Yo! Yeah, no sweat. Here's my current tables. I experimented with the 1st and 2nd gear tables a bit after making that comment to make the throttle a little less sensitive, but 3rd gear and on are all fully linear, as shown. FWIW, anything past 47* of throttle opening on my N/A setup was basically full throttle, so the tables could be made MUCH less sensitive if desired.



Sweet, looks like pics are working again.

In unrelated news, the car's actually maybe ready to race this weekend? I've been pulling more side quests on it all week.

Due to classing rules, I'm going to be forced into Limited class this weekend, since I only have 40TW and 100TW tires at the moment. Street class mandates running 180TW tires and above, while Limited allows for 60TW and above. Being that the Toyo R's are a 40TW, I'll be limited to running my 100TW RC1's. I really think this car would be competitive in Street class based on last year's times, but I'm not gonna buy a set of 200TW's just for this race. I've got some Toyo bucks from the last couple NASA events, but will be spending those on some 255/40/17 R's for track use only. So we're gonna be packfill in Limited class this weekend and will be happy about it.

Since Monday, I've done a bunch of tire swapping. My 4 day-old RC1's are mounted on my street wheels and I pulled the Toyo R's off of my track wheels and mounted my 2 day-old RC1's on those. Gonna bring both sets as I've historically flat-spotted wheels at BW CW13 and don't want to have another scenario where I'm in the paddock trying to make my wheel round with a bottle jack again. I also bled the brakes, added heat shielding to the O2 sensor harnesses, added more heat shielding to the brake lines, mounted a front tow strap as I forgot they're required for GTA, retorqued everything attached to the turbo as well as the exhaust, replaced my leaking oil pan drain plug washer, chopped out the remainder of the melted EVAP leak detection pump wiring, as well as the EGR wiring in the engine bay, tightened down my oil pressure sensor which was backing out and I believe was weeping oil, and a bunch of other things that I can't fully remember at the moment. Shoutout to the Fab9 manifold for making access to my oil pressure sensor easy. I literally couldn't get a wrench on it from anywhere else except the front of the engine bay. Factory manifold would've prevented this completely.


Sensor's under the starter solenoid. Just a little deep in there.

I also pulled the cylinder 1 and 4 spark plugs to do a quick check for signs of preignition. Being a dead head fuel system with the fuel rail feed between cylinders 1 and 2, some folks assert that cylinder 4 runs lean when in boost. I didn't find any signs of this on the plugs. They look the same to me. The cylinder #4 plug center electrode looks a little more chalky in the top photo, but that's just a product of the camera/angle. These plugs probably have 300 miles, a morning of canyon runs, and a few dozen more pulls on them.





This weekend should be a blast. We've got four of us racing time attack in various classes, one of my buddies is driving W2W in WTCC, and one buddy driving in the HPDE sessions. My parents, fiance, and a good group of other buddies are coming out to hang and watch. Again, hopefully my car holds up in front of the crowd

 

Godspeed brother. Really excited to see your updates, and hope things hold together. I suspect there will be SOMETHING that crops up, there always is on a fresh turbo build, so bring tools!

 

Likecats awarded as promised. Stoked for you man, have fun, fingers crossed everything stays solid.

 

This is what ChatGPT thinks Zak is going to do this weekend:

 

Appreciate it dudes! Yeah I’ll def be taking the first couple sessions easy and monitoring everything like a hawk. Van’s loaded to the gills with tools, every spare I own, and plenty of meat to put on the grill tomorrow night. I drew the line at packing in my spare 5spd transmission. If I blow something the driveline, I’ll accept defeat haha.

Nate, I might have to get that made into a sticker if the car holds together and runs down some V8’s. Too good lol.

Loaded up and ready to rock! Either good updates coming next week or none at all because I’ll be tearing the car back apart

 

Godspeed man! Put it down for MT.net this weekend!

 

Best of luck out there brother! Show ‘em what’s up.

 

All or nothing man! give em hell!

