That hill to the finish is a bear in a low power car. You want to go faster, but can't.
Well done.
That hill to the finish is a bear in a low power car. You want to go faster, but can't.
Well done.
mazdeuce - Seth said:That hill to the finish is a bear in a low power car. You want to go faster, but can't.
Well done.
thanks man.
just to show everyone what REALLY slow looks like on a lap of road america..
Headed back to Texas first thing tomorrow morning.
Transiting tires are back on the fit because the RT660's are rubbing in the rear and I don't wanna cut one down. And the weather looks condusive to running the rock hard old tires. So we will..
Car is loaded up with all my E36 M3 and the 8 wheels and Tires I bought while I was here.
I paid to fly fellow GRM forum dork and good buddy TXRATTI to help me knock out the 15 hour drive tomorrow to DFW. I'm picking up 4 more wheels and tires at his place tomorrow to bring to a friend in Austin.
We're off first thing early morning to. make the most of the daylight.
Watts the current mileage ?
Got back to San Antonio this afternoon.
Good to be home.. starting to get stuff unpacked.... but more importantly.. photos from last weekend are starting to DROP!
My buddy Chris is one of the #Gridlife hired guns for photography and he's a wizard with a camera..
he doesn't normally shoot HPDE sessions.. but he knew i would be out there and got this awesome photo on Saturday...
then followed it up with these 2 other Amazing shots on Sunday.
Been a quiet 6 weeks.. but went to NOLA this weekend and the Fit went out.... in DD spec for a ffew reasons..
I still need to buy the high res photos..
So, thanks to the pandemic spread going out of control in November.. this car and I go almost nowhere right now.
I went up to Austin first weekend of December to pickup a HANS from my buddy and it went to the shop for a popping noise that turned out to be a sway bar link that had come loose last week. I filled the car up before I went to austin in December.. and I filled it up on Saturday again after running around the city a bit to do some errands.
This has always been a northern car and it has some rust, it's not bad.. but I'll be working to kill the spread and seal what has happened during 2021.
right now one of my more pressing ones is a spot under the gas cap on the driver side.
i don't want to deal with paint matching the factory vivid blue pearl and so I picked up this vinyl for cheap to try it out..
I think it works. I enjoy painting. I don't enjoy the prep work.
In reply to clutchsmoke :
yeah this this is only a test version... i'm looking at like.. the back 1/3 of each side of the car eventually having color and i'm exploring options on different orange metallic shades.. this was just a $10 easy button..
annnnd it helps hold the bumper on since the driver side mounts are not holding well anymore at speed.
Well, been very quiet in here this winter. But things are about to get a LOT more interesting.
I spent the whole weekend at COTA supporting Gridlife GLTC special Stage during Super Lap Battle.
Adam Jabaay the motorsports director for Gridlife and I talk pretty often and he has been asking me for weeks when I'm going to just get coilovers and nut up and modify the car to accept TCS camber caster plates. He and I had a few chats driving around between COTA and the Gridlife AirBnb and I have finally relented.
I have custom valved BC Racing Digressive shocks coming with the Tailored Chassis Solutions Caster camber plates coming.
I am REALLY EXCITED.
More Good news!
Work said I'm cool to work remotely up north for short periods. So I can kickstart my Gridlife 2021 Season planning.
Track Day Picnic is first up!! T-Minus 60 days until I have to prep to head to Chicago!
Nice. You going to make it to the Gridlife Heartlands event? Looking at hearding down there since it's close.
In reply to bmw88rider (Supportive Dude) :
not currently, it's a bit of a hike from both my place and my remote HQ in Chicago.. so I'll probably skip it.
Alright, been a good week!
I took a gamble last week on a used fire suit..
$75 for a SFI 3-2A/5 suit!
I found out after I took delivery of it that the previous owner has some history on the track and his family has some history off the track.
Doesn't mater to me! Proper fire suit for dirt cheap money!
then on Thursday these arrived!
These are the custom TCS top hats and my Coilovers will be here in about a month!
Today i lounged around most of the day and after dinner got a bug to go wash the Fit and work on it!
so got it washed and then swapped out the plugs!
