Grand Am speed3 first time in FWD driving techniques
 

Coming from a back round of racing rear wheel drive cars, racing a fwd car requires a slightly different way of driving which I have yet to master. The fundementals are exactly the same, trail in, rotate, back on power. The only difference is where that all happens.

In rear wheel drive car you treat almost every corner as a "slow in fast out" kinda of a corner, but in a fwd car its a little different. I do mean, just a LITTLE. FWD cars tend to have a lot of understeer on power so that means you get to power a bit later than a RWD car. So the goal is to roll in as much speed as possible so that the time you need to get back to power its at the end of the turn. But it since all the weight is on the front and the car is set up with as little rear grip as possible to help rid the understeer on power, it can be very easy to over drive the entry to center of the corner which in turn will cause you to get to power WAY too late and screws your run out of the corner.

So how I like to look at is, I am driving both cars (MX-5 vs a Mazdaspeed3) with the same basic techniques, just everything is happening at a slightly different time. Same braking point but rolling a little more entry speed so I can get back to power a little later in the corner.

The race was at Road America in the Continental tire challenge series (a 2.5 hour race) where I qualified 6th and ran P4 until my stint was over and I handed it to my co driver.

Congrats on your top 15 finish.

I drove 2nd in the #92 HART Civic Si, spent a few laps around your teammate. He was holding me up a bit but we had some good, clean racing. We gambled and ran out of gas on the last lap, oh well.

Seems you were a little faster than your teammate, any reason you didn't run the longer stint?

Doing anymore races with i-Moto this year? I'll be running again at Kansas this weekend in the #92 car but that's probably it.

Yeah, I kind of knew I might be a little quicker. He had a contract that he had to drive second. I think if he had qualified and we had driven to about an hour and 10 in we would've had a good chance at a top 5. By no means am I saying he is slow, I just had a few tenths on him, cool kid and knows his stuff.

We had a brake pad explode with about 45 minutes to go. I'm not sure if it was the new pad we tried or that he used the brakes up, but I'm going with the new pad we used.

And that's a negative, only ran the one. Was able to find a little bit of sponsorship to do it. We don't have the money to do another. My goal was to just get some experience and hopefully have a good showing which I think did ok.

Good luck in Kansas bud, those civics look like they will probably be strong there.

Thanks, we were definitely down a few HP to some of the other Civics. We have a new engine to swap after the test day...

If I can pull my head out of my a$$ just long enough to do 15-20 decent laps we should be pretty good at Kansas.

Too bad you aren't able to do anymore races this year, it's definitely an awesome series. I feel especially blessed to be able to do 4 or 5 races.

Glad to hear it went well. I was part of the development year with those cars in 2010. (Team Sahlen) They are really cool cars and it is great to see them and I-Moto running up front.