 

She F*cking goes!!


The first track weekend with the turbo was a success. I was nervous as hell all week leading up to the event but the car just… worked. All weekend. I checked lug torque, oil level, rotated my tires, and made a few minor tune revisions and that was it. Ambient temps were 65-80* on track all weekend. Highest I saw coolant temp get was 212*. Oil temps and IATs maxed out at 245* and 105* respectively. My first session this morning was probably 65* out and I didn’t see coolant temps get above 199*. Nuts. I know I’m running very low boost but I expected to be battling temps at least a little bit.

I did run into an electrical gremlin while pulling the car onto the trailer today but that may or may not be turbo-related. More on that later.




We had a pretty solid group this weekend, as I stated one or twelve times in the posts leading up to it. As far as drivers go, we were pretty diverse. My buddies Cesar and Rafa pitted with us, driving their FK8 Type R and Tesla Model 3 Performance respectively. Cesar is a great driver and is usually a decent bit faster than me (pre-turbo). He works at a speed shop and his Type R is decked out, gutted, and really well set up. Dude knows his stuff. He and I would end the weekend with 0.1 seconds separating our fastest laps. Rafa is our resident sage/wizard. He’s been driving track and instructing for 20+ years and runs a track-oriented tire shop. Before anyone hounds on him for driving a Tesla, it’s worth mentioning his other track car is an FD RX7 that’s crazy fast. He might have the Streets of Willow lap record for a stock power, non-aero FD (1:19 on a day I was running 1:23’s in my turbo NA!)



So with Rafa acting as our designated Track Uncle, and Cesar to pace off of, I felt kinda at ease coming into the first session. Cesar and I happened to get gridded next to each other, with me trailing. I had already decided I was going to do 4 or 5 mellow laps monitoring the hell out of my gauges, then pull off and check to see if anything was melting. Cesar was going to be warming up too so I figured I’d just hang behind him to make sure I didn’t get carried away. We head out from the grid, I do a few pulls and check fueling. It’s still a little on the rich side (11:1), but everything acts as it should, and I get on the throttle to keep up with the type R in the straights. We hit three chill-ish laps and I notice none of my temps are getting hot. Lap four Cesar pulls into the pits and against my better judgement, I slingshot past him and go for a heater.

I still haven’t driven a 250whp+ Miata on track in a year and a half, and my throttle control could use some fine tuning, but the power doesn’t take too long to get used to. I’m definitely not driving the car as best as it can be driven but I finish the lap and my Aim flashes a 1:58.3. 0.2 seconds faster than my PB in my last car, on a substantially degraded road surface. Hell yes. I pull off track. Temps are all well within the safe zone and nothing under the hood seems to be melting or loosening. Hell yeah.

I’m embellishing a little bit here but damn, it feels so sick to drive a medium-high power Miata again.



So since everything’s going swimmingly, I decide to spice things up second session and send the car into the dirt BAD. I get four laps in, still driving within my limits and keeping an eye on the gauges, and get down to a 1:57.4. Then I hit lap 5 and get to Phil Hill. A right hand turn cresting a steep hill, right after one of the fastest sections of the track. No excuses here, I simply turn in maybe fifteen feet too late. Car unweights at the top of the hill, as it normally does, and I realize I’m probably not going to make the exit. I point the wheels straight, still probably going 80, facing downhill into the dirt. BOOM. Bottom out. BOOM. Bottom out. BOOM Bottom out. Back onto the track, scraping noises. I pull into the pits. My splitter is fragged pretty bad, air dam is warped, splitter rods are splintered, intercooler and radiator have minor dings at the bottom, but no serious damage.



I didn’t take any photos of the before, but it was pretty ugly. Fortunately we had some hands ready to help. Me and two of the guys pulled the front bumper and splitter and relocated some of the aluminum angle to straighten it up and hold together sections where it buckled. Took us about two hours but we got the car back on track for session four, missing session three by about 20 minutes.



