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haha. congrats Ian. Buttonwillow is so fun! No lap times to share?
Most of the sessions were exercises (driving side-by-side, passing exercises, practice starts, etc), so there wasn't much time for hot laps.
My best was a 2:03 on the Sunday warmup session. This was the 13 CCW config, and was about my 5th ever hot session on that config so I know I'm leaving a good 10-ish seconds on the table there.
A little late posting this. The weekend after the comp school was my first NASA race event, at Thunderhill. I need to do 4 races without incident to get out of "provisional" status and get a real license, so I went in with a simple goal -- finish the event cleanly. Stretch goal was not to be last.
Before that, though, the car needed a wash to get rid of the Buttonwillow bugs and dust and some more stickers. Specifically a bunch of "R"s and an orange square to tell everyone that I'm a rookie and therefore not to be trusted.
(man, the car is really shiny when it's clean).
Then off to Thunderhill. Trackmasters was running a pre-NASA day with race testing groups, so I signed up for that. TC Design was there doing coaching for a few customers (including me), so I parked next to another TCD car to simplify logistics.
Testing/coaching day went well, then Saturday was the first race. Time to mount up the actual race Hoosiers:
Some other new guy showed up and parked a disreputable Miata next to me:
So how did the race go? I didn't qualify very well (13th out of 17), lost 3 places on the start (was on the outside going through turn 1 and into turn 2), and then never caught up to anyone. Finished 14th ahead of one car on track plus a couple others that had issues. Nevertheless, I finished the race cleanly with no contact and no penalties, and I wasn't (quite) last. So I call that a success.
Unfortunately after the race I realized that the streaking I had just barely noticed on my windshield in the last couple laps wasn't bugs after all, it was oil. The high-pressure line to the VANOS accumulator (kinda like an accusump it stores high pressure oil so that the VANOS works at startup) had sprung a pinhole leak and hosed the coolant reservoir with oil. No real damage, just a mess, but I didn't have a spare line so it wasn't something I could fix in the paddock. I packed up and went home Saturday night.
Looking at the event overall I came to a couple conclusions:
- I need to get more comfortable racing next to people. Not surprising, this is a new thing and it's very alien to other experience I have. Mainly this was an issue with the start, I was not aggressive at all in trying to keep my place and went very backwards as a result.
- I really need to learn how to drive Hoosiers, I was 1 to 1.5 seconds slower on the Hoosier than I had been on the test day using RRs, when I should have been 1 to 1.5 seconds faster. The transition from NT01s to RRs was easy, apparently they're basically the same construction with a different type of tread rubber, so you drive an RR the same way you drive an NT01 except it's got more grip. That's not true of Hoosiers -- something about the way they respond means I'm underdriving them significantly and can't get to the grip limit. I'd only used them once before at the NASA TT event last June, and I experienced something similar there. There's really no solution for this except for seat time, so I'm just going to have to go burn up a bunch of Hoosiers for practice.
- As frustrating as it was to go home early, the M3 has been super reliable. I've left an event early for mechanical reasons with it 3 times now, out of around 75 days, which is a zillion times better than the Miata ever was.
- Wow my car is heavy. I've got a 3000 pound competition weight, and the white M3 next to me was over 300 pounds lighter. A fair bit of that is driver weight, plus I still have steel doors on my car and a passenger seat. Taking out the pax seat is easy, but then I'd need to go get it retuned to knock a few hp off to stay legal and that doesn't seem like the right thing to be focusing on right now. I'll worry about making it lighter once the weight is the significant factor in my lap times.
Off to Thunderhill on Thursday for my favorite private track day group, then Sears Point on the 20th for another NASA event.
Congrats on your first w2w day! I can confirm that starts are a bit overwhelming starting out, eventually you'll come to like them and maybe even look forward to them!
You might look into a rental program in a race series like lucky dog or WRL. Should get 3+ hours of W2W driving/weekend, beat on someone else’s car, let them take care of prep and setup. I know a lot of the customers like my work’s program when their races are short, only 1-2 times a year, and once you get into the GT classes, we’re WAY cheaper comparatively.
You might look into a rental program in a race series like lucky dog or WRL. Should get 3+ hours of W2W driving/weekend, beat on someone else’s car, let them take care of prep and setup. I know a lot of the customers like my work’s program when their races are short, only 1-2 times a year, and once you get into the GT classes, we’re WAY cheaper comparatively.
