of DC proper involved a mind-numbing amount of stop-and-go traffic that is a chore driving something with a clutch. I suggested she consider replacing Sloppy the '08 with an automatic-trans NC, preferably with the PRHT. She thought that would be a good idea.
We looked at a blue '10 in town that was nice, but I thought it was a bit overpriced and the dealer wasn't playing (I did not realize how well PRHTs were holding their value). It's just as well that we passed on that as Kate confessed that she would rather have a Club (NC3 vs NC2), and ideally a black one. There weren't many out there. There was one at a Carmax north of Baltimore but it got reserved while we were driving up to check it out.
This one was at a Ford dealer in Toledo. It looked like a garage queen and only had 7700 miles on it. The dealer had it listed for $21K which I thought was just outrageous, and we waited it out as the price trickled down week by week. It finally got to a number we were good with, and we spent New Years Day 2020 trucking to Toledo, and showed up at the dealer when they opened to get the car.
Since we did not like stock NC ride height, and Sloppy was going to get sold eventually, I took the Ohlins and Progress front bar off of Sloppy and put them on the new car. Someone asked "Why Ohlins on an automatic commuter car?" Simple answer: because we already had them.
We thought that Slushy was going to become a competition car after all. Kate had to have yet another left foot surgery, but still wanted to run three Pro Solos to qualify for the Pro Finale. She'd still be in a walking boot by the time the Charlotte Pro came around, so she'd run that in this car. But all that got canceled with Covid so Slushy still has not made an autocross run.
I traded a set of black RPF1s for a set of SBCs and put Conti ECS on those, and that's what Slushy rides on for the most part (after a very necessary rear fender roll). Lowered and on those aggressive wheels, the car looks very sharp.
While still not yet autocrossed, Slushie got to play at a Track Night in America last September, It was Kate's first time on a track and she enjoyed it very much, and is looking forward to doing more.
This is really the last of the introductions, with the balance of the fleet and a plus-one.
This is the workhorse, the 2019 Ram 1500.
We started towing with a 2011 4Runner, which was good but not great. We moved to a big boy truck in 2014 with a Ram 1500, and replaced that with this 5th generation Ram when I couldn't keep Kate from drooling over the new ones. It's nice: Hemi engine, 6'4 box, 3.92 gears, 33 gallon gas tank. It's the Laramie model so it has leather, the big screen, the big sunroof, all the toys Kate had to have. Tows effortlessly, and doesn't really get used otherwise.
Next is the dreaded MGB, mentioned in my posts here fairly often.
I purposely chose a picture of the car with a year's worth of crust on it because I don't want anyone getting the impression that it's a nice car. It was a ratty patched-together clunker when I bought it in 1987 and it never got much better. It has probably my dad's best front yard paint job but underneath it's all Bondo and questionable mechanical ability. It should have gone to the boneyard back in the '90s but it just kept going, and we kept fixing stuff when it broke, but I'm kinda done with it at this point and I've been dragging my feet figuring out the best way to make this go away.
Finally, a car that's not even ours but will definitely be showing up in this thread quite a bit down the road: Marmy, the 30AE
This is Trevor's car, and I'm lucky that he lets me co-drive it. He bought it with the goal of going straight to STR with it, and we had it ready to go for the start of the 2020 season. It was put together with all the Karcepts goodies and we're fine-tuning it with help from Ryan Davies, and the results are already very encouraging. I got third with it at the Dixie Tour and second at the Charlotte Pro, and I can't wait to do more with it, especially at Nationals. The 30AE cars are all sequentially numbered, and this one is #0197/3000, which is why I am 97STR and Trevor is 197STR.
Claff said:In reply to infernosg :
I'm planning on being at all Dominions (might have to skip one but can't remember which), Lime Rock and VIR in May. Switching to a NC if all goes well.
So... Dominion in two days? I'll be there in the stupid loud orange RX7 and at VIR in May. I'm kind of wanting to do a Friday at the Track (FATT) at Summit Point in June or July but I just saw they have a 103 dB sound limit they strictly enforce. Dominion is supposed to have a 99 dB limit but I haven't been bothered yet. I'll probably be back at Dominion in August and September unless something else catches my eye.