Ugly, but functional.

Session four was warm. I knew I wasn’t going be any faster, and wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything else that might end my “shakedown” weekend, so I ran the whole session start to finish, at a reasonable pace, just to stress test the car. Temps held steady and I didn’t send the car into the dirt again, so I was stoked on that.

Cesar and I did a little car work before it got dark out, then we all grilled up some hot links and went for a pit walk when it got dark. I checked my oil level, tire pressures, rotated my tires, hit a quick bolt check, and checked my catch can. Damn near nothing in the catch can. Stoked on that too. We walked the pits for a bit and saw some cool stuff that I didn’t think to take pictures of. Ryan R was there with his LS Miata monster. I think he ran a 1:45 or something insane this weekend. I then took a shower and knocked out around 10, cooked from driving and working on the splitter all day.



Catch Can Contents™

Today went about the same as yesterday, except I kept the car off the dirt. The weather was going to get warm quick so it was basically going to be first session PB or nothing. I felt like I was driving better this morning but couldn’t go faster than yesterday. Pulled a 1:57.55 followed by a 1:57.51. People have been saying the road surface at this track has degraded a lot in the last six months, and it’s running over a second slower than it used to. Maybe it’s placebo effect, but I feel like the grip isn’t there like it used to be, and my tires were heat soaking quick. Maybe I’m also driving a car with 80 more horsepower now and don’t know what I’m doing. Things to chew on…

WTCC was also at BW this weekend, and we got to watch my buddy Sergio (who I battled in TT5 at WSIR back in March) compete in his second ever W2W race weekend.


Sergio in the Silver GR86 near the back. The WTCC races were good this weekend. The pack stayed tight over the whole race, good battles, passes, and no lappers.

I finished out the fourth session clean today and headed back to my trailer after a little cooldown cruise through the pits. Unfortunately my car was done playing nice and decided to develop an electrical gremlin. I put the car in reverse to load it onto the trailer and accidentally knocked the wipers into top speed. I heard a pop noise come from somewhere, rhe car died, and a bunch of warning lights came on. Crank, no start. I found the fuel pump fuse blown and replaced it. The car started and ran but the battery light was on and my head unit and wideband gauge both wouldn’t turn on. OBD port still had power so I checked trouble codes, found none, confirmed voltage at the ECU was 12.8 with the engine running, confirmed the radio fuse was intact, and pulled basically every other fuse in the car without finding any more blown. I don’t know what happened but I’ll dig into it this week. My alternator and wideband wiring parallel each other over to the exhaust side of the engine bay, so maybe one or both melted or shorted to ground? My wideband shares power with two other gauges pulled from the windows switches, and the other gauges are working, so I don’t think that’s the issue. Maybe the alternator shorted, spiked voltage for a second and took out the fuel pump fuse and a couple components? I haven’t dug into it at all yet. I’m sure it’ll all make sense after a little diag.

Oh right, so how did I do? Like I said. Packfill



This car’s not ready, or prepped, for Limited class, but that’s beside the point. I was just happy to be out there this weekend, get some laps in, and see some wild cars. Wider tires, taller gearing, and a whopping 8psi of boost instead of 7, and the car should pick up plenty of time later on.

Other than that, no issues to report! Gonna get the gremlin figured out then it’s onto my buddy’s event at Chuckwalla on 11/28! Haven’t been to Chuck since February. Should be a good time!

 

Fastest lap from yesterday morning. I'm still not adjusted to driving with power again, but I'm trying my best. Adding a little more angle to the wing yesterday helped allow getting on throttle earlier at corner exits. I'll probably experiment with stiffening the front bar next. 235's at this power level are working but I can't wait to put some 255's on now that the car's got power to push them. 4.10 ratio out back is too short as expected. Very busy working the shifter haha. I'll address that before the first NASA race of the season in Feb.


Other important bits that I missed in the recap: I found and recovered my shampoo bottle that I left in the Buttonwillow showers three weekends ago. It was about 50% less full than when I left it there, so hopefully I have some good karma coming my way for providing that accommodation.