WRL doesn't really seem to do west coast races from what I can tell. LDR does and I've looked into it a few times in the past but it's never really worked out for various reasons. There aren't really any reasonable-distance LDR races til November (Thunderhill) though.
Yarp. I'm happy to throw you on the list of "people to contact when we have an open seat" if you'd like. It'll be a familiar platform to you, albeit slower. But we're generally competitive as long as we're not in total fuel conserve mode and the car is very easy to hop in and drive.
Yarp. I'm happy to throw you on the list of "people to contact when we have an open seat" if you'd like. It'll be a familiar platform to you, albeit slower. But we're generally competitive as long as we're not in total fuel conserve mode and the car is very easy to hop in and drive.
That'd be cool, yeah. Somewhat familiar car, although not at all familiar tracks.
Wow, it's been a year and half since I posted anything here. In that time I've done.... nothing to the Miata. Sigh. Lots of stuff with the M3 though. You can skip this post if you don't care about that car or the racing.
The hard line to the VANOS was easily fixed. I took the car to NASA races at Sonoma in May and June of 2022, finishing off the provisional license status and got a full competition one. I got an SCCA license too, ran one race at Laguna, then a couple more NASA ones (Sonoma and Thundehrill) in the fall. Cool shot of the car at Thunderhill around dawn:
At the end of last year I sat back to take stock of things. I'd been to 6 race events and run a dozen or so races (some events had 3), but I'm not sure I'd spent much time actually RACING anybody. I was typically finishing in the bottom half of the class, fast enough to pull away from the guys behind me but not fast enough to play with the guys in front, and if I wanted to do more than just expensive track days I needed more pace. I decided to work with a driving coach and started hitting Sonoma open test days with him last winter. At the beginning I was 4-5 seconds slower than him in my car -- I was doing 1:50s at Sonoma with an occasional 1:49, he was consistently hitting 1:45s. This was super useful, both because it confirmed that there was nothing wrong with my car (I knew that, TC builds awesome cars, but it was good to see it actually demonstrated), but more importantly because it gave me data traces to directly compare myself to. After a year of doing this I'm down to mid 47s, so I've learned a ton and knocked that gap in half!
Other highlights from 2023, let's see. I was thinking about running the 25 hour Thunderhill enduro, and it was recommended to me to A) rent a car and B) run a couple other NASA enduros first. So I rented a seat in a Spec E46 from Legacy (great shop, BTW) and ran the WERC 6 hour enduro at Buttonwillow last April. I split the driving with Peter Jones (owner of the shop), this was a lot of fun, I'd never driven on the track at night before and that's pretty intense, especially at Buttonwillow. It's infamous for the dust clouds and at night those become completely opaque. We came second in E2, about 20 seconds behind the class leader. I also brought the M3 down and ran the sprint race on Sunday after the enduro.
Then I went to Thunderhill a couple weeks later, and a Spec E46 made a dive bomb pass on me in turn 11 (pretty stupid place for it) in the second session on the Friday test day. WTF? The car was drivable, but I was upset and "not having fun" so I went home without racing.
I got that fixed, went to Sonoma in June, and in the Saturday warmup another Spec E46 spun in front of me in turn 3. I misjudged his path and couldn't stop in time, hit him about 20 mph but it made a mess of the front of the car. This one didn't upset me as much, probably mainly because this driver had made an honest mistake (instead of being an ***) and was apologetic and helpful about it. We tried to patch up the car, I took it out for a TT session to see how it went, but the hood was cracked (fiberglass) and flapping in the breeze and I was afraid it was going to come off. So no racing for me that weekend either. (car is at a weird angle because one side is on the jack)
The week after that NASA race was the SFR SCCA race at Laguna -- the first race after the repaving job that had closed the track for most of a year. I really wanted to do that event, so TC Design did a heroic job of getting the car back together in time. One nice thing about a black car, when you put on fiberglass parts with black gelcoat and no paint it actually doesn't look terrible:
I did 2 sessions on the Friday test day but then someone's Formula car caught fire at the top of the corkscrew. They shut the track down for the rest of the day, saying we would be good to race on Saturday, but the next morning the county officials threw a tantrum about us damaging their new pavement and shut the event down. So three race weekends with no racing -- am I cursed???
