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Evo autocross update

First autocross in the Evo was last weekend, and it was less than spectacular. Kumho SPT's are far from the tire of choice apparently. I started out inadvertently running with too little pressure, and perhaps the best word to describe them was "floppy." Any time the car had to move in something other than a straight line, they caused me problems.

For Time Only runs I raised the pressure and they felt better...but I didn't go any faster. Great. All in all, it wasn't particularly fun.

After finally receiving my new wheels and tires, I went to the Tucson event yesterday, and wow, what a difference. The car turned in a whole lot quicker, there was more grip, everything was great. I can't wait to drive it again.

The Tucson event itself was a lot of fun - low turnout meant only two run groups and five runs each, with pay-per-run fun runs at the end. First car out was around 9:15, and I was packed up and ready to head home by 11:30. Except for a little first gear turnaround, the course itself was a lot of fun, with three slaloms heading out and another three heading back. Even had a fast straight finish.

San Diego National Tour

An interesting co-drive opportunity had me going to the San Diego National Tour last weekend - a 1985 Camaro running in CP. (Click for full size on all of these.)

Weighed in at just over 3100 lbs, supposedly 525hp, and fresh 12" wide slicks. Despite all that, it wasn't all that fast on the courses we ran. :-P It was fun to drive though, once I realized that you had to be sliding around a bit to be fast. I was not fast.

I hadn't been to a tour in a couple years now, so it was nice to see so many well-prepared cars in person again. My album with lots of pics is here.

Broken Integra (holiday weekend pt 2)

A short car failure story. Wednesday afternoon the screw holding in my distributor rotor thought it had enough, and decided to remove itself from the system. The rotor thought this was fantastic, and celebrated by tearing up the distributor cap while mauling itself in the process. Glorious. Get my new cap and rotor on Friday, still doesn't work. New complete distributor is on its way from "distributor king" on ebay. Meanwhile I'm driving my parent's 740 wagon, in all of its boxy turbo wagon goodness. At the very least, the car fits me well. Lots of steering wheel/leg clearance, I have at least a couple inches of headroom, and the headrests are sized well for someone my size. It even fits in the garage!

This made Sunday's autocross interesting, as now we had no car to drive. Fortunately, Brad was nice enough to let us co-drive his godaddy.com Miata, complete with slick orange and green stripes. Teresa and I were both pretty pleased with our results, her with one of her best pax scores since the GS Neon, and I scored higher than I have in a good number of events now. Driving the right car for the class has its benefits I suppose. ;-)

That's a mighty-big cone

For the first time in a while I had an autocross I really felt good about. Ran something like a 33.5 with a passenger on my first run, then a 33.0 on my second, but I thought I could pick up a couple tenths in the last slalom. The third run I stopped looking ahead at one point and just couldn't make the last slalom, so I blew that one. The fourth run I hit the very first slalom cone on the first slalom. :-( After that I really just stopped caring. Unfortunately, that lack of caring kind of pushed me into one of the uber-cones at a reasonably high speed and left quite the cone mark.

It also knocked loose my passenger-side fender liner, which had just been resting in place to some extent (it had been knocked out at a PIR event several months back). It didn't actually fall down during the run, so it was still in place during the tire change, but once I was on the road it fell down and slowly ground itself to death. Now there's a nice big hole in it right underneath my air filter, and the two front mounting points for it are both torn, so I think it's finally time for a new one.

Fortunately my time gave me a pretty decent pax score, just a couple tenths out of #2 pax (with lots of good drivers out of town, of course). Hopefully I can do ok the last event and end up with a decent series score, but I'm still way outclassed by a majority of the drivers in SPM.

So much emptiness

The site has been blank for weeks now, great. Fortunately, I haven't done much:

- Went to New Jersey for vacation. Spent some time on the beach, ate unhealthy food, played enough miniature golf to get me through the year.

- Got my first-ever second place autox trophy. Thanks Clint! :-P

- Had probably my best ever Addams Family pinball game, at about 412 million points. The machine was almost fully-functional, which was pretty nice. I had at least a couple multiballs, getting the jackpot or double jackpot each time. Two or three extra balls helped out the score quite a bit as well. Towards the end I finally got the "Tour the Mansion" award, which is awarded after you've gone through all of the game modes. You get 50M points, in addition to a few other things. That was great.

- We have a cat now, and have had him for a couple weeks, but still no name. Current possibilities are Samba (after the monkey in Samba de Amigo, greatest Dreamcast game ever), Pi (after the greatest number ever), or Hobbes (after the tiger in the greatest comic strip ever).

- Had my first mountain bike crash just over a week ago, right over the handlebars. Knocked the wind out of me, scraped up my knee pretty good, and my right hand is still in pain. The urgent care doctor initially said it was broken, but I went to a hand doctor that said it wasn't, so that's good I suppose. Still, this isn't good for my golf game.

- 360voice.com lets your Xbox 360 tell everyone what you've been up to. Mine is like most others, in that it seems a lot like a dog - really happy when you play with it, sad and whiny when you ignore it. At least it posts every day, more than I can say about myself to be sure. It also seems to be good motivation to get some achievements, as I've increased my score a good amount lately.

Related to video games, I picked up Uno on Live Arcade last week, and it provided a level of fun commensurate with the price. Single player seems mostly worthless, but partner Uno can be pretty fun provided the other people in your game actually talk. You're paired up with the person sitting across from you, and if either of you goes out, you both get the win. Since Skip/Draw Two/Draw Four cards only punish the person next two you, you can get into good circles of making the other team constantly draw cards. If nothing else, having a teammate requires some amount of talking, and that prevents games where you just sit there with three other strangers and nobody talks (and if you're going to do that, you may as well just play against a non-human).

I also finished up the GRAW single player campaign at normal difficulty, that was pretty fun. After a few levels I realized I had to use the night vision goggles way too much, and that's when I discovered the brightness level in the game was set to zero. :-P Not so good on an LCD RPTV! Cranked that up to 5 out of 6 and I could finally see things. It was nice to get good use out of a $60 game. I might try to stretch it out a bit more and play some levels on hard for a few more achievements.

So speaking of $60 games, the 360 might be what gets me to try gamefly.com. More games are coming out that I want to try, but I don't feel like they're worth $60 to me yet, and prices haven't really come down at all in the eight months or so that the system has been out. Granted some have been less (PGR3, Table Tennis), but it's still feels like a big increase over the $40 and $50 games I was accustomed to with the PS2/Xbox. So for $15/month I could rent games as they become available, and not deal with Blockbuster (I'm doubting here that Blockbuster has changed at all in the last year or so since I dealt with them). That works out to 4 games a year - so what am I better off having? Four games that I can keep, or as many as I can go through in a year, but keeping none?

Honestly, I'd still have to buy some to keep. :-P Forza 2, Halo 3, maybe a couple others that I rent and really enjoy. But I'd really like to try stuff like MotoGP 06, the new LOTR game, Gears of War, etc. I think the stream of games due out is good enough to support using something like Gamefly, provided they have enough copies of the games to keep me playing something.

On to autocrossing, a proposal was made to move the 3-series BMWs and the IS300 out of DSP for 2007. As great as this initially looks to me on paper, it would be both a blessing and a curse. Obviously if this were to pass, I should have a car that's potentially a top competitor. Perhaps not the first year, but at least by 2008 the pax factor should be adjusted, so even if I didn't compete nationally I would still see a local benefit with no changes to the car. Still, if I have a car with potential to be competitive, I should really prep it a lot closer to the limit of the rules. And there's Part 1 of the curse. Just getting "closer" to the limit would mean an LSD, Hondata, exhaust, and dyno tuning. There's $2500 right off the bat if I want to use decent parts, and using cheap stuff doesn't save all that much. To go beyond that requires work that doesn't help the issue of street legality, like ITBs and a big header that eliminates the cat (figure $3k for the pair).

So I could have a car that's potentially competitive. I can take over $5k and get it a lot closer to fully prepared, or I can take that same $5k plus any money I'd get from selling the car, and buy something else. That's where Part 2 of the curse comes in - even for the $11k or so that we're talking about, I can't get a car that's as fast, as fun to drive, and as competitive in its class as my Integra. So I'm stuck with it (starting my 9th year with the car this month).