I also tore into the electrical issue a bit last night. Wideband gauge and head unit still have power at the connectors, and the head unit internal fuse didn't blow. Also super interesting, all four of my turn signal bulbs went out, but the fuse didn't blow. Upon checking them, I found three of the four turn signal bulb filaments broken off and sitting at the bottom of the bulbs. I'm about 100% certain that I cooked the alternator electronics, which are right next to the exhaust manifold/turbo, and some resulting voltage spike killed all of said components before the alternator called it quits. Will be relocating the alternator to the intake side of the engine where the AC compressor used to be, using a Mazda 5 alternator and tensioner.

Honestly, I was planning on doing this eventually anyways. If this is the turbo teething issue I have to deal with, and I'm not having to worry about fluid temps or tune issues, I'll take it!

 

Car looks fast! Going off at Phil Hill is scary.

I tried to make Speed Ventures at Butt last weekend, but I need another week on my car. I did get it started for the first time on fuel.

As far as showers at the Butt, there are nicer showers in the bathroom my the Kart track.

 

Congrats on a shakedown without too many problems! It's always something... LOL NC stock gearing is definitely too short for turbos...

Something's borked in your YT link... I was able to get there by pulling out the video ID.

 

Nice work! Glad to see the extra power wasn't too hard to figure out.

Does the boost come on pretty linearly with the MBC? Do you have much ability to tune EBC with the factory ECU or would that require a standalone? Just went back in the thread and saw closed loop is going to require some firmware hoops, does that mean you have open loop available?

 

Thanks dude! And yeah, I've gone off thrice there. One time in the passenger seat of a car. I'd like to not make it four times hahaha. What really sucks is that everybody else seems to be going off there too recently. The backside now has two or three moto-style whoops in it that will wreck the underside of your car. I remember two years ago, the backside was smooth.

Stoked to hear you got the car started at least! I figured making last weekend was going to require a pretty massive push given the state of disassembly your car was in haha.

Yeah, no joke it is. I seriously am amped that I didn't have to touch anything turbo/engine/fluid-related all weekend. I've known about people frying alternators on turbo track NC's and figured I'd get around to it soon either way. I probably didn't do the poor alternator any favors by running a 20 minute session at full bore then parking it with the hood closed and engine running for a little while. Every previous session, I was pulling off and lifting the hood as soon as I got back into the pits, which probably made a huge difference in heat dissipation. Either way, it's a pretty finite, solvable problem which I'll take over an overheating car or other mechanical issue lol.

YT link is fixed now. I originally used a link straight from my channel "studio" page that was a little different.

Thanks man! Yeah, I'm glad too. I was having flashbacks of tripping out the night before tracking my turbo NA for the first time, thinking things were going to look like warp speed from Spaceballs lol.

I don't know if I can attest to much with the MBC, as I'm basically just using it to prop up boost to 7psi from 3,300rpm to 4,300rpm (where it would sit at 5psi before). Logs show boost is pretty linear across the board. There's a tiny "spike" from 145kpa to ~152kpa around the 5k rpm mark in most conditions, but other than that, it's pretty linear. No real lag during track use, at least no more than my last car had on track. I'm excited to bump it up to 9 or 10psi once I get the car on a dyno and see what it does. It's def still a bit lazy doing pulls starting at 3.5k rpm but I figure that's good for the bottom end and trans anywho.

 

Nice! Great update, really glad the car performed. Interested to see what the electrical gremlin is and if it's turbo heat related.


That FD is beautiful man, so cool to see someone tracking one now days. With values where they are most of them are garage queens now. What did he run?

 

Congrats on the successful weekend. Weird electrical gremlin, surprised at how many of these are cropping up for you.

Cesar from Bullet performance, right? Good dudes, they took care of me on my z4m recently. Cesar saw me wearing my MTTC shirt when i went in there and asked if I was competing, chatted with him for a while. Cool dude, I remember him saying he knew you.

