I did half of a rallycross last weekend and ended up with a single good run. I couldn't back it up and my co-driver raw timed me by about 2 tenths over the session. The site was pretty wet due to all the rain in south Florida. I think Fort Pierce got 6 to 7 inches in the second half of the week. The course designers did a good job working around the standing water but I still had to plan around not steering through the muddy parts.
I had a feeling it was going to be pretty wet out there, but not as bad as I expected. The mud puddles are less fun when you're wearing the mud after you go through it! lol
I finally got a real skid plate on the Z3 and took it to St Lucie.
The ruts were pretty serious due to narrow gates and minimal course changes between heats. I lost a front and rear bumper. I was expecting the front bumper to crack eventually but the rear was a surprise.
A photographer got some videos of the event and it looks like my outside rear is sitting on the bumpstops on acceleration. I like the weight transfer but I am not sure the correct change to increase the ride height at full throttle. I can't really raise the static height because the rear suspension has non-adjustable toe/camber. Springs are about 50% stiffer than stock. Is it time for extra bump stops?
I raised up the suspension, repaired the bumpers, and drove to Huntsville for the Sediv regional event last weekend. My truck is gigantic when you don't have a full family worth of stuff in it. The drive up was uneventuful except for the usual Atlanta traffic jams.
The competition went well. I set the fastest time for the class on each of the three courses. I still need to work on staying off the cones. I hit 5 over the weekend including 3 in one run. Only 1 was due to a real driving error. The rest were due to optimism about the edges of the car.
I am vaguely concerned about the missing center valance that I destroyed at the last local event. I need to decide if extending the skid plate into where it used to be is enough to avoid the rules lawyers. I have the pieces that fell off and tape if it comes down to it.
Here are my quick runs. Looking back, they were a little choppy. There was much more front grip than I was used to. I kept pushing harder in corner entry and it kept sticking. Managing the rear in this car is always work though.
The best part was some central Florida people finally came out to a regional event. I caught a few of them on course.
Overall, we ended with three 1st place trophies, a 2nd place, and one broken master cylinder. The one negative of a totally sweet right hand drive 22B replica is you can't get parts in Alabama at 6pm on a Saturday. Hopefully our winning ways continue through the increased competition at nationals in a few months.
I have now been doing this long enough to have a collection of Leon trophies. They might be a primary motivator to continue.
Sweet collection!
I ran a local rallycross this weekend at The FIRM. It was dry and hot. Grip levels were among the lowest I have seen on the skid pad. It feels like all the medium sized aggregate is gone and we are just running on fluff on top of hardpack. I think I am going to switch to street/snow tires only for future events there.
I just got back from the muddiest rallycross I have ever done at St Lucie. There was exactly the right amount of water for it to pool and flow back into the ruts. The course held together to get everyone 5 runs. I wasn't expecting that. These conditions usually mean we have to cancel the event. Maybe we have finally hit the critical mass of construction sand.
Driving a RWD car on course was rough. The obvious line was full of water most of the way around the course. The mud outside the ruts was pretty soft. I had the best tires and diff on the day and ran away with the class by about 10 seconds per lap.
I am putting the 3 series up for sale soon. I was going to prep it for stage rally but I need to hold off for a few years. The money is mostly there but the time commitment is tough with two kids. Four days of transit for each rally is a lot for a vacation that only I am enjoying. I have a few things to take out of the car like the steering wheel I have owned for 12 years and three cars. Otherwise, I am selling it as it appears in this and previous videos.
Is anyone interested in a stripped out 318ti that has about 7 seasons of rallycross on it?
We just had our last rallycross of the season. I was back in the Z3 after repairing the coilover sleeves. Ground control sent me the wrong sleeves for my Bilsteins and I wasn't savvy enough to figure it out. On the first big compression on course, the sleeves became a stressed member of the suspension.
The new ones are the correct height for my shocks, the correct diameter for my shocks, and significantly thicker. Looking back, I don't know what I was thinking.
We connected the east and west fields at the rallycross to run a long course. The whole venue was pretty soggy after all the rain we have been getting. I was happy to run first. I don't often get the chance to practice the grass -> topsoil -> dirt change over a run group.
I bought new tires for the first time in two and a half years in preparation for rallycross nationals. I forgot how much grip new tires have. It was so nice to be able to turn in and have the car follow instructions.
With the new tires, I was putting about 15 seconds a run on the rest of the class running street/snow tires. The big win is how awesome the car sounds at the top of the rev range. The fast section into the finish lights felt great in the car.
After ripping the right side bumper mounts off the car a few events ago, I ripped the left side mounts off at the end of the first set of runs. I probably could have taped it up and finished the day but I didn't want to spend a week sourcing a prepared legal coupe bumper for nationals. That turned out to be a good idea with the hurricane in the gulf. Now that the mount is gone, I can jb weld in some aluminum flat stock, drill holes in it and bolt the bumper on with metal instead of plastic. Maybe I will remember to take a picture this time.