Of course, if the proposal gets turned down, my car remains uncompetitive, there's no reason to spend money on it, and getting a different car that's more competitive seems like a worthwhile venture. But whatever. I still think it should pass, I guess. :-P

The weekend of little sleep

I tend to sleep in on Saturdays...a lot. So waking up at 4:30am to take my parents to the airport meant I had a lot more free time than usual that day. As a result, I actually got a lot of stuff done! Went mountain biking, golfing, cleaned up parts of the house, and played softball that night.

- Biking was short and a bit too easy, but I followed some paths I hadn't taken before, so at least I know where they go now.

- Golf started out well, but then I got stuck behind this 4-man scramble tournament that was painfully slow. I took a triple on the ninth to shoot a 43, then stopped after that. :-\

Sunday continued the lack of sleep trend, getting up early for the first summer series autox. I was still running a bit late, and only got one course walk in before it was closed. Still, I felt ok about my times and I didn't cone away anything, so that's not too bad. It was also my first time getting results online from start to finish, and while it mostly went ok, I can see some room for improvement. I just hope I can find the motivation to do it. :-P

I actually washed my car on Friday, so it was clean yesterday, albeit a little tilty.

Sporting goods (and bads)

With my back feeling pretty much all better now, I'm finally able to get back into golf and softball again. I played golf last Wednesday, and it was my first round with the new driver. I was looking forward to seeing how far I was hitting the ball, since it looked like I had gained a few yards on the driving range, but I wasn't quite sure. As it turns out, I gained a lot of yards.
- 2nd hole, 436 yards with the tees about 20 yards up, I had 100 yards in
- 7th hole, 359 yards, I hit it to about 20 feet off the green
- 10th hole, 364 yards, I was 30 yards off the green
- 15th hole, 364 yards, I was 30 feet off the green

Those were just solid drives that hit the fairway, but even the bad drives were going 300 yards, which was amazing. Still, having not played in a while I made a number of mistakes that I can chalk up to just a lack of practice, and I ended up with an 89. I can see 7 or 8 of those shots coming off pretty easily.

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What can I say about the autox really, except that new tires are a lot more fun than old tires, and I never got the top clump section right. :-( I really think that's where I lost most of my time. First two runs I didn't go down to first, third run I missed the gas pedal and couldn't get it into first right away, last run I just felt like I coasted through the left into the clump. I didn't like it at all.

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Softball later that day was my first two games of the season, as I missed the first two weekends with the back injury. My fielding was horrible - I dropped two catches at first, and made a throw that I shouldn't have. Fortunately, I made up for it at the plate. I batted 1.000 for the night, including the game-winning hit in the last inning of the second game that I'd like to think made up for the other errors I made. :-P

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So all that's left now is to get back mountain biking again, but man is it ever hot out after work these days, and before work? Well that just isn't happening. :-P

A Clean Slate

I think my site has been blank for something like a week now. As I've said before, missing a few items I want to post about just instigates this snowball of failure. "I keep meaning to write about such and such, but also these other things, and I don't have time to do it all now. I'll do it tomorrow," I say. Tomorrow comes, and I say the same thing, but the number of items has increased, so now it's going to take even more time. Thus, as time goes on, the less likely I am to have time to write about everything. Snowball of failure > me.

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When I left off, I just realized that pedals came in two different thread sizes, and I lost the coin toss. I remedied that by buying a new set, and they're infinitely better than what came on the bike. Bigger platform, and my feet stay in place much better.

I tried them out for the first time on a ride with Alan (a significantly better rider than myself) on a trail around South Mountain that would turn out to be well above my skill level. Between the fact that it was my first time seeing the trail, my general lack of mountain biking skill, and overall cautiousness, it was both mentally and physically draining. Mentally in that I was trying to process all of these obstacles on the trail that I didn't think I had the skill to overcome, so I was constantly doubting myself the entire time. No confidence. Physically in that there were just a lot of hills. :-P

While I think I could psyche myself up enough to hit that trail again, I'd want to at least see an improvement in skills elsewhere before trying it, I think. I spent a LOT of time walking the bike, and that's never as much fun. I scraped the new pedals up nicely as well. :-)

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We moved a couple weeks ago now, which was all sorts of fun. There's still a room full of junk, with no place for it to go. The garage needs work as well, which I almost look forward to. The bikes need to go up on the ceiling, and better use of shelving should help things out a bit.

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Now that we're in a house, of course, I could finally buy the subwoofer I've been wanting, the SVS PCi 20-39. :-D


I was a bit worried when I plugged things in, and didn't really get any sound from it at first. I eventually just had to turn the levels up on the amp and receiver a bit more than I thought to get anything, and now it's quite loud. I really need to get the whole thing calibrated though. Listening to music over media center, it didn't sound quite like I had hoped. My receiver being as old and partially feature-less as it is, I noticed that I have no idea what it's internal crossover is set to, so when it's on the "subwoofer" preout I'm not sure what frequencies it's getting. Hopefully with a dB meter and some calibration tools I can figure it out, I don't know.

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Finally, the issue of tires. After two autocrosses of hovering around the 900 point mark, I'll finally have a set of 710's on the car that should make me closer to competitive in my class. I really should have ordered them a couple months ago, but I'm cheap, obviously.

Of all the...

Last month I was drawn for jury duty, federal court. Fine, I go down there, fill out the questionnaire, whatever. I'll know next month if I'm selected. What do I get in the mail yesterday? I'm drawn for jury duty again, this time for county court! Even better, the court date is a week after the first trial I was drawn for is scheduled to start.

Last week I went to a new Costco that opened up in Chandler, on opening day even. I understand many people were waiting in line early for 360's, but I wasn't one of them. Still, I can cross that Costco off my list of places to go. :-P It was nice being in one that was new and clean, and the alcohol selection was closer to that of the Scottsdale store than the Tempe store (that's a good thing). Odd though - I didn't see ice cream bars on the food court menu. Not a good sign.

Sunday's autocross was fun, but frustrating. I DNF'd what I believe to have been my best run, but even if it was clean, I still would have been way off Clint's time. I'm going to have to make some significant improvements if I want a chance next season. Hopefully more people can be dragged into the class by then as well...two is good, but three or four would be great (especially after a few years of one).

Finally, I was sick most of this week, which is always fun. Hooray for DayQuil.

Rebirth of azsolo2 forums

About a month away from the 3-year anniversary of the azsolo2.com forum installation, it will finally be getting its first upgrade. I emailed the hosting company last week asking them to upgrade php on our system to meet minimum requirements for the latest version of the software, but I never heard back from them. Just yesterday I find out that they did infact upgrade it for me. :-) I went ahead and bought the forum upgrade, and just this morning put in my request to have it upgraded (included in the cost). I would expect that to be done today or tomorrow. This should fix the numerous security issues we have with running such an old unpatched piece of software, and we'll have access to all future upgrades.

I got my hands on an Xbox 360 demo kiosk the other day, that was kind of cool. The whole startup sequence and Live! interface looked pretty nice on the little LCD HDTV. :-D There were a handful of games listed on the demo disc, but most were just demo videos, and I believe there were just two playable demos: Call of Duty 2 and Kameo.

I started with COD2, and while it looked good, the controls instantly frustrated me - no invert look, so I was all over the place. No option to reconfigure that either. About five seconds in, I was done.

Moving on the Kameo...oh wait, I couldn't. I started it up, and I got an error message saying something to the effect of "Your disc appears to be dirty or scratched, please clean it and try again." Pretty slick.

I thought the controller felt kind of cheap compared to the current Xbox controllers, but I don't know how much of that was due to the weight, which I thought was less than the current controller. I have no idea how a white controller is going to stay clean, either. :-P

Update bonanza

This is exactly the problem with a website, the further behind I get, the less motivated I am to make a post, since each passing day means I have more to add. At some point my brain hits a limit though, and anything new I want to add means something else gets left behind. Or to paraphrase Homer, "Remember when we went to that wine tasting and I forgot how to drive?"