 

Yo, thanks dudes! Interested in the gremlin as well. I'm 99% sure the alternator electronics just fried due to proximity from the turbo. The relocation should fix that. I already have an alternator, belt, and pulley on the way to do the swap to the intake side. I'm also going to measure and order a cheap Amazon head unit to see if my current head unit really got fried. Free no-question returns, baby. I'll keep the thread updated.

As for the FD, yeah man it's clean, fast, and gets driven hard. It's not common to see one that ticks all those boxes nowadays haha. Gridlife actually had him run it as a pace car at Laguna in 2024. I know he's ran as fast as 1:56's at Buttonwillow before on stock power, which is pretty nuts even for when the road surface was better. The car's been his for ~10 years and just last year the engine finally lost compression after who knows how many track events and canyon runs. He went with a factory rebuild, but put in a slightly bigger turbo and bigger intercooler while the engine was out. I couldn't tell you which ones specifically, but he says it's making a little over 300whp now. It was running at the Streets of Willow event I wrote about a few weeks ago and basically blew everybody there out of the water lol. He's got a few lap videos of it on Instagram but nothing on YouTube unfortunately. His IG is here: https://www.instagram.com/jdm_fd/?hl=en - Dunno if you can see any posts without an IG or FB account, though, which is lame.

Ed, yeah that Cesar! Small world haha. Yeah he's a solid dude. Lots of setup knowledge and the dude's handy with a wrench for sure. We've driven the canyons and track before and he's always smoked me. That Civic is fast! Looks like we're almost perfectly even though now that I've got the turbo on this thing (he ran a 1:57.6 yesterday and I ran a 1:57.5). I'm trying to get him to run in NASA TT3 next year so we can put the cars toe to toe a few times. That's rad you guys met haha.

 

I just realized I never responded to this part of your post haha. So as it sits, I'm gonna have to jump through some hoops to get even open loop boost control via the factory ECU, but it is possible. I'll likely dive into that later on, because for now the MBC is working fine (at least by my standards). Tuning EBC, especially closed loop, while having to shut the car off and reflash the whole tune to make adjustments is making me feel sick just thinking about it as well...

Alternator relocation project is done! Took a little more effort than I expected, and I still need to clean up some of the wiring, but overall it wasn't too much of an undertaking. I finished wrapping things up tonight, started the car, and confirmed the new Mazda 6 alternator is charging. Also installed a cheap Amazon Android head unit and replacement Innovate wideband controller and confirmed both components are working. The alternator failure really did kill my old gauge and head unit.



Old alternator removed from the exhaust side of the engine bay, old tensioner removed from under said alt, wiring shortened and relocated to the intake side, Mazda 6 belt tensioner installed where the OEM PS pump mounts. Still gotta resecure some things in the engine bay and clean up the wiring harness. Actually the whole engine bay needs a cleaning. Sh*t's still dirty as hell from my dirt surf last weekend.

I'm pretty amped on the end result. Not only did it get the alternator out of close proximity to the turbo, it also eliminated two pulleys from the front cover, shortened the belt by 40%, and made access to the turbo oil drain and wastegate unit super easy.

Parts needed to do the swap:

-Mazda 3 or 6 alternator - These bolt up where the Miata's factory A/C compressor would normally sit. Both are plug and play. I used a Mazda 6 alt, part #A3TJ1091. The Mazda 6 alt is rated at 110 amps compared to the Miata's 100 amp alt. The Mazda 3 unit is rated at 90 amps.
-Mazda 3/5 belt tensioner - Gates part #38357 or comparable.
-6PK1370 belt - I got a Dayco one for $8.75 shipped. Then I ordered a Gates unit as a backup later on for $11.



The alternator requires some trimming to one of the mounts in order to clear the steering shaft. I test fit mine, made a cut, attempted to install it, found that I needed to cut way more, then went back to the chopping block.



