Mazdeuce does One Lap 2018, Round Four!

I just discovered that this is a fairly old thread at this point. Whatever.  

Anyway, how many miles are are on the car/clutch?

It got a new clutch at maybe 90k? That followed many many rallycrosses and some truly epic fwd burnout sessions. 

If he hasn't done anything with the pool yet, I suggest heavy steel bar and set it up as an oil bay under a carport. 

While sleepyhead and Bob muck about with leaky Hyundais, we're in full testing mode. We did have to replace a tensioner pulley and drill this one hole. And yes, the hole isn't exactly round because I'm not exactly good at measuring. 

The point of the hole is to install the screw that holds this little guy in, a $15 silencer from Amazon. And it WORKS. The car is so much more pleasant at cruising speed. You can have a conversation and you don't even have to yell. We're both so very happy. Pops out in 10 seconds and the exhaust is cool enough to install it 5 minutes after we come off course. Best modification of the year by far. 

With that out of the way we went autocrossing with the Houston SCCA. I'll hold off on saying how slow or fast we were until the results come out, but suffice to say we were not in contention for any trophies. The car is good though. So much better than last year. We were running on the 225 Michelins from last years One Lap and it needs more tire. Luckily more tire is on the way. 

Next weekend we're up to Dallas for a NASA weekend at Motorsports Ranch Cresson which is one of the tracks on this year's schedule. We're serious about this preparation nonsense this year. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

While sleepyhead and Bob muck about with leaky Hyundais, we're in full testing mode. We did have to replace a tensioner pulley and drill this one hole. And yes, the hole isn't exactly round because I'm not exactly good at measuring. 

 

Next weekend we're up to Dallas for a NASA weekend at Motorsports Ranch Cresson which is one of the tracks on this year's schedule. We're serious about this preparation nonsense this year. 

It's not leaky... it's automatically making sure we don't have any more fluid weight at any one time than we need.  ?

And, really... I think for the first 10 attempts, every OneLap is a "learn as you go" event.  

I'm seeing a decided absence of front splitterage and canards

Next year is aero and general tidying up of the car in preparation for POWER! Much research into turbos is happening. 

Testing! That's right, while sleepyhead and Bob muck about with ink pens and seeing how much interior makes a pound, we're on track. Seriously, that little dot out there is the Civic. 

We spent the weekend at MSR Cresson outside Dallas. This is one of the tracks on this year's One Lap though we only drove the 1.7 mile configuration which according to the schedule we won't be driving. There is also a back section that is 1.3 miles and when you combine both sides you get 3.1 miles with some interesting math, and we should be driving the 1.3 and the 3.1. We each did four 40 minutes session on the 1.7 on Saturday (and I did four more in the Accord on Sunday) and we spend some quality time walking the 1.3 forwards and backwards because you never know with Brock. 

The car is much better than last year. Much better. Brakes work, suspension works, tires are a bit sketchy. We're not sure if it's just an end of life Michelin issue or if we've made the suspension good enough that we just need more tire. For the first time I have real confidence in the car. I didn't even have to work up to it, I got out after my first session raving about how much better it was. It was different enough that Brian had to reprogram his expectations. He came off from his first session not really knowing what was going on. It was so very different from the car that he had bought and driven for 100k miles that it took him a bit to realize that he had to drive it like it was a car that someone loaned him, and not the car that he knew. Once he did that, he fell in love with the car all over again. 

We managed to finish off last year's tires and brakes in 8 sessions.  We will be getting new front pad/rotors and will run the RS4's from the Accord at NOLA in two weeks. Yup, testing at NOLA too and then right before the event Brian is going to get in a weekend at Hallett. We're all serious this year. It's going to be fun. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Testing! That's right, while sleepyhead and Bob muck about with ink pens and seeing how much interior makes a pound, we're on track. 

Just because it's my favorite, and it fits....

Guess y'all are happy about getting to run all 3 Cresson configurations now?

Seth's just jealous that we're travelling in Luxury while he suffers in a penalty box. A fast penalty box.... but a penalty boc none the less.

In reply to Bob the REAL oil guy. :

Economic Luxury

In reply to sleepyhead :

you say potato, I say onion. 

More track time! One Lap is visiting NOLA in New Orleans this year. A mere 5.5 hours from my house and 8-ish from my co driver. Practically in the neighborhood. We popped over last weekend to run just Sunday with NASA. 