I think the last post I made was just before the Tucson autocross, where I planned to drive Dave's car. I had all sorts of problems with that. It was a really fast course, requiring a shift to third on two occasions. Rarely could I get the car from third into second gear cleanly, and on the last couple runs I even had trouble upshifting to third...I just couldn't find it. On top of that, a cone was called on my fastest run (I have no idea where), so I had to stand on a slow run. It really wasn't a good course to exhibit all of the car's abilities, which was unfortunate.

Car issues aside, the course design resulted in some..."event management" issues I guess. Due to the loop and crossover, launch intervals were in the neighborhood of 40 seconds, and even that often put two cars close to each other on course, where one car could easily spin out into another. On top of that we got 4 runs, and that made for a pretty long day.

This is where I totally forget everything that happened last week. I think I probably played some video games. A bit of GT4, some Halo 2. It's good to know that an entire week of my life can be boiled down to "I played video games."

Over this past weekend I noticed an odd noise on deceleration from around my front right wheel. When I finally went to check it out, I first noticed that I was missing a lugnut. Wait...that's not right. The other 3 were "fairly tight," in the same way that I was feeling "fairly stupid." As I'm mourning the loss of the poor lugnut, I notice something shiny on the back side of the wheel. Grease, and lots of it. That's rarely a good thing. Off comes the wheel, and the cv boot is torn all the way around the joint, tossing grease everywhere. Sweet.

My first trip to the dealer for the week, and I'm buying nothing but a lugnut, as I don't have any spares, and I'd rather not (knowingly) drive on three. The boot kit comes from BAP, and I drive up to Clint's place for yet another fine boot installation, which generally went well, except for some additional pain caused by my poly bushings in the LCA, and a broken cotter pin.

Second trip to the dealer for the week, this time to get some spare cotter pins. They don't have the exact one I'm looking for in saleable form, but the guy is nice enough to grab a handful of pins from some bins and just give them to me, saying "one of these should fit." Hooray.

I did in fact carve a pumpkin this year, and I finally tried using a stencil. I did The Cheat from homestarrunner.com, as it looked easy and recognizeable (well, if you know the site).

So that's about it, I think I'm caught up now.

Slow to update, slower to autocross

Yes, I know. Site hasn't been updated. Blah blah blah. I really meant to update it last night, but instead I slept for 11 hours. It was great.

So, yes, slow to autocross. The One-Make Battle: Integra continued this weekend, with rounds 2 and 3 of the fall autox series. To recap, round 1 of the first-ever showdown resulted in a victory for the aging GSR, though barely. The Type R was still on street tires, and only lost by 0.4s (5 points). I was able to pick up more time than Clint in TOs, spreading the gap to 1s on a 70s course. Not quite as much as I'd like, given the tire difference.

Round 2 was like a whole different battle, mentally. Now there was almost no reason I should win, because the Type R would be sporting some brand new V710s. Even though they were only 205's on a 6" wheel, it's still a big step up from Falkens. I thought 1s on a 71s course wasn't enough, and I was right. Running in B group, still on a pretty green track, I couldn't do any better than a clean 51.8 to Clint's 51.0. My last two runs were both dirty, IIRC. That always hurts, but I don't think they were much faster anyway. That 0.8s margin of victory was worth 15 points, pretty big.

It TO's we both got faster by a fair amount - I went down to a 50.5, but apparently I had been hitting the first cone on the course the whole time, and nobody had told me. That time would have been good for about a 982. Clint took the half-as-old Type R down a 49.8 and a 995 score. Always good to see what can be done when you run with good rubber on the course.

I also tried out my camera mount on Saturday, and it wasn't too bad. I don't know much about video compression, so I just cut out everything but my last run and left it in mpeg2, at a massive 63MB (right-click, save as). I think that was the 50.5s run. The seat moves around a bit much, but I'll try to hold it in place a bit more next time.

Round 3 of the One-Make Battle was a bit more frustrating. I think Clint ran a 45.1 on his first run, but couldn't break into the 44's on any of his last 3 runs, finishing with a 45.0. I wasn't doing particularly well, starting with a 46.6 on my first run, and a 46.0 on the second. My last run I came across the line with a 45.4 that I was quite happy with, but apparently I had a cone called on me. :-( With wheels that stick out past the car, I don't hear/feel any cones that I hit with my tires, just the ones that hit the car itself, so I had no idea I hit it. I had to stand on my 46.0, a full second slower than Clint, and we finished with scores of 970 and 949. My 54.4 would have been good for a 962, making the final results a lot closer.

For some reason I just couldn't pick up the time in TOs, and that was frustrating as well. I couldn't top a 45.9, despite each run feeling better than the last. No idea what was going wrong. Actually, it was one of the few events where just about everone did relatively poorly in TOs. The best TO pax score was only a 981, and usually there are at least a couple scores above 1000.

Possibly the best part about Sunday's event is that someone got my picture. :-P You can see it here. For some reason I haven't had many good pictures taken of my car since I got the new wheels, but I think that one was pretty good.

So there you are, after 3 events, here's how the One-Make Battle is going:
Clint  951 972 970  2893 (Total)  1942 (Best 2)
Ben   956 957 949  2862 (Total)  1913 (Best 2)

I figured it out a couple days ago, but I think if Clint gets anything better than about a 972, he clinches the Fall Series title. Which it seems that he'll likely do, because even if he doesn't get a 972, I still have to get near 1000 to have a chance. Oh well.

Slightly more interesting is what happenst when you eliminate the cones, look at TO runs, and just compare pax scores for our absolute fastest raw times of the day. I don't have the numbers with me, but it puts us only 3 points apart for the season, with the same dropped score if you look at best 2 of 3. A lot closer.

Looking ahead, what can I do to go faster? Well, what are my current excuses. 1, no Type R. That'll always be an excuse. 2, no V710s. That can be fixed whenever I burn off these tires, but I'm not really anxious to do that, as it's still a $600 expense. 3, I make dumb mistakes. Yeah, that would be a good one. Cones cost me about 14-17 pax points in competition runs, so that obviously hurts.

I suppose those are really the main excuses. I could always blame OTS shocks, or the lack of an LSD, but I should be able to overcome that. Those are both things where I'd really like to see what my car would be like with them to know if they would be worthwhile purchases. Driving better would be a good place to start...probably because I'm cheap. Of course, now there's no local event until December, so I get a nice little break to think about why I'm so slow. :-P The One-Make Battle comes to a conclusion in two months!

Football camaro mount

Went to the ASU vs USC football game on Saturday, and despite ASU's loss, it was really a good game. Held them off until the very end of the fourth quarter, but that was it. Should be interesting to see where we fall in the rankings after the loss.

After the game, I went with Evan to pick up some lightly-used race tires for his Camaro, some meaty 265/45-16 V710s. We meet the guy to buy the tires, and for whatever reason Evan's car won't start. Fantastic. Somehow AAA takes two hours to arrive, and the car gets towed to the dealer. That's exactly how I wanted to spend my Saturday night.

Sunday meant Camaro parts buying, with a trip up to Rippy's to buy some used shocks and look at a stack of ESP parts for sale. He just came away with the shocks, but we got some good advice when it comes to actually installing them.

Finally, I built the in-car camera mount that I bought parts for last week. It turned out...mostly ok, I guess. I didn't have a drill press, and I'd say it's near impossible to cut through box aluminum walls in a straight line, at least the way I was approaching it. So the holes for the post are kind of scraggly, and the whole thing has a bit of a tilt to it. Bah. Should still work at least, but it would have been nice to turn out a better-looking product. I still have enough aluminum left that I could make another one of the same dimensions and just re-use all of my hardware, so I might give it another shot when I can use a drill press.

A good autox weekend

It felt good to be autocrossing the Integra again last weekend, especially now that I have some competition with Clint running DSP. I was able to stay ahead after each run, but it was only by four tenths in the end. Given the tire advantage I had, it kind of takes away from the victory. On paper I should have won by a lot, but I'm just not as good a driver. Despite running in the morning, I still paxed a 956. Looking back at past stats, that's pretty consistant with my scores in the spring (952, 950, 953 in Jan, Feb, Mar respectively).