Second cut provided plenty of space for the steering shaft. I cut a little more than necessary, but was happier to do that than not enough. Snaking the alternator in is a bit of a puzzle.



After bolting up the alternator, I found there was a bit of a clearance issue between one of the alternator mounting arms and the radiator hose. Wrapped the thermostat housing and alt in some rags and went to town on the arm with an electric grinder. This photo was taken partway through. This bit was surprising because I hadn't seen a single word about it from the couple other writeups on the web.



Luckily the rest of the install is plug and play. The alternator in question uses the same connector as the NC and the B+ terminal is unsurprisingly the same size. I ended up shortening the B+ and connector wiring by about 6" to get rid of all the slack from the relocation. The B+ cable is basically only accessible from the driver side wheel well with a 13mm wrench, but isn't too bad to get to even with the wheel on. There's a short radiator hard line attached to the front subframe that needs to be bent upward for clearance. There's more clearance than there looks like in the picture, but I should put a rubber cap on that terminal just in case...

Probably won't drive the car much or at all this weekend since it's supposed to rain. Registration is coming up and I'm gonna get it "smogged" on Saturday. Next week I'll probably do a little work to sturdy up the now-even-more-damaged splitter, and get some additional tuning done. I'm still running the car a little richer than it needs to be at full boost and it's much richer than it needs to be at part-throttle/low boost. Gonna make a few adjustments then she should be ready to get back on track at Chuckwalla in two weeks!

 

Been hammering out more and more on the car to get it ready for Chuckwalla this coming Friday. Lots and lots of little fixes and projects, some of which probably needed attention before I even put the turbo kit on. Knock on wood, I think we're pretty ready to go for the next track event.

I fixed the splitter (again) and airdam and got everything sturdied up and looking borderline acceptable. I also replaced my fried head unit and my wideband controller/gauge. Then, in a maneuver I should've done months ago, I finally wired in a new OBDII connector. The car's original connector has been having worsening pin fitment issues for the last couple months. ECUtek says I've now reflashed the tune on this car 323 times, and I'm constantly plugging in different dongles to run CLT and IAT gauges on my head unit, or record logs via my phone. Makes sense that the thing's getting worn out. Given that I use a bluetooth dongle to display ECU information while I'm on track, having the thing intermittently disconnect is unacceptable, and it's been happening more and more recently. I grabbed a generic OBDII port and wired that in yesterday.



As you might expect, working under the dash was super fun and totally doesn't irritate your back. Luckily the connector only has 6 wires to splice.



I left the wires at full length, adding about 8" to the harness, and mounted the connector closer to the front of the dash for easy access. It's now slightly in the danger zone of getting kicked during egress, but is much easier to access and I can reach it even when strapped in. A solid improvement since it used to be in an inconvenient position pretty far under the dash.



So I also swapped the wideband gauge and head unit out with new ones after confirming there was still power and ground at both of the connectors. The wideband new gauge fired right up but the AFR readings would intermittently freeze up for a few seconds at a time, even after recalibration, so I replaced the sensor. Luckily I still have a bunch of spare Bosch widebands from my NA. Replacing the sensor fixed the freezing issue, so I guess the power surge from the alternator dying fed through the wideband controller and killed the sensor too. I've been driving the car around for the last week and it seems that no other components were fried aside from the head unit, wideband controller/sensor, and the turn signal lights. Weird.

For the head unit, I grabbed a cheap Android-based one off Amazon for $47, since I was still skeptical about the head unit blowing out but leaving the fuse intact. I wired it in and it fired right up. Double bonus, it was preloaded with a Madonna song and it has Carplay, which I've never had before. Thing's gotta be at least ten years newer than my old head unit so it's an improvement for sure.





Since it's Android-based, I was able to hook it up to my home WiFi and download a generic OBD-reader app off of the Android store. Confirmed it communicates with my other OBDII dongle and can read CLT and IAT, so that's good.