I know that RX7. I'll come by and say hi on Thursday.
Speaking of Thursday, here's a post about actually doing something rather than just showing what we're working with (and I missed one, the 2008 Fit that the wife does most of her commuting with). Track Night in America will be at Dominion Raceway, our "home" track which is still 90 minutes from home. Both Kate and I signed up, so that means two cars to prepare. Her car is easy: take out the stock brake pads, swap in more aggressive stuff, bleed the brakes (system was flushed last September), and wash the car which won't matter in 24 hours because it's pollen season and it's going to rain tomorrow and of course it's a black car.
For Bruce, it was a little more involved. The car has had a noisy right front wheel bearing for a while now. I can't feel any play in it but the sound was getting impossible to ignore. I got a wheel bearing and hoped to get the old one out of the knuckle without much drama, but it wasn't budging. I also couldn't get the brake rotor off, so there's a lot to do there. For convenience, I got a pair of used front knuckles from Redline and figured putting those in would get me on track this week, and buy me some time to get the old ones apart and new bearings in for spares down the road. I was happy that all three ball joints separated fairly easily and the knuckle swaps were quick. I got new rotors and got all that together with the track pads, and flushed the brake system since I can't remember if I had done that before with this car.
Weather permitting, I should get the silver car cleaned up and on the trailer tomorrow afternoon, and we'll have some happy tales to report back after Thursday.
Thursday we ran our first Track Night and I'm happy to report that all went well and we're all smiles.
Kate sounds like she's about ready to move out of Novice as she isn't liking the traffic there. She made darn sure she was the first car in line on pit road before her last session, and got to enjoy plenty of open track. She still isn't comfortable enough to try shifting the car 'manually' but I guess if it came down to her thinking about gears at the expense of concentration on the track and traffic around her, I can live with he leaving the car in Drive and letting the computers and stuff handle the gears for her. She wound up running consistently faster laps than when she was there last September in an unchanged car, with her fastest lap four seconds faster than her best.
This was the first time out for Bruce and wow is it head and shoulders better than the '90 in every way imaginable. Modern features like power steering and anti-lock brakes are appreciated, as is enough torque to drive out of corners. It turned in much more sharply than Slow and that took some getting used to. But the big difference was on the stopwatch. While the best lap I've run in Slow was a 1:43.XX, Bruce ran a 1:38.4. I don't even know what to fix. There's a little mid-corner push in longer turns but I don't know if I want to risk changing too much to try and address it.
A good time was had by all. Made some new friends, shot some pictures, hung out, drove fast, and everybody went home in one piece. With fellow NC driver Danny Kao it was a great day at the track.
Bonus picture for infernosg
In reply to Claff :
It was good to meet and briefly talk to you. I agree with your wife that the traffic got a little heavy in Novice at times. I think we managed to stay pretty far apart during all the sessions although I may have ended up behind her at the end of the second(?) one. I think I'll stay in Novice for June and re-evaluate after. Overall I'm pleased with my driving but I made one boneheaded move that earned me a black flag in the second session, which tells me my head isn't quite ready for intermediate yet. Thanks for the picture and I hope to see you out there again!
One of the things I really like about Track Night is that it's a Thursday (in the case of Dominion), and I still have a weekend left to do other things.
Washington DC Region ran its first points autocross on Sunday. Our co-driver with the ND wasn't going, so I decided to take Bruce. This meant a quick trip to the Quickjack to put street brake pads in.
This was WDCR's third try at Summit Point's Washington Circuit and we're still kinda feeling our way around there. Paddock is still tight and trailer parking is not great so I just drove the car there (2 hours from home). Course was a bit on the short side, I got down to a high 38 second run while others were in the 35s with the really fast cars. I can easily make an argument for adding another half hour or so to my drive and wind up at VMP where a legit 60 second course can be built. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss FedEx Field.
On an unrelated subject, Trevor the ND owner informed me that his new job is going to prevent him from doing much traveling until he gets some service time in and can accrue vacation days. So this puts the kibosh on more travel events in Marmy the STR car. We had planned on doing the Finger Lakes champ tour and maybe the Bristol double, but I'm not going by myself even though he did offer the car for me to take. When Kate heard this, she started poking around the Track Night site and I got a barrage of "do you want to go back to Pittrace?" "Do you want to go to Thompson?" and I was kinda meh about those.