In the morning I was pushing everywhere, and just generally running poor lines. My last run I tightened up some of the lines, blew about 3 turns and a slalom, and didn't lose much time. In TO's I cleaned up those turns, kept the better lines, and the extra grip from running later dropped my times almost two seconds. That was good for a score of 980, easily the best score I've had at a Phoenix area event. In January I had a competition run that would have been a 974 were it not for a cone, but...well, there was a cone. So I'm happy with my performance for the weekend.

In afternoon fun runs I ran the Saab a few times, and those stock tires are just terrible. The best I could manage was only good for about an 895 on the DS pax factor. I was surprised at how easy the car would rotate with the pressures we were running, however (suggested by Jay B). Well, easier than I would have expected, at least. It really needs some better tires, particularly in a better size. Something tells me that 205/55-16 isn't the hot size for STX, no matter what car you're driving.

One down, one to go

Found my leaking coolant line over the weekend, and it turned out to be one that I had to replace when installing my intake about 4 years ago. Once a little pressure was applied to the system, it was a pretty obvious leak. Replaced the hose, added yet more coolant, and I think it's ok now.

Drove it to the gym last night (I'm trying to drive it at night, since the air doesn't work), and I figured I should get on it a few times after it warmed up. For some reason it felt really fast - probably a combination of the following:
1. Been driving the Neon the last two weeks
2. Haven't been up near redline much since the new clutch & flywheel
3. When I was driving the Integra, I would always have the air on.

So now I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how it'll feel on Sunday with the 13's on it again. Hopefully I can get the air fixed so the ride home is somewhat comfortable.

I should have said one down, one-and-a-half to go, I think. Seems that I'm still leaking a little bit of fluid from the clutch reservoir, but I'm not sure what part is leaking. :-\

Arrive & Drive

I tried the Arrive & Drive at Bondurant last night, and it was a lot of fun. Of course, I wasn't looking ahead, so when the 2nd turn came up way sooner than I thought, I overcorrected and spun right there. I had to wait for the rest of the pack to pass me before I could safely turn around and continue. A couple turns later I was a bit distracted when I saw some fireworks going off in the distance, and put a couple wheels off into the dirt. ;-) After that though, everything was good. Lap times were consistantly coming down, as I got used to the grip and tried some different lines.

The grip level seems pretty good, and I think that's what seems to make it so much more tiring than the indoor karts, but I don't know. That, and there's nothing holding you in the seat, so you have to work to stay in place. The bigger seats are definitely welcome for drivers of my size, even if it's harder to keep yourself from moving IMO. I'm sure skinny people would disagree with me. ;-) I like the banked turns and slight elevation changes, and rumble strips/grass/dirt are a welcome change over tire barriers right at the corners. $25/race seems like a pretty fair price for the experience, especially since by the time I was done, I didn't know if I had enough in me to race again. It's a lot of work being a slow driver.

I ended up finishing 6th out of 9 or something, with a time in the low 41s. Clint won the race with the only lap in the 39s.

Now my problem is that I still have a card with two races on it at F1 race factory, and my motivation to go back there is low. :-P

High-altitude cone-dodging

Sunday was the first autocross in the Saab, with the RGRSCCA running in Santa Fe this month (a bit less than an hour's drive from Albuquerque). Thanks to some tire pressure advice from Jay Balducci, former "plain-'ol-WRX-on-street-tires" driver, the car felt pretty good. Well...not at first. You see, it was a bit of a slow course. Slow enough that you put it in second, then you wonder why you ever did such a thing.

First run I shift into second at the first turn, and boooooog. I don't shift the rest of the run, and it's like the car has a 2000rpm redline that it just will not exceed under any circumstances. Finish with a 63.3, Teresa has a 64.4.

Second run I decide that I better at least downshift for the clump - yep, it's not just Arizona, apparently New Mexico has them too. Ok, so it was one cone, but it was reeeealy tight, and not a bit of fun. I think Teresa took the clump cone better than me all day. I take off some time though, 61.4 for me, another 64.4 for Teresa, but +1.

Third run, the lag is pretty frustrating, and there are just so many slow turns on this course, plus the tires aren't offering much. First gear it is! I don't shift into second until the very end of the course, which is essentially a straight. I finally break into the 60s with a 59.8, but Teresa takes off loads of time with a 60.3. Hmm...only a half second back.

Fourth run, more of the same. First gear, trying to be smooth with the throttle, blah blah blah. Go a bit faster, 59.4. Teresa improves more though, to a 59.5. Only a tenth behind me. Was I worried? Does Ron Burgundy play jazz flute? You bet.

Fifth and final run. I know I need to take off a LOT of time, lest I bear the brunt of much scorn come Monday morning. I don't know what was happening this time, I think I just pushed a little more everywhere, turned a bit earlier, and the car just kind of floated around the cones and through the gates. It was actually kind of nice. ;-) I crossed the finish line, not knowing where I would stand, hoping I would widen the gap just enough. As I rolled up to the timing lights, I saw the glow of the five-eight-oh, which I knew was plenty. Teresa's next run was a couple tenths faster. She congratulated me on the good run, then I think she hit me. Something like that. :-D

How does that stack up to everyone else? It was a totally stock car on big tall RE92s, how do you think? S-L-O-W. Results sorted by pax are here. I was 19th with a 916. Paul Brown takes top pax in a small car on a course with a bunch of slow turns? Unpossible! :-P

That said, there were some things left to be desired about how things were run. I think this was a bigger event than they usually put on, and it was a new location, so there are always problems associated with that. 40-second (est.) overlap + 5 runs + 2 run groups = long day. The course doubled-back on itself a couple times, so it took a while before you could send the next car. 36 cars in a run group meant that it was a long time before you could run again, too. Of course, it was much worse if you were a course worker, as I was standing out there in the sun for about 3.5 hours for the afternoon work assignment. I'm a bit red now, as we didn't have a chance to pick up some sunscreen before the event. Bad idea.

A few of the cool cars I thought I'd mention. There was a Conquest (see below) in all it's 80's-retro glory, 2 red FD's, including one in SM2 that looked absolutely perfect, and an SM2 NSX that looked almost as gorgeous. Oh, and there was a new C6 that put a wheel up on a curb while trying to pull into a parking space. Nice.

Onward with pics!
This is ALL of the stuff we brought to the event, including two jackets in case it rained. Weird!

Grid lineup.

The curb-hopping C6.

The fender-ful Conquest.

Ah, an actual picture of the car!

And in motion.

Teresa attacking the clump cone, while Ben wishes he had a better zoom (you'll have to click to see anything):

Hey, who took all my camber!

More on course.

Me pretending I got something out of my Evolution school.

And finally, a shot for the sponsors. You listening OMP? I need a new helmet bag! :-D

No Sleep Till Casa Grande

You'd think I'd learn, but no. I knew I had to get up early for the autocross on Sunday, especially since I was riding down there with Evan, and he somehow got stuck doing course setup. So I set the alarm for 3:45, as I get into bed around 12:45*. Really smart.

I wake up at 3:45, get out of bed, and stare at my clock for a few minutes. I think, "3:45, what does that mean? Is that a time, or is that a weight?" I'm not kidding, a weight. I don't know what kind of weight 3:45 would represent, but perhaps it made sense at the time. So you can tell what my level of awareness was like.

All I can say about changing tires on a Camaro is that after dealing with a 3400lb car with heavy 5-lug 16" wheels, it'll be nice to go back to a 2600lb car with 4-lug 15" and 13" wheels. :-D

First run, we don't really know what the tire pressures should be. It might not matter much anyway, because I think we may have been running a wheel and tire package like this:

Seriously, the tires are at least 3 years old*.

I think my first run, I put down a 62.4 or something - pretty slow, but I haven't driven the car in a while*. Evan follows that up with a 62.2, but that's not a big deal, he has more experience with the car obviously*.

Second run I take off a bunch of time, with a 61.0, and I think Evan follows with a 62.0. We're not even checking tire pressures*, but whatever, I'm up by a second! :-P Well...maybe we should be checking tire pressures, I think. Check the fronts, they're at 45*! Bleed those down to about 38. Evan checks the rears, I have no idea what they were, but he dropped them down to about 38 as well. Note that the tire pressure gauge the region gave out for trophies one summer series bleed air slower than anything imagineable.