Otherwise, it's just been lots of minor fixes and maintenance since the track day at Buttonwillow. I bled the brakes again, trying to stay on top of that because of how close the ABS unit and lines are to the turbo. Everything's shielded and I didn't have any brake issues last event, but I can't imagine the fluid near the turbo is staying cool and happy. I also readjusted the exhasust as it shifted a bit and was rattling against the underbody bracing after my off-track excursion. Did another bolt check on the turbo and exhaust, changed the oil and richened the coolant mixture since we'll likely be seeing freezing overnight temps at the track soon, checked brake wear (DTC60's wearing surprisingly good despite no ducting yet), rotated the tires and installed a new set of ProfessionalAwesomeRacing splitter rods.

I have three sets of 235mm tires that all have four track days on them, and I'm going to run them all to the cords before grabbing the new sets of 255s. The next few track days, up until the first race of the season at the end of January, will just be fun days tweaking with the car and getting used to the power. I'm not expecting any record-setting times between now and then. Funny enough, I basically did the same exact thing last December after initially installing the 2.5. Had fun tweaking and tracking the car on smoked NT05's for a couple months then mildly blew my mind with the times the car put down on a brand new set of tires at the first race of the season. I'm excited to get back to tuning and tweaking, as I've barely had any time to do so while pulling dual duty instructing and driving at the NASA races all season. I'm shooting to make it to the NASA/SouthWest Speed Festival event at Podium Club in AZ on the last weekend of January (Roda, I'm gonna shoot you a PM about that as we get closer). Hopefully I can make some more improvements to the car before then and have something that's podium-worthy in TT3 class.

 

Turbo track day three in the books! With stellar results, too. The car demanded almost no attention, set faster times than I hoped for, and drove off the trailer and into my garage this morning with minimal TLC needed.

I’m also feeling a lot more confident with the power on tap. Comparing this vid to my Buttonwillow one, my shift inputs are about 600% less jerky lol.


So close to a 1:54, but blew the final corner. You can hear me yell “f*ck!” as I cross the line which definitely wasn’t an unwarranted or overdramatic response Ended up beating my pre-turbo PB from back in February by 3.7 seconds, so very happy about that. However, that previous PB was on a set of sticker RC1's, and yesterday I was on a set that looked like this after the final session...



I'm getting ahead of myself, though. The long weekend started out pretty great. Left my parents' house after Thanksgiving Thursday night and headed out to meet my buddies at the track. Aside from a car breaking down on the left lane of the freeway and the CHP shutting the freeway down completely for twenty minutes to move it, there was basically zero traffic.



Fueling up the hog at Morongo casino. Backup plan if the car blew up at the track was to stop here on the way home, put it all on red, and win big enough to put an LS in this thing.

Made it to the track around 10. My buddy Josh who runs the event organization wanted a hand bedding in the brakes on his 370z, so we took the car on the main road, got that dialed in, then hung around a campfire for a little longer before going to sleep.



Weather was a little warmer than expected on Friday, but still pretty ideal. Stayed about 65-75* all day. No excuses for not being able to set a PB. Taking the car to Buttonwillow for its first shakedown with the turbo was fun, but a bit of a bummer in the times department due to the road surface getting so much slower recently. Seeing the car run only slightly faster times than when I was there, turboless, earlier this year was kinda disheartening. Recent reports said Chuckwalla's surface was as good as ever, so I was hoping I could set a fast baseline and compare it to TT3 lap times from last year.



Between acting as an instructor, running the beginners' first session download meeting, and talking to friends and participants, I didn't end up getting on track until late morning. No biggie, as the instructor wristband would allow us to go on track in any session, and temps were going to be pretty linear throughout the day. I got a warmup session in my car, ran six or seven laps and got down to a 1:57.89. Chuckwalla is a medium-high speed course, made up predominantly looooong sweepers, and if we're being honest its the track I could definitely use the most work on. Almost every corner requires a much later braking zone and apex than you'd think. I haven't been here since February, and knew I was going to need a couple sessions to get dialed in, but was happy to know the car was on track to shaving some serious seconds today.