But then she asked if I wanted to go to Road Atlanta and my mind clicked. That would be fun to go back to. My dad made an annual trip to the Runoffs there going back to the '70s, and I got to tag along on those trips starting in around 1980 and joining him on many of those trips until the Runoffs abandoned Road Atlanta and we stopped going altogether. I still have the T-shirt from the 1989 Runoffs. So yes, I said, I would like to go to Road Atlanta, and signed up to go there in June. That should be fun.
I have the Cybul roll bar in Bruce the silver PRHT. Overall the bar is a nice piece: all the bolt holes lined up and it had predrilled/tapped holes to remount all the electronic stuff that were mounted to the original roll hoops structure. But one thing that didn't line up well was the catching mechanism for the hard top.
This is hard to explain to those not familiar with the PRHT mechanism, which I hadn't been before launching into this project. But here's the thumbnail description of the issue at hand: there is a smallish tab (1" x 1" and maybe smaller than that) under the front of the most forward roof panel. When the top goes down, that tab lands on a pad that is part of the latching mechanism which mounts on the crossbar of the stock roll hoop structure. As the rearmost panel closes, a hook goes over the top of that tab and pulls the roof panel down and doesn't allow it to move as the car drives.
When that latch was put on the Cybul roll bar, it was too far rearward and the tab on the roof panel landed on the top of the hook that grabs the tab rather than the pad. The rear panel still closed and while the roof panel didn't rub on anything despite sitting on top of the hook, it wasn't secure and I imagine there could be contact on a bumpy enough road.
In the picture below, the tab is seen sitting on top of the hook, well, it's on top of the hook mechanism. You can see the hook finding no purchase. The tab is supposed to be resting on the rubber-looking thing on the left side of the latch mechanism.
The obvious fix was to redrill the holes on the roll bar bracket to allow the whole latch mechanism to move forward enough that the roof tab will land where it should. I did that, but it didn't buy me enough room and it was unsuccessful. Since I'm a hack mechanic, that meant just drill even more. That got me most of the way there, but still not enough. So I had to drill new holes on the latch itself. That wound up working. In the picture below you can see the tab resting on the rubber pad like it should, with the hook atop it holding it securely.
It's still not 100% fixed since, while the tab lands on the pad and the hook successfully grabs said tab and holds it securely, it's not a nice smooth operation. There might be some tension there as the roof releases from that latch with a SPROING when putting the roof up (the tab contacts the vertical pieces that surround the hook on its way up). I don't have any more room to elongate holes in either the roll bar bracket or the latch itself. My gut says to just grab the bottom of the latch and give it one good UNF to bend it just slightly upward and forward, maybe that'll be enough movement to get everything to line up properly again. But it seems so inelegant.
On the plus side, sourcing a replacement latch for this is easy and not expensive if I happen to really harm it.
On the other hand, I'm pretty good at ignoring little nagging stupid stuff like this if it doesn't materially affect the actual operation of the assembly in question. If I had to hazard a guess at how I'm going to deal with this, it's probably going to be ignoring it until the winter when I think I'll take a real serious look at what's not right and figuring out what it'll take to make it right. Or forget about it completely until next spring.
This is not a Miata.
It is also not mine.
We haven't had much to report here at Parsimonious Racing HQ thanks to chilly weather and no pressing stuff needing to get done. My buddy Greg buzzed me the other day asking about GoPro mounting solutions. He has a BSP MSM and has had more than a few camera lenses/cases busted by rocks thrown by Hoosiers when he stuck his camera to the side of his car behind the drivers door. I showed him videos from my old STS days where I mounted my camera to a piece of bar stock attached to the Kirkey passenger seat. As a matter of fact, I added, I'm not using that anymore so he was welcome to use it if he wanted to try something different.