Third run I drop another half second, down to a 60.5, so I'm feeling pretty good about my 1.5-second lead. Then Evan hits me with a 60.4, bah! My last run I cone the slalom, and that's it. He does the same, so we stand on our third runs, and I lose by a tenth, translating to one pax point. Maybe next time.

All this time, the engine was getting pretty hot during the course of the run*. We really shouldn't have been in the same group, and I don't know when his coolant was last changed. Next event we'll definitely split it up though, assuming he still wants to go.

It seems that most of the day I was looking ahead just the wrong amount*, too, as I felt like the A-pillar was always in the wrong spot. ;-) Of course, I hadn't autocrossed in a couple months*, so that certainly didn't help either.

By now you should have figured it out, but every * represents an excuse - I figure each one is good for about 5 pax points. :-D

New parts, bad news, good news

Parts have arrived! Clutch showed up on Friday, flywheel on Saturday.
Exedy Organic:



Fidanza flywheel:

Hopefully they'll make their way onto the car shortly, to be broken in before the Fall series.

As mentioned previously, a side effect of my new medication is a change in how sodas taste, and I'm afraid that's definitely happened. Imagine a regular soda with about 85% less carbonation and 65% less sweetness - that's what it tastes like to me. Not so good.

But what's the good news, you ask? Beer tastes exactly the same! :-D

Evo-itis

I have it, but I can't afford the cure. :-(

After a few autox runs in an STi last weekend, and hearing that the Evo is the superior autox car, the seed has been planted. I want one. Currently considered one of the "cars to have" in ESP and STU, plus a contender in AS and SM. Last night I read through the most recent 10 pages of the motorsports forum at evolutionm.net, looking at how people had been setting theirs up for various classes. What did I learn?
- You want a 2005 model for the front diff.
- Kosei makes a light & cheap wheel for AS ($239, 15.5lbs for the K11 TS).
- 5Zigen makes a good 17x9 wheel for non-stock classes (FN01R, FN01R-C).
- 285/30-18's on 18x10 wheels can fit for ESP/SM.
- Be sure to get an adjustable rear sway bar.
- Koni doesn't make anything for it yet, so buy coilovers. :-\
- Camber plates > *
- Several companies provide ECU reflashes that don't change boost.
- Both the turbo manifold and downpipe can be replaced in STU and higher classes (leaving a cat in place for STU).
- Oil starvation can be an issue in long high-speed turns.

So not only is it competitive in Stock ($), STU ($$), ESP ($$$), and SM ($^infinity), but it has 4 doors and a trunk. To a slightly lesser extent, there's only one Evo autocrossing locally vs. about a dozen STi's, and it would be kinda fun to go up against them. ;-)

Of course, this whole discussion is really meaningless when I recognize that I can't afford $550-800/month for 3-4 years, plus the inevitably higher insurance rates. Oh well. :-(

Who doesn't like a few pictures?

Last week I uploaded some of the better pics I've taken on my camera phone (well, better is awfully subjective). Pics > text, right? Onward!

1. A fine old car, taken on the freeway to...somewhere. It may have been coming back from a Sierra Vista event I went to several months back. I think the picture came out surprisingly well, given the low light level.

2. Viper in a parking lot. Not so unusual...except it's the parking lot at Costco, and unless you're a regular, you're probably going to walk out with more stuff than will fit in a viper trunk. God help him if he needs to buy toilet paper.

3. Same parking lot! This person might have similar problems. How he drove this to a Costco, I have no idea.

4. LAN tournament at an Athlon 64 launch event. The game was Far Cry, which I had never played before. I made it through several rounds though, and was just a couple kills out of making it into the final four people.

5. These were taken from the balcony outside the main conference room in the new building on Mill Ave., "the brickyard". Good views, and the room was full of about 40 Aeron chairs.

6. Beer pong, sport of kings. Unfortunately this game was played on a smaller-than-regulation table.

7. Soft pretzel? check. Que Bueno? check. Beer? check. :-D

8. The pinnacle of 80's wagondom.

9. Just a little cooler, even though it's not a wagon. ;-)

10. Cone decapitation. So sad.

11. "It's a flavor explosion!!" says the cat.

12. The pummelo. Large grapefruit? Martian spider egg sac? You decide.

13. Shiny race wheels, followed by tire stack comparison. From left to right: 205/50-15 Victoracer V700 on 15x6.5 wheels, 235/45-13 Ecsta V700 on 13x8 wheels, 225/50-14 Ecsta V700 on 14x6 (?) stock Neon wheels.

14. Said race wheels on two different cars. Lots of positive comments on them. There's no doubt that the awesomeness level is high.

15. Finally, what proved to be an meaningless threat. The Wagovan is a good car, and it was lots of fun to drive, but it couldn't quite keep up with the Miata (ok, so 3 seconds off on a 60-second course). Again though, fun to drive, and it looked GREAT on those wheels.

Dead tires

At least, they're mostly dead. After this weekend's autocrossing, I think they're about done. Here's an approximate breakdown of the runs that have been put on the tires:

- November 2-day event in Tucson: 38 runs
- December Phoenix event: 6 runs
- January Tucson event: 8 runs
- January Phoenix event: 6 runs
- February Phoenix event: 12 runs
- El Paso tour event: 15 runs
- March Phoenix event: 8 runs
- April driver's school: 24 runs
- April Phoenix event: 12 runs
Total: 129 runs :-O

A majority of those were obviously from just two events, but I figure it's better to wear the tires out before they heat-cycle out, like I did with my last set. Co-driving really takes its toll on a tire's life expectancy. ;-)

Autocross, 007, sugar

Drove out to the autocross on my new street tires, the Falken Ziex ZE-512. GREAT price, decently quiet, good ride. I enjoyed the course this month - felt like it had a high average speed, but the maximum speed wasn't that high at all, maybe mid-50s at the most for me. Felt kind of busy, and I'm sure my line left lots of time out there. I never really felt that I put together a great run, just mediocre. I'm missing all of that front camber I lost, especially on the two big sweepers on the course. :-\ Fun course though. The "three runs count" idea was interest, and certainly added some pressure when I coned my second run. Ended up with 3 clean runs though, so it wasn't all bad. My pax score counting 3 runs was only one point more than my score counting 1 run, for whatever that's worth.

Leaving the event early meant there was actually time to do other stuff on Saturday, so we finally went to the James Bond exhibit at the Arizona Science Center. It was pretty interesting. They had an Aston Martin DB5 from one of the earlier movies there, which was nice. Also several props, such as the Oddjob hat and Jaws' chrome steel jaws. I especially liked seeing some of the original drawings of gadgets and such, and old movie posters (including a number from other countries), so that was cool.

Last night we finally played my 007 Scene It! game, after an Easter filled with sugar and other generally unhealthy stuff. With just two people it goes pretty quickly unless you play where you can only move when you answer a question right. It really pointed out that, despite liking Bond movies, I couldn't tell you much about them. :-P They're all on my "to watch" list now, along with all of the LOTR movies with commentary. Hopefully I'll pay more attention this time. You really have a shot of doing well if you can remember the following about each movie:
- the name of the movie
- where it was in the order of release
- which actors played Bond
- brief plot summary
- the main villian's name
That alone should give you enough info to make a really good guess at most of the answers.

Alas, in all of that business, there was no time for GT4.

Knife to a gunfight

That pretty much describes me in my class at El Paso.