Post rallyx nationals update:
Just before rallycross nationals, hurricane Milton hit central Florida landing as a category 4 in the Sarasota area. We came through mostly unscathed. We had a bunch of wind and our side fence will probably only last one more big storm. A block away lost power for a week and a half because they got unlucky with a branch and a transformer. I was happy we were spared. This mostly doesn't matter for the rallycross but I had to cancel a test and tune which was scheduled during the hurricane. I wanted to make sure my new suspension setup was working before the big event (cough foreshadowing cough).
We left for Huntsville Alabama and a weeks vacation as soon as the storm cleared. We visited the Barber Motorsports Museum outside of Birmingham on the way. It was pretty cool. It had the entire history of the motorcycle and the entire history of Lotus. I am a Lotus guy so I had a great time. If anyone has a GRM priced Type 23, let me know. We stopped by the Monte Sano State Park to play in the playground and do some disc golf. The kids took turns getting stung by a bee and hit their head while jumping in leaves by the second hole. They spent the rest of the day collecting special rocks. Those rocks now live in Florida.
If you turned into an old man at age 34 like me and can no longer have gluten, I recommend Mason Dixon Bakery and Farm Burger. If you are still young, I recommend Canadian Bakin. All three are great. We were blown away by The Sandra Moon Art Complex and and the Lowe Mills art district. I play music semi-professionally and the idea that we could have a publicly funded place to rehearse and perform music is just amazing. Lowe Mills puts hundreds of artists into a single place and lets you discover new things while walking to the art you know you like. We ended up in an arcade and I introduced my five year old to Turtles in Time because we are a classy family.
I had a codriver for this event because his Boxster lost an axle on Tuesday night, about 10 hours before he was supposed to leave. This wasn't a big problem but my car is setup pretty specifically for my height. My codriver has about 8" less torso than I do so we had to think fast to get the seating position right. The five pillow method worked ok but changing drivers was a hassle. We showed up early on Friday, walked the course, prepped the car, and moved our tire collection to the grid. My first set of runs went pretty well. My first run was slow as usual. The only real news was the camera fell off the car and broke some of its mounting pieces. We swapped to an interior camera for the rest of the event.
Saturday (day two) was more of the same. We go there pretty early to walk the first course. The Saturday AM course was the toughest for me. I lost a bunch of time to the other drivers in PR and I am not exactly sure why. My two guesses are driving too slowly in an attempt to stay on line and the Z3 rear being too loose for the big sweepers on this course. I have some thinking to do about car setup.
The Saturday PM course ws a repeat of the first course on Friday PM. I got faster and stayed clean. The rest of the class got roughly the same amount faster so I didn't make up any positions. I ended up 7 seconds out of the trophies by the end of the day. The drama started when I heard some clunking when going back to grid. I popped the hood and noticed one of the strut top bolts was less than finger tight. After every run, it would loosen and we would retighten it. We got some
loctite from a competitor and that fixed the problem permanently.
On Sunday AM, I figured I was out of the trophies. I decided to just drive fast and take my normal line. I felt like I gave up too much time trying to stay on the clean line on the 2nd course. That turned out to be a good decision. Gonzo, in the last trophy spot, had a bad day and hit four cones. I hit one cone and my
runs were slightly faster than his. It should have been enough to make up the time to the last trophy spot.
Then disaster struck. The clunking came back and it wasn't the strut top bolt. Two or three of the caster bolts on one side had loosened enough that my drivers side strut went from full positive to the full negative caster position. I didn't realize it at the time but this added 2 degrees of camber and close to an inch of toe out on that side. I did notice the car trying to hook left under power, spin under braking, and the complete removal of clockwise steering self centering. We got through the last couple of runs but I dropped two seconds a run.
Here are my quick runs on each course. There isn't any video from the Friday PM runs because we lost a camera pretty early on.
I ended up 1.1 seconds out of the trophies. All in all, I was pleased with my driving and pleased with the car. It is so much more fun to drive with the torque spare in the big 6 cylinder. I come from a professional music background where the goal in pressure situations is to have an "average" day. If you have a good day, that is awesome. If you have a bad day, hopefully you can get by. Another season of tuning and getting seat time in the car puts my average day close to a trophy spot.
I also need to call out that jerk, Shawn (sneaky edit), for driving too fast. He managed so put in the 4th fastest class winning time out of the whole event. He had the fastest time in the second run group (PF, PR,PA, and UTV M) and was only beaten by SA, MF, and MA (by 0.2) in the other groups. What a jerk.
Offseason changes this year will include stiffer rear springs that allow for some more travel at full throttle. Maybe some bump stops that engage before the springs coil bind (I am still trying to figure out what is banging in the video). A seat that lets us swap drivers without playing with pillows. And some loctite.
It was cold in the mornings. I had a moment of panic when I didn't remember if the car had antifreeze in it.
Accelerating on the bump stops:
A central Florida local just went to his first regional and first national event and won trophies in both events. All anyone wanted to do was to take pictures of his bicycle:
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