Greg decided to pick it up this morning and showed up with his newest ride. It's a 2017 Grand Sport 7-speed, and he let me take it for a little ride around the nearby back roads. It's the first C7 I've driven and it left me with the same impression I've left previous drives in C5s and C6s: it's a very nice car, surprisingly comfortable, very powerful, and very BIG. Obviously the comfort can be dialed up or down depending on what suspension setting is chosen, and I'm sure this was set pretty low on the nice-stun-kill scale. Also, I wasn't trying to go fast since the road, while fairly twisty, is not in great shape in places.
I bet this car would be phenomenal on a track, and I'd love to try one if I didn't have to pay for the brakes and tires. As a street car, I've found most modern Corvettes pretty underwhelming in my old man aversion to breaking speed limits and an unwillingness to test ultimate grip on public roads. I'm sure they're nice, and this C7 was by far the nicest I've driven so far, but I don't have to have one and I don't know what I'd do with one if I did.
Thought about doing some actual work on stuff, and looked at that stupid MGB. It had been on a battery charger for the better part of a week, so I figured that it was going to be up for a bunch of cranking as I tried to figure out why it's not starting. Got in, turned the key a notch and didn't hear the fuel pump. Well, I thought, maybe this will be an easy diagnosis. But then I went one more click to see if it would turn over and got a whole bunch of nothing. No charge light, no dials coming to life, not even a click from the starter. That's when I said out loud "I'm done." So I'll have to figure out how to dispose of a worthless MGB at some point.
After that miserable failure, it was on to something easy. Sloppy the '08 needed to be clean. Not only has it not been washed since sometime last fall, but it has the same problem that afflicts all the outdoor cars here, trees that hang over the driveway drop crud on these cars every spring and fall. Usually I'm on top of this stuff, but Sloppy had a larger than usual accumulation of gunk in the door jambs, trunk opening, inside the gas door, and under the hood. So I gave it a wash, then went after the door jambs and stuff so it doesn't look like a science experiment when a door is opened.
I have no detail photo of this so here's an Instagram selfie instead
Cleaned the trunk opening, conveniently ignoring the random plastic parts that were taken out of Bruce's interior for the roll bar installation. Some day I'll have to figure out how all that goes back together and/or how much has to be cut to accommodate the roll bar.
I like Sloppy. For all of its little bumps and bruises, it still cleans up into a decent ten-footer. I've had a couple people reach out to me about buying it, but I'm not so sure I want to let it go. It wouldn't be bad to have as a backup plan. I figure if I were unfortunate enough to wad up Bruce somehow, it wouldn't be that difficult to transfer all the surviving good bits to this car, and then take it to 11 as a serious track car. But none of that is today's problem.
The latest adventure doesn't involve any of our own vehicles. But there's one more on the property that I didn't bother introducing, mostly because I'm pretty hands-off regading it. We keep the equipment van for Autocrossers Inc. next to the garage since we live the closest to the site that the club runs at. It hasn't gone anywhere in over a year since the club hasn't put on any events since 2019 thanks to Covid and, now, said site is now a mass vaccination center.
Imagine my surprise when I walked past the van the other morning and saw one of its windows busted out.
It's the big window behind the drivers door, so not the ideal window to bust out if you're looking to gain access to anything in the van, so I quickly discounted the possibility of criminal activity. Nothing was missing. My only guess at what happened was that the window was struck by one of those awful gumball things that the trees between our house and the neighbors, maybe when said neighbor was mowing his lawn. I'm sure if he noticed it he would have said something, so maybe it's just random window breakage? Regardless, it had to be dealt with.
Broken automotive glass makes a huge mess. I broke a door window of a car in the driveway many years ago (probably with a mower-weaponized tree gumball) but that window was tinted, and the tint held the glass mostly together so cleanup wasn't that bad. In this case, cleanup was pretty bad. I think I filled my kid-sized shopvac three times between the glass in the yard, on the driveway, and inside the van. I also had to unload all the cones and stuff out of the middle compartment to not only get all the glass sucked up, but also to figure out how the glass is mounted so I could fix it.
Fortunately, the window mounting is pretty simple. Our local U-Pull-It yard claimed to have a pair of E350 vans of the right year and body to have the appropriate size window; whether those vans still had those windows remained to be seen.