The drive out was uneventful. I brought along a good selection of cd's, though I knew they wouldn't last me all the way there without some repeats. In no particular order:

• Zwan - Mary Star of the Sea


• Sublime - Greatest Hits


• Garbage - Version 2.0


• White Zombie - Supersexy Swingin' Sounds


• Reel Big Fish - Turn the Radio Off


• Smashing Pumpkins - Machina II/Friends and Enemies of Modern Music

It was a cloudy night, which made things weird, as it was always very dark. It really didn't feel like I had been driving that long as I went from Tucson through New Mexico, as nothing changed - it was always just as dark as it was 10 minutes ago, and the road is pretty much the same the whole way there. Doing this for four hours made it that much more interesting when I crested a hill above Las Cruces, and just saw the sea lights that made up the town. Not dense lighting, like in a big city, just lots of little lights across the desert. From there, it was onward to El Paso, which wasn't very far away. Mentally, I tried to make the trip easier by thinking of it in terms of sequential "Tucson" trips, since I've made that drive a number of times. It's about 110 miles to the middle of Tucson, from my place. Then from Tucson, Lordsburg was only 150ish miles - a little more than one Tucson drive. From Lordsburg, Las Cruces was 120 miles away - about equal to one Tucson drive. El Paso was only 45 miles beyond that, and that's only like a drive to Casa Grande. Not bad at all. It really didn't feel like six and a half hours of driving.

The Radisson in El Paso is actually a pretty decent hotel. At the very least, the tv in the room at rear RCA inputs, and some of the better rooms even had them on the front of the tv. Fancy. Two free drinks per night and a free breakfast in the morning made it a pretty good deal. A nearby Applebees and a steakhouse made it that much better. The RCA inputs were used, of course, to connect my PS2, so we could play GT4 during free time. As a result, I only watched the 70+ channels of cable in the room for about 10 minutes. If I ever had to go to El Paso again, I wouldn't mind staying there.

Friday's practice day didn't start out so well. Just as people started making practice runs, it started to rain. Still not having much rain experience, I took my practice runs during the rain to get a feel for tire pressures in case it rained the next day, which was what the forecast called for. After an hour or so, it dried up. I still didn't like the fact that it rained at all, as autocrossing in the rain is my absolute least favorite type of autocrossing. Just incredibly frustrating for me. Oh, and have I mentioned that I don't have any rain gear? That's fun, too. At least I now have a tarp to go above/below my stuff, so it doesn't get all wet when it rains. Overall, I'd say the practice day went ok. At the very least, I got my car tech'd, and came back later to check in for registration, and to walk the course.

Walking the course, it looked like it was going to be fun & fast, and that proved to be true on Saturday. No rain, fortunately, spare a few drops in the morning before we started running. Everything seemed to flow nicely, except for one tricky little turn about 2/3rds of the way through. Average speed was pretty reasonable, and top speed was probably in the upper-60s I'd guess (at least, for my car). I really could have used a lot more power for maybe 3 to 4 sections, but there's not much I can do there. The fast car in the class was so much faster, I wonder why anyone would even try to compete in an Integra. Obviously the driver was far better than me (national champion at least once, I believe), but 5 seconds on a 60-second course is a pretty huge margin to try to overcome. If I ever want to attain that level of ability, I'll need to be driving at least as fast as our local SM drivers in my car, or in other words, top pax by a nice margin at just about every event. Yeah, that's a little ways off. :-P

Sunday's course was just Saturday's course run backwards, with a couple modifications to the start and finish. It definitely had that "course run backwards" feel to it, as I didn't think things flowed quite as smoothly. It was fun, but for me, not as much as the previous day. Maybe that's why I went so slow the second day. ;-) I just didn't drive well. Coned my first run, DNF on my second. The third run I thought I was doing ok, but I hit a stupid cone that just shouldn't be hit. Even worse, the time wasn't all that good. I was still a couple seconds off of where I should have been. I knew I had to have a good clean run on my third attempt, but I'm wondering if that didn't slow me down some. So there you go, my co-driver and I finished last and second-to-last. Hooray.

The drive home was equally uneventful, but driving during the day, I actually got to see what New Mexico looked like, other than the 20ft-wide stretch of asphalt. Turns out I wasn't missing much. It's like Arizona, but with no saguaro. I shouldn't say it was uneventful, really. There was some periods of really hard rain, where I couldn't see more than about 50 feet out of my windshield. Fortunately that only lasted a few minutes. Then I ran over a few massive tumbleweeds, which I'm sure scratched up the paint a bit. :-( Then I ran into some massive traffic in Tucson, where I was pretty much idling along in first gear for about 45 minutes. That was pleasant. >:-O

Overall, I came out of the event a bit discouraged. For one, I knew the fast car in my class would be faster than me, but I didn't expect the margin to be so huge. At this point for me, it's like standing in front of a smooth 20ft wall with no equipment, and having someone tell me to climb it. It feels that insurmountable. I can make up all the excuses I want regarding the fact that I'm so much less experienced, that the car is underprepared, whatever. Even if you account for all of those things that I would fix if I could, there's still that wall that I just don't think I can climb, and it's disappointing. It has kind of made me re-think what I want the car to be, and how I want to spend my money. If the goal is a locally-competitive car that I drive every day, then the high-dollar items are out. ITBs, standalone engine management, maybe even the LSD. I'm wavering on the race-valved shocks, but those will probably happen anyway, as my current springs aren't adequately controlled as it is. Money spent on the expensive items can go to other things, like the cost of traveling to other events, or even non-autox items I'd like to buy. After all, I'll need to buy the next playstation and xbox, and those won't be cheap. Especially if I want to play them in the full glory of a high-definition projector. If I'm ever convinced that my skills are at a level where my car is seriously holding me back, maybe I'll look to get something more competitive. Whatever car that may be is anybody's guess though. I don't really like the lack of modifications in stock, and race tires are too much fun to go back to street tires in STS/STX/STU/STS2. That pretty much just leaves SP classes, which can be expensive to do right, and for a top car, often leaves you with something that's not suitable for street use.

In closing, never attend an autocross without chapstick. Ever.

Hope the rest of the day doesn't go like this...

So I'm going to Costco for lunch, figuring I can cross a couple things off my El Paso todo list. When I went to charge my camera batteries last night, I found they won't hold a charge. The camera takes 4 of them too, which is no good. It's not the latest and greatest sample of digital photographic equipment, that's for sure. Costco.com shows a 4-pack of NiMH batteries with a 15-minute charger for $25 - it sounded good, and I know I had seen it in the store before. So after my hot dog, I go battery hunting. And I can't find them. For 15 minutes. I know I've seen them there before, and now I can't find any batteries at all. I even had to go so far as to ask someone where they were, which I absolutely hate doing. So, where were they? Right up front, as you walk in the door. About six pallets of them. >:-O They didn't have exactly what I was looking for, but it was close - a 6-pack of NiMH AA's for $13, but no charger. Fine, I'll use the charger I have at home. Hopefully the batteries were the problem, not the charger!

While I'm there, I check out the various language learning programs on audio cd, thinking it would be a good way to pass the time both driving there and back, plus an actual activity would probably do a better job of keeping me awake. At $19, the price was right as well. Eight cd's per language, and at 75 minutes per cd, that's about 10 hours of content. Perfect! Unfortunately, I wasn't really interested in the languages they had at the moment - Spanish, French, and Japanese. Obviously Spanish could have been sorta useful, given where I'm going, but I wasn't interested for whatever reason. French, no thanks. They don't even pronounce half the letters in each word it seems. Those letters can't just sit there and be ignored, they demand to be heard. Japenese could have been cool, but every account I've heard says that it's a really tough language to learn, and I wasn't up for that sort of challenge. I know in the past they've had German and Italian as well. I was kind of hoping they'd have German there. Despite taking 4 years of it in high school, I don't really know much. Perhaps a different leaning technique would lend itself to better results? Who knows. For $19, it would have been worth it to find out I think. Maybe some other time.

So let's review the todo list:

1. Buy GT4. Priorities and all.
2. Get front end aligned after suspension work last weeked. Hopefully that'll be done today.
3. Pack a bag, remembering that it should be a little cooler there. Almost done
4. Check fluid levels.
5. Check tires (for things beyond the terrible wear pattern).
6. Bring enough cd's to get through the 12 hours of driving, round trip.
7. Stop at the bank for some road cash.
8. Mail in the Kumho liability waiver (made my magnets yesterday).
9. Find camera, and charge the batteries for it.

Looking good! Just have to finish up those last three before I head out. :-)

Longest day evar?