Ik22 plugs that are one step colder are recommended by everyone in the Fit tracking community. Denso P/N 5310 Courtesy of our friends at RockAuto!
Old vs New....
I need to review my records... but I'm pretty sure these are the original spark plugs that I pulled out.
Tailored Chassis Solutions sent me a photo of the caber plates installed on their original development car for a point of reference.
you don't have to cut the tops off the original shock tower, but it is recommended to make making adjustments as easy as possible
In reply to spacecadet (Forum Supporter) :
I haven't even pulled all the plastic in the way to see how much room I have. I have a sneaky suspicion a large corner of mine will get cut to allow access.
Parents came down for Vacation for a few days..
today we took a Trip down to the Padre Island National Seashore..
Now it's been to 2 coasts.. It's been to New England and now down to south Texas gulf coast.. guess I need to plan a Cali trip sometime in the future..
Sundae Cup track cars are the best..
side note.. i hit the brakes about 2 weeks ago and got a bit of ABS activation.. ever since the pedal has been awesome! finally have the brake pedal I've been chasing for months!
Excitited to get the season going in May!
spacecadet (Forum Supporter) said:Tailored Chassis Solutions sent me a photo of the caber plates installed on their original development car for a point of reference...
Those strut tops are interesting. It looks like they add camber and castor in equal portions. All of the other plates I've seen either add camber only or allow for separate camber/castor adjustments. No judgement. Just interesting to see the different solutions people come up with.
In reply to CAinCA :
The car is BADLY in need of both.. but caster is the primary goal of the plates. So I'll still be adding camber bolts to the knuckle to get a bit more camber.
OK, Buckle up.. cause I went to the junkyard this weekend and I got a stack of boxes on my doorstep today full of Fit parts.
Rolling the calendar back to Saturday I noticed saturday morning that a new Fit sport had been brought to my local Pick-n-Pull Last week. So I loaded (dumped) all my tools into one toolbag with a good shoulder strap and off I went.
Like an idiot I didn't get ANY photos of the cars in the yard, but It was my lucky day.. the Sport Automatic Fit that had been plundered only for the ignition... literally...... otherwise untouched with the steering column lying on the floor in front of the driver seat... I grabbed the armrest plastic and the plastic trim around the driver window switches.. and that switch trim was busted the same way the one in my fit had been.. damn.. .. BUT WAIT.. what about the one in the base fit? I pulled up the webstie.. oh it's only a few rows away.. I walked down to the end and then walked back in the row.. well.. I'm an idiot.. it was almost directly in line with the sport fit a few rows up... AND the Base Fit that had been there since Feb.... it was virtually untouched.. SCORE. the window switch trim I wanted was in good shape, so i snagged it and moved back to the sport fit.
sticking my head in the trunk area.. i realized.. OH these plastics are in really nice shape! SO i snagged the lower sill piece.. I may go grab other stuff in the future.. but here's a few photos showing how beat up the part I removed was.. and how nice the new one is.
also in that photo above.. see the nice rubber seal? also snagged from the Sport Fit.. mine got torn up in the spot i'm showing in the photo..
here's the one I removed..
The tears were not in any way harming it from doing its job.. but its the minor details where I'm putting the time and love into this Fit.. to make it that much nicer of a car.. they make it mean that much more to me.
ANYWAY.. back to my junkyard tales...
I moved that fit steering column out of my way in the Sport model and I had a look at the wheel as I did.. huh.. i mean it's pretty nasty.. But i bet this will clean up half decent.. then I'd have a leather wheel I could throw in my base sport! how much do they want for this?... $20?.. DONE..
This is the moment where i mention that this is the first time I've had an electric impact with me at the junkyard.. BY GOD.. glorious.. i would have never gotten the wheel off the removed steering column without it. But I'm still a fan of disassembling and assembling things with manual hand tools. less chance of over tightening/cross threading/stripping something.
SO this is the wheel in the condition I pulled it out.
]
it was pretty nasty.. but after my experience with Hazmat.. I figured it was worth a shot to see if I could save it!
And this is what it looked like after I did clean it up..
So some overwrap material is coming later this week... I've held off on ripping the leather off and redoing it because while it was an option, it was at least $50 for it and I want to try just adding an overwrap first.