I'm checking up on my car after the session when one of my buddies comes over and asks if I can take his fiance for a few laps in her BMW. They want to know what I think about the handling, she thinks it's understeering too much. "Sure, which BMW is hers?" "It's the grey M4 over there." "Oh hell f*cking yeah I can do that."



So we're on track and I'm pushing this car within a reasonable limit and I have this weird epiphany. Out of the couple times I've driven a high-ish power car on track, I've usually felt like the extra power is a cool change in driving dynamic, even if my car might be able to turn a faster lap time. I.E. the dynamic is flipped from a N/A Miata as you now have more power on tap than traction. After three laps in this, my thought was: Whoa, my car is just flatout faster than this thing I know my car's not the fastest thing in the world, and the M4 was on a stock alignment and street tires, but it was a proud little personal moment lol. This is to take nothing away from the M4. It was definitely a weapon of a car and super impressive. The Bimmer was also quieter, more comfortable, more mild-mannered, didn't have mirrors that rattled too hard to see at a certain RPM, and probably starts first try on cold mornings, so there's that.

The rest of the day went pretty well. The car didn't really ask for anything. I found the catch can halfway full but hadn't emptied that since the end of GTA day 1, three weeks ago, so I didn't find that too concerning. I also found the manifold to turbo V-band loose and allowing the turbo to rotate a little at the end of the day, but I haven't checked that since GTA as well and should have been tightening it every other session, so that's on me. I did start getting some mild fuel starvation in turn 4-5 (the long left hander) when fuel level was below 80%. I'll look into fixes for that as I definitely don't want that to become an issue next time I'm here. Luckily, it wasn't an issue at Button and probably won't be anywhere else as that turn is the longest left hander on any track around here by a long shot.



Per my buddy Rafa's recommendation last event, I set my front sway bar from the front to the middle setting for a session, but the car felt pushy and kinda boring to drive. I ended up stiffening the rear bar for the next session, but the front end still felt a little pushy at high speeds. That being said, I usually experience very little oversteer at Chuckwalla compared to at Buttonwillow. Probably because Chuckwalla is as smooth as a new sidewalk in comparison to Button. I should probably be adjusting my oversteer/understeer bias differently for each track.

I'm running the wing at -1.5* right now and will either flatten that out, or add tunnels and more extension to the splitter, seeing as I still need to build a new one anyway. Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with how the car's handling. I'm still going to be swapping from 235's to 255's in January, so maybe I should hold off on any major aero/handling adjustments until then. I'm pretty certain I'll have to up my spring rates once the bigger tires go on anyways.



Managed to weasel my way into a couple other friends' cars as the day progressed. Drove my buddy Josh's 370z at one point which prompted our friend Jorge (who was actually an instructor at my first ever track day) to say I should take his out too (he was trying to one up Josh lol). Both were super cool, fun to drive cars. Felt like driving a big, more stable Miata. Or maybe I just have no frame of reference and that's all I know how to compare cars to lol.



Knowing the car can run 1:55's at Chuck now is very, very exciting. I checked times from our February event last year and the car should be super competitive in TT3 class based on yesterday's stats. NASA Chuckwalla in Feb is always a collab event with NASA SoCal and AZ, and I already know I'm not taking a W there. Cameron Lane (TT3 national champ in his LS RX8) and Joseph Brasch (Lotus Elise on Hoosiers) always show up and absolutely mop up TT3 class at this event. However, on non-smoked, wider tires, I might have a shot at taking fastest time for the SoCal region participants.

Or you know, maybe I should just focus on enjoying the car and not worry too much about playing make-believe racecar driver

I'll be swapping tires and doing maintenance on the car this week, then might consider making a new splitter for the car next weekend. Next event is Streets of Willow with my buddy's organization again on 12/19, assuming I can get the time off work. Hopefully the positive updates keep coming!