It's 6:50am. The sun is almost up. On a normal work day I'd be brushing my teeth about now, but today, I've been here for an hour and a half already. Woke up three hours ago. Even worse, I was awoken by the sound of rain gushing off the roof at 3am. I should be leaving work early, but alas, it won't be to play GT4. I can only hope that I'l get out of town at a reasonable time today, so I can make it to El Paso and get some sleep before the practice day tomorrow. My confidence level has dropped a bit lately, as my class has seem some additions in the last couple weeks. After a little research, I think the only people in my class that haven't trophied at nationals are me and my co-driver. Great. I plan to bust out the "underprepared" excuse BIG TIME. :-D Even if I don't finish well, it's looking to be a fun event (well, provided my car stays on this side of the border).

Alignment hilarity

So - went to pick up my car after getting an alignment yesterday. $94 out the door, more than I expected, but they did a 4-wheel alignment, rather than just the front. Probably best that they did, as rear thrust was a bit out of wack. Toe is now near zero, car drives straight, and the steering wheel is well-aligned. Funny comments on the receipt though - camber on the right side wasn't within factory specs, so they recommended offset bushings to "correct" that. !!!! I've been looking for offset bushings for a couple years now, and NEVER found any for my car. I mentioned that to them, and they seemed quite surprised. :-P I think my camber now is a pathetic -1.2° on the front left, and -1.4° on the front right. :-(

Mmmm...tilty.

One more thing. As is obvious from this picture, I either need (a) stiffer springs, (b) a fat front swaybar, or (c) less lateral grip. Well, maybe not (c). :-P I really need to get more of Brandon's pics up, and there are plenty of good ones.

Oh yeah, that.

I mention suspension work in the previous post, yet don't talk about it. Fantastic. Brian and Clint helped me change out my adjustable control arms and replace most of my front suspension bushings with poly equivalents. I think the only rubber bushings left up front are on the swaybar endlinks.

Control arms: the car definitely doesn't look as good without 3° of negative camber, but there's no way around that at the moment. Hopefully one of these days I'll get some control arms out to someone that can make offset bushings, and I could get a little of that back. My tires should thank me though, as I should get more than 10k miles out of a set. Of course, if I wasn't so lazy, I just would have had them flipped a few thousand miles back, and I'd be ok.

Poly bushings: these weren't so bad to install, once we got the process down. Fortunately the new bushings came with tons of lube, as (a) you definitely need it to get them in, and (b) it's supposed to prevent/lessen the squeaking. Right now I do notice them squeaking still, but mainly over larger bumps, and usually the radio drowns it out. One of us didn't get the "put grease on all poly surfaces that will touch metal" memo until halfway through, so maybe that has something to do with it, too. ;-) I've heard people complain about increased vibrations and noise from these bushings, but since I already have the motor mount inserts, I didn't notice anything above and beyond the vibration that was added from those. After driving on them a few days, I can say it was definitely a worthwhile change, even if it makes no difference for autox. The front end feels MUCH better going over bumps and such. Reactions to bumps are better/faster, and with less noise (other than the occasional squeak). With 132k on the stock rubber bushings, they were definitely overdue for a change.

A countdown, if you will

The trip to El Paso begins in approximately 32 hours now. I'm sure I still have plenty of stuff to do by then, so I think a checklist is in order.

1. Buy GT4. Priorities and all.
2. Get front end aligned after suspension work last weeked. Hopefully that'll be done today.
3. Pack a bag, remembering that it should be a little cooler there.
4. Check fluid levels.
5. Check tires (for things beyond the terrible wear pattern).
6. Bring enough cd's to get through the 12 hours of driving, round trip.
7. Stop at the bank for some road cash.
8. Mail in the Kumho liability waiver (made my magnets yesterday).
9. Find camera, and charge the batteries for it.

That's about all I can think of at the moment, though I have to be forgetting something. I'll probably end up forgetting something stupid that I won't remember until I get there, too. Like, I don't know, one wheel or something.

Beer, shoes, shocks

I planned to do this over several entries, but as always, I got lazy. Imagine that.

The El Paso tour is about 10 days away now. I felt pretty good after the autox this past Sunday, as I wasn't hitting cones all over the place like my last couple events. I thought the time was pretty decent too. Brandon was out there taking pictures, and he got a bunch of good ones of my car. If I can overcome the laziness, perhaps I'll post some of the better ones. Here's a sample of what he took that day. Still have some work that needs to be done before the tour, but that's what next week is for, right?

Went to BJ's the other night. One of their special beers that day was called "Quad", described as a "strong Belgian ale". It was pretty good, I'd definitely have it again.

My brown docs have finally been retired. Served me well for almost 9 years. Money well spent.

Koni has finally started making race-valved, pre-shortened shocks for Civics/Integras/CRXs. Front shocks are 25mm shorter, rears are 15mm shorter. All have the SPSS3 (I think that is) valving, which I guess is how they valve most Yellows for racing these days. Hopefully they'll hit the street at about $1k/set. A tempting product for me, as I would have zero downtime in going to a shortened/revalved setup...wouldn't have to go back to stock shocks for the several weeks my current shocks would be out for service. That valving would let me go to higher spring rates as well....hmm....maybe 600/750 sounds good. :-D

And the most recent thing...we had a power outage at home for a couple hours this morning. I woke up to an occasional beeping noise, which I recognized as the UPS for my computer in the other room. I looked up to check the time....where'd the clock go?? Turned out our entire building was dark, and this was around 5:15. After stumbling around in the dark, I set the alarm on my phone for 6:30 so I could get up for work, still having no idea how I would shower in the dark, or get my car out of the garage. :-P Fortunately the power came back on at about 6:40, and I made it out the door in time. Now I just have to go reset all of the clocks. >:-O

Things...and stuff

Another Tucson autocross last weekend. Not nearly as cold as I expected, and way more sunny. Result? Captain sunburn. >:-O Even worse, I didn't do particularly well, and I think I hit more cones in that one day than in the last 4 (5?) years of autocrossing combined. A whopping 19 on the day, including 7 on my first run. I was fortunate to get a single clean run, even though it was slow. Slightly more successful, Teresa and I went bowling last night with some friends, and both did quite well:

	Game 1	Game 2	Game 3	Total
Teresa	120	145	170	435
Ben	153	215	163	531

And finally, in the tradition of worthless internet quizzes, I present the following:

Which Website are You?

Blankness no more!

blah...site has been blank for a week, and I haven't posted anything since January 12th. Nice.

Well, last time I posted, I talked about just getting a Tivo. So what's new with that? The Tivo is fantastic, as expected. I'm no longer missing episodes of Good Eats or Mythbusters. I picked up a USB network adapter, so now I can listen to all of my mp3's in the living room, which is nice, and as soon as my Tivo gets the upgrade, I'll be looking forward to copying shows over to the computer. :-D

Christmas was good, got some nice stuff. I somehow received 24 cans of tennis balls, which I know will be put to use. I used some Christmas cash to buy myself a new racket as well, thanks to a good Big 5 sale. Used a little more of that money to buy a new softball glove as well just the other day, but I haven't had a chance to actually play with it yet.

Car stuff - went to a weigh day, got a chance to weigh and cornerweight my car. I was stupied and filled my gas tank before I went, so I didn't really try for perfect cornerweights. I think we got them to within 19lbs, and I raised the front of the car as well, so I don't think there will be any more tire/fender rubbing issues. The biggest pain was just getting the swaybars reconnected. :-P I was all set to have some offset bushings made as well, but it looks like that won't be happening. There's just not that much camber to gain at the upper arms, and getting camber at the lower arms means increasing the track even more than the wheels already did. So the stock UCAs are going back in soon, and some poly bushings have been ordered to replace the stock rubber bushings with 130k on them.

So what's next? A frigid autox in Tucson this weekend, and hopefully the El Paso NT at the end of February. I think I'll be happy if I don't finish last. ;-)

Early Christmas

I finally got my Tivo! An 80hr unit from Costco. I'm quite excited. Need to pick up a usb network adapter now, and I'll be all set. :-D

Also got some pics online of the new race wheels, which I mentioned the other day:

Gah, blank site...again.