The last order of business for the weekend was my headlights.. something got onto the right front headlight a few months back.. not sure what it is.. but it wouldn't come off. So i grabbed a polishing kit.. busted it down best i could and got the headlights back to 90%. Some of the spots of this stuff wouldn't come off. but they're on top out of the beam of the headlights.. soooooo.... meh.. called it good. Did both headlights but the right is the one where you see the difference, the left was still good.
before
After
I also grabbed some stock ignition coils as backups. never know.. and they were cheap with the toolbag discount..
NOW... onto the fun stuff that arrived today.
a broadway mirror showed up first thing this morning along with 2 bottles of Castrol SRF!
I've already removed the mirror from the box and installed it without a photo.. I'll get one sometime in the future..
BUT here's my two bottles of GLORIOUS Castrol SRF!!
But... I've been tracking these since they left Taiwan last week..... THEY FINALLY ARRIVED!!
I'm headed to my friends house on Sunday morning to get them installed..... I'm EXCITED.
Nice junkyard scores! Walking up to a car that you've been tracking and discovering it's in great shape and mostly untouched has to be one of the better feelings in the auto world.
Nice coilovers too. BC DS series coils are the #1 current choice for my Accord, though how on Earth I'll manage to fit them in the budget without a divorce I have not determined yet. I'll be curious what you think after the install. It's not the same platform obviously, but still intriguing.
Did you select the custom valving? Or how did that work?
In reply to Number1Gaza :
Man good junkyard scores... that's a high I'M ALL ABOUT.. AND IT'S A CHEAP HIGH!
TCS said they were having them valved.. but it would have had to be done at the factory.. even if they're not valved.. I don't particularly care.. these were $100 cheaper than the list price from BC. Even the basic BC coilovers are a nice upgrade for the Fit. So I'm happy with these and my camber/caster plates from TCS and I look forward to getting some track time on them!
BC hardware in the DS and above lines is solid quality and so I'm looking forward to getting good use out of these!
Well... 4 months later.. my summer is finally calming down for a bit....
I have a lot of recapping to do.. but in Summary here's what has happened so far...
The Fit had 156,982 miles when I last posted back in April.
Today... it has 167,560... and I'm still on the road.
The BC racing coilovers went in at the end of April and work great. In June the TCS camber plates got installed, which meant the strut tower tops got cut off, and I had the car corner balanced at that time.
Car has run at all of the past 5 Gridlife events and gotten about 10-12 hours of total combined tracktime at them..
Trackday Picnic at Blackhawk Farms
Spring Kickoff at Gingerman Raceway
Gridlife Chicago at Autobahn CC
Alpine Horizon Festival at Pikes Peak International Raceway.
Gridlife Mid Summer meet at Mid Ohio
before Alpine Horizon festival myself and a few buddies decided to go all the way to the summit of Pike Peak and the Fit went along for the ride.
It has been an amazing summer and I've absolutely loved it.. but it has meant that the GRM forum has completely fallen to the wayside..
Some fantastic memes were also born in the process...
I'm now working 100% remotely with no chance of returning to an office anytime soon... so that fueled all of my travel for July and early August...
I'll try to get some more photos and recaps posted in chronological order over the coming weeks.
I'm skipping the next Gridlife round to take a breather and set myself up properly for Midwest Festival in September..
So, starting from the beginning of the season..
or well.. before the season started..
Installed the BC racing coilovers on the Fit.
Install was super easy.
Then Mid may drove the Fit up to chicago full of stuff and dragged up a Roll bar as a part of the GRM relay!
Then we move on to May and Gridlife Trackday Picnic, thhe first time I'd get the car on track with the upgraded suspension.
Shakedown went well. Had lots of fun, learned how much harder I needed to drive the car.
But I had a few odds and ends to mess with on the car, and as I was putting the stock wheels back on.. one of my studs started to gall and the lug was fighting going back on.. so we ran it on with an impact and cross threaded.. knowing that i now HAD to install ARP studs before the next event. OH BOY
But over memorial day weekend my buddy and I got the studs thrown into my fit and I was good to go for Spring Kickoff.
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