For those that don't know, NOLA was scraped out of a swamp. It's still a swamp. Getting the cars ready in the morning involved mosquitoes. An autocross friend from Houston happened to be there and after the first session (where the 3-4 group was crowded and FAST) we decided to move around and hang out with DE2 which was lightly attended and being very polite back where we were driving. We had a bit of a Honda Bro moment. 

The only hitch in the day was the Civic running over a screw in paddock. Luckily we had another matching mostly worn out tire and wheel that completed the mostly worn out set that was on the car. S2000 was a bit faster than the Civic and the Civic was a couple seconds faster than the Accord. We adjusted speed and had fun. There were corners that I could enter in the Accord without braking that the Civic could not which highlighted the fact that the car is down on pure mechanical grip. We're looking forward to new tires. Outside the corners the Civic was about 10mph faster than the Accord at the end of the straights. We played with suspension settings and the Civic is getting better.

Two things from the weekend. The first is that we're happy with the Civic. We need tires and next year we need aero and probably brake cooling and it will be time to start thinking power. The car is in a good place. The second is that the Accord is a suitable backup car. This lets us push and experiment with the Civic without having to worry about missing a year of One Lap. The Accord can stay sane and the Civic can be less so.

We're less than a week from the start. In fact we leave in something like four days. The scooters came. Big wheels. Rode them down the dirt driveway and they're awesome. 

Brian just finished up a day at Hallett. Says the car was good, track is good, everything seems like a go. 

Still deciding if I'm gong to post pictures from the road this year or not. I may just do word updates and add pictures after the event. Focus and drive fast and all that. 

Bumping this up at the request of 759NRNG. 
Cut a bunch of vinyl. Scooters came. Made some shirts. All my track stuff is packed in one bag. I just need to pack my personal stuff. If I do laundry in the morning then I'll have enough underwear to make it through the week without having to do any doubles. 

Entry list for this year looks legit. We'll have fun.

I think the main GRM One Lap thread is going to be the sleepyhead/Bob/John thread. I'm still going to post, but that's where the real action should be.  

thanks MzdSethB safe travel to y'all and great results!!!!   

Good luck! have fun! (as if you could not) 

When a pseudo Grow-up says "Scooter" my brain leaps to this:
 

Pete

I'm seriously excited. Turned up to 11. I'm hoping Cotton doesn't think I'm always like a meth addicted squirrel when he comes to pick up Fergus in a few hours. Right now I'm like a meth addicted squirrel. 

Fergus got sent away, in-laws pulled in, I went and got kids from school and Brian pulled in just as I got home with them. We did six-ish hours north from my house, add that to the three that Brian has to drive to get to my place. We're doing so well on time we didn't even set an alarm for the morning. The ratio of cigarette burns to simple tears in the bed covers prove that we indeed chose a fine hotel. I always find it interesting to compare the quality of shampoo at hotels of different price points. Today we have a combo shampoo/conditioner in a pump container stuck to the wall with adhesive. It has a very "welcome to prison" feel about it. 

Big tire problems. 

The big tires mostly removed the rest of the front fender liners that had previously protected the long ram intake mounted air filter. This all became clear when the rain got heavy today. No real danger of hydrolock when we were driving but I bet the pistons are super clean now. We stopped by a NAPA and now a big 10 inch cone filter is up in the warm dry engine bay and our full throttle miss is fixed. 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

That is just budget water injection. Very GRM. And I bet that dirty Honda could use a good piston cleaning. Party on.

Well there! now you've already got your OLOA repairs done, that should make the rest of the event go even smoother!

Started today with a 38th in the wet skid pad. Not great, but not upsetting. From there to Autobahn for a single time trial that will be used to seed us for the week. Brian drove to a 39th out of 71 and we are EXTATIC about that. Fastest Honda and we should be running about 45 minutes earlier than last year which means 45 minutes more sleep a night. 

Tonights transit is fairly short which is good as we got off track late due to a broken car a couple of groups before us. We should still make it to the hotel by 10:00ish which is pretty cushy by One Lap standards. I wish klodkrawler was here because Mayfield and Melchior are back an  properly fast. They are a great benchmark for M3's.

We’re watching the Mayfield car with lots of interest! They’re off to an awesome start also!

congrats on the finish! And for beating Travis Pastrana :) 

You guys killed it yesterday!

We’ve seen the battle between the big bad wolf s2k and rs motors before at gridlife so that’ll be fun to see them battle all week also!