Fortunately there was another SFR race at Laguna at the end of July, I had only planned on doing one but since the first was cancelled I went to the second one instead. There isn't a great class equivalent for ST4 at SCCA, so I was running it in "ITE". That's a regional "run whatcha brung" class, where the only rules are that it needs to be a production car on DOT tires that meets the cage/etc safety rules. There were 8 or 9 cars in the class, including someone with a very similar car to mine. We had fun racing each other for 2nd in class (the winner was 3-4 seconds faster than either of us)
After that the car got painted and I went back to Sonoma for NASA NorCal again. In additional to the usual sprint race, this event featured a 3 hour enduro, which I entered co-driving with Tony (owner of TC Design who built the car). The first sprint race was Saturday afternoon, and during it I was having problems with it not downshifting to 3rd very well. Sitting in line for post-race weight it wouldn't go into gear and they had to push me up onto the scales. There was ~ 1 hour to go before the start of the enduro, but fortunately Tony had brought the other guys from the shop along for support. Joe diagnosed it as running out of clutch travel, did some emergency surgery to shorten the clutch stop and that added enough to let it run. I took the first stint in the enduro, going 1hr 20 or so, pittting for fuel and driver change from P2 in class. Tony passed the class leader during his stint and we finished P1 in E1, and I think P3 overall behind a couple of prototypes.
After that there was one more NASA NorCal event and I made a last minute decision to go to a CalClub (SoCal SCCA) race at Buttonwillow. Running it again in ITE, it was a fairly light field but I managed to take P1 both days. Saturday was fairly uneventful (P2 was a long way behind me), but the Sunday race I raced a GT2-class first-gen RX7 for 6 or 7 laps and had a lot of fun.
Whee:
Closing out the year:
I did not run the 25 hour this year. I decided I don't really like the way Spec E46s drive -- they look really similar to my car, but they feel very different. Mine is nailed to the track, an SE46 moves around a lot, and I just don't have the confidence I'm looking for. I couldn't find any other seats available that were in cars closer to mine, and there wasn't time to try to run my own car (lots of prep work required, needed team, crew, etc). Maybe next year, assuming the race happens (attendance was down again this year, so who knows)
Great update Ian. Huge congrats on the big time found. Making the car go faster is fun, but the most satisfying thing is improvement to the nut behind the wheel.
It's been great fun to watch you moving closer to the front of the ST4 pack when you roll through Tech. I'm jealous of all the seat time you've done in the last 18 months!
I will also mention that it's been secretly gratifying to see your "perfect" E46 accumulate some scuffs and bumps as you progress. Heck, I think I saw a scrape or two that didn't get fixed between events once!
We'll see what happens over the winter; hopefully my car gets powered again and I can find the budget to run some events. If so, maybe I'll see you in ST4 by the end of the year! Or at least your brake lights...
Great stuff Ian, and special congratulations on biting the 'driver coach' bullet. Driving a fast car is one thing, driving a fast car fast is another.
Been a believer since I organised a coach for half a dozen(!) of us at a track for one day(!!). He hopped between cars, sometimes as pax, sometimes driving - everybody said they got a lot out of it, especially me. I liken it to how you throw money at mods to the car to make it quicker, but bang for buck the best return is putting your money into the nut holding the steering wheel!
Thanks guys! Yeah, there's nothing like good coaching. I'd tried it a bit before, but the first one I worked with had very little time availability so it was really hard to find a time to go to the track, and the second one I just didn't click with. My current coach is awesome.
The other thing that really makes it work is the open test days at Sonoma. You need a competition license to get in, but with that it's just open track all day -- no sessions, go out when you want, come in when you want. So I hire Matt for the day, and I'm just alternating between driving the car and looking at video and data with him in the trailer for the whole day. I installed a radio in the car for enduro use and that makes a huge difference too. Without the radio I'd try to make mental notes about what to do on what corner, but inevitably I would lose track of it and half the laps would be wasted in terms of trying to make a particular change. With my coach on the radio, standing somewhere that he can see the vast majority of the track, he's got notes in hand and can remind me 5-10 seconds beforehand that I'm aiming at the second tree, or staying off the apex curbing, or whatever it is. Super valuable.
beerbaron: there's a scuff on the driver rear bumper that I think is from the dive bomb at Thunderhill -- after the main hit where he spun me around (like a record baby), he just barely tagged the rear bumper while I was facing backwards. You can really only see it when the car is freshly washed, though, so I missed it when the car went to the body shop. I will probably just grudgingly ignore it until something else happens that causes me to need to replace the rear bumper again.
04-19-2022, 04:01 PM
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