I showed up at the yard and they printed me out a list of vans on site with aisle numbers so I could find them, and they gave me a quick verbal how-to-get-there before sending me off. I wandered out there, looked around, couldn't see them. Went back in the office, said I could find Row 11 which had one van that was the wrong year, but couldn't figure out where FOR11 was. A guy gave me similar directions to what I had before, and if I couldn't find them there, go all the way to the back row where buses and stuff are, maybe they're back there.
So I went back out and wandered around for what seemed like an hour, almost every row up and down. No vans. Finally it was getting close to closing time and I threw in the towel. Found another person and said I guess I'll have to come back tomorrow, or really turn in my man card and have them pull it. The guy looked at the sheet and said anything labeled FOR was in a different yard, in Fort Washington, 30-45 minutes away. I don't know why neither of the first two people bothered to tell me this before. Many many years ago I had the thought that the next junkyard I found that had its act together would be the first, and I haven't found that one yet.
The guy said he could have the window pulled and brought to this location tomorrow and it would cost me a hundred bucks. I don't know what it would have cost me to go there and pull it myself, but I wasn't in the mood anymore. I paid for it and I'll get it tomorrow and get it in before the expected evening storm blows in (the hole in the van is covered with a trash bag).
Hopefully I can get this done and over with tomorrow and I can get back to working on fun stuff that actually gets used. Bruce needs its oil changed and a newer coolant overflow tank installed; I thought I'd have that done by now.
All caught up on this thread. Really enjoyed it!
We're starting to get a pretty good flow for putting on events at Summit Point's Washington Circuit, and Sam Strano built us a course with an early loop that got the course length a little closer to what we're used to. It also had some quite fast blasts that were sorely lacking in our previous efforts there this year.
Bruce the NC is still up for the challenge of STR but our 2019 Nationals RE71Rs are starting to act like they're not as grippy as they used to be. I'm not helping things by reverting back to newbie ways of bombing into braking zones and expecting the car to stop on a dime and turn while completely ignoring the laws of physics. I thought I (partially) fixed that for my last couple runs but that didn't show up on the timer.
Six runs is too many for me. I wound up with a 47.3 on my third run and on my fourth it was a 47.2. My last two were both 47.1 so I'm not seeing any improvement the more we run. I considered parking it after run #5 but figured I should take one more shot at it, and I was rewarded with a whopping 0.029 second improvement. Ah well.
In other news, the junkyard got me the van window as promised and we've restored that to wholeness, if not beauty. No pictures because, well, it's a van.
Nice to get a decent day here at Parsimonious Racing HQ. The primary project today was swapping brakes on Captain Slow. I'm doing something called Motorsports 4 The Masses at Summit Point Washington on Saturday. It's supposed to be something halfway between autocross and HPDE. I wasn't going to go to the NJ Tour so I was free this weekend, and the guy who puts on M4TM is someone I've known for some years and he was keen on having me try it, so I'll give it a shot. Since it's sustained lapping on an autocross course, I figured putting the DTC30s and their rotors in wouldn't hurt. Between that and a quick brake bleed, I called that car done.
The bigger project was dealing with Sloppy. I took the hardtop off and put it in the shed a couple weeks ago. A couple days this week we got some big rain, and the wife discovered wet carpet in the car this morning. I thought I had been keeping the roof drains clear, but sometimes they get overwhelmed in storms. The drivers side was dry, but when I pulled the passenger seat out I found a lake.
For the second time in as many weeks, the shopvac got a workout. Fortunately, sucking up water isn't as bad as broken glass, but it's still something I'd just as soon not do. I pulled the carpet up and sucked the water out, but it'll take a day or two of dry and sunshine to get the carpet dried enough to put the interior back together.
My specially designed drain cleaning tool was nowhere to be found, so I had to go to a closet and commandeer an old wire coat hanger to cut and straighten to replace it. The right side roof drain was very much clogged as it still had a lot of standing water waiting to drain, and I got that taken care of. Just to make sure, I put the roof up and ran a hose over it, and was happy to see two puddles form under the car where the drains empty.
With any luck the weather cooperates tomorrow so I can get the car out in the sun and get the carpet dried, plus I'd like to not get rained on while loading Slow on the trailer in preparation for Saturday's fun.
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