So...finally got some new race wheels. Rota RB's. 13x8, 4x100, +4, 12lbs. Look like Panasports. Despite taking quite a few picture with my camera phone, somehow none of them managed to get online. Just trust me when I say they look cool, if you haven't seen them already. Especially before the first event, when they were all shiny. :-D Took them up to Chapman BMW to have tires mounted, as they have a shaving machine, and they were ready to go for the Thanksgiving weekend, when Tucson was holding events on both Saturday and Sunday. Due to relatively low turnout, we were able to get five runs each day, which was great. Brian co-drove my car both days as well, meaning my tires got a whopping 37 run on them. It was well worth it though. Brian took top pax on Saturday, and was a cone away from top pax on Sunday. I had a respectable 959 on Saturday, and after a little instruction, was able to score a 972 in TOs. Sunday was better still, as cone trouble for Brian meant I was less than a tenth behind him for comp runs, and I score a 987. Went faster still in TOs, and was close to a 1000, getting a 999. Maybe they round down or something, I don't know. ;-) Anyway, it was a lot of fun. Except for the weather. That wasn't so good. REALLY cold on several occasions, and we even had hail for a few seconds.

This past weekend wasn't quite as fun, as it rained a lot. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to change tires or anything...but as it was, a lot of stuff ended up getting wet, and my car smells kinda funky now. Saturday was the driver's school, and that was a lot of fun. All of my students seemed to learn a lot. One was turning some very impressive times, and it was only his first autocross ever. Another was picking up time all over the place on the slalom course, and was very pleased with his progress. The next day he was in his Integra, gridded right behind his dad's Boxster S, and despite starting with 2 DNF's, managed to beat his dad by over 2 seconds. Regardless of weather conditions, that still had to feel pretty good.

Race tires were worthless on Sunday, and my car felt much better on street tires. Teresa felt the same way in her car. Scores for people with races tires were generally pretty sad, especially those with RWD and/or decent power. I didn't quite do well enough to beat Joe Moritz for the fall season combined Street Prepared class, but I finished the ASC (class by myself), so I should get another trophy there. :-P

Hooray, another blank page.

So my site goes blank for a day, and I start hearing about it from people. :-P

Been playing a lot of Halo 2 recently. Haven't touched single player, but multiplayer has been fun. My real goal is to have my level higher than Brian's level. :-D I'm especially enjoying the deathmatch, as I can unplug the headset and play a while. People don't talk to each other much during those matches anyway, and the games are always the same 6 minutes.

Before that I was playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Ton of fun. The nitro add-on for cars is great in San Fierro, as it's modeled after San Francisco, and there are huge hills everywhere, making for some great jumps. I just finished the flying school too, so all of the airports are open to me. There's really just way too much to talk about. I'll definitely be going back to at least finish all the missions.

Looking to the future, it looks like GT4 is still scheduled to be released in mid-December. Can't wait.

The new Rammstein cd is officially released here tomorrow. I think I may buy it. That would bring my total number of cd's purchased this year up to....one.

Here I am, maybe what, 8 weeks after I ordered my new race wheels? Still no wheels. Bah. Who know that heat-cycled-to-death Vitcoracers were harder than Kumho 712's? :-P

Softball! Played the last game of the season on Saturday, with just a tournament remaining. Teresa actually had to play because were were short a few players for the first game, and she came through with a clutch hit in the last inning to help us come from 4 down to win. :-) My glove has seen better days, so I think I might get a new one before the next season. I've had this one since...hmm....I think since I was about 12, and playing little league. Quite a long time.

Hooray for tires!

Picked up the new tires from Fedex this afternoon...now I just need the wheels. The tires smell good. :-D
Click for larger.

Things and stuff

Finally a reason to make a new post...a blank front page. >:-O

Autocrossed the Neon on Sunday again, and I'm still amazed at the amount of grip it seems to have. I find myself going into a turn thinking "there's no way I can take the turn this fast", and coming out thinking "I should have entered the turn faster". I don't know if it's the light weight (couple hundred pounds lighter than the Integra), the wider tires, or the fact that the tires themselves are newer than my old Victos. PAX'd a 951 with my best clean run; could have had a 966 were it not for a cone that jumped out in front of me (or behind me, as the case may be). One more summer event, then some new tires and back to the Integra for the fall.

Though I think I've told just about everyone that reads this already, I'm hoping to have HDLoader installed by the end of the week. The idea is that you can copy your PS2 games to a hard drive, thus reducing the load times by quite a bit. The software itself is $35, you can use any Maxtor hard drive (40GB+ suggested), and you need to have a network adapter, as that provides the hard drive connection. I picked up a 120GB drive at Fry's yesterday for $70 out the door, now I just have to wait for the software. This should be reason enough to start playing Tiger Woods 2004 again, as all the loading time on that was quite a pain. Only downsides are that (a) not all games work, but most do, and (b) you can't play games online when they're installed on the hard drive. Despite having a network adapter and a few online games, I've never played any of my games online, so that doesn't really bother me. ;-) None of the games I currently own are on the "don't work" list yet, either. Now if only the Xbox could do this, I might be motivated to play Top Spin again...

Woo....cam seal came today

Hopefully this will be the end of the oil leak. :-)

What? You want updates?

My laziness shows through once again. Some stuff to read, in no particular order:

I started taking a C# class at CGCC a couple weeks ago. Since I'm still unemployed, it's nice to actually be doing something. The class is still pretty easy so far, because there are a couple people in the class that have never done any programming. I haven't learned a new language in a while though, so it's fun.

I ran in the first National Tour event of the year a couple weeks ago [results]. The Miata in my class busted out Hoosiers for the dry stuff, so that hurt. A poor performance the first day meant I ended up third. Lots of rain...and so cold, most of the weekend. One of the longest weekends I've had, ever.

Like I said, I'm still unemployed. I've been playing a lot of video games lately, mainly PGR2. I got all golds in the Kudos World Series, and all-platinums is impossible, so now I'm pretty much just playing online. I should probably try playing some other games now and again. :-P

The fall season autox banquet was last week, and plenty of fun. Besides the t-shirt trophy, I walked away with a little pewter pylon, a bottle of wine, and a 12V tire inflator. The food was good and the drinks were expensive, as usual. A good time though!

The wedding is now 38 days away. :-o

I owe the state gov $190. >:-O

I guess that's about it.

Coooold autocross in Tucson

Cold is a bit of an understatement. With the wind chill, it felt like about 25 °F in the morning. The ground was practically frozen. The race tires were like rocks and offered nothing near real grip. The hose on my air tank just about froze; it could barely move. I had two jackets, and it wasn't enough to stay warm.

Turnout was pretty low, so we only had four groups. Unfortunately, I had to run in the first group of the morning, and there was just no grip to be had anywhere. My pax score was the lowest in months (921), so that's no good. On the positive side, it was a really fast, fun course. I spent a lot of time above 6000 rpms in second gear. It looks like the other guy in my class needs a 994 at the next event to beat me for the season, and I doubt that's going to happen, so at least I have first place essentially locked in.

In other autocross-related news, I signed up for the National Tour event here in January. I'm pretty sure I'll finish near dead last in my class, but it should be a good experience.

Stats

Thought I'd post a couple graphs.

First, my autocross stats. Every autocross I've done since I started is listed, color-coded by class. Here it is.

Second is a graph of weight vs time, which I started 2 weeks after my diet began (on 4/1/03). As such, you'll see that it starts at about 230lbs, rather than the 240lbs I actually weighed when I started. Just recently I hit my driver's license weight of 190, something I haven't been at since late '95. Here's the graph.

tucson autox update

Results are posted - I paxed a 970! Much higher than my previous best, which was just last week. Link to results.

Tucson autocross

After seeing the course map (pdf) for today's autocross last week, I thought it would be a good idea to head down there. The course was just as fun as it looked! I think I turned a decent time, so I'm hoping results will be up soon. Dave took some pics at the event - a bunch with my camera, and some with his. As always, full size pics are available.

autox goodness

After a long break, the first autocross of the season was on Sunday. It was great! The course was more fun than I would have guessed from the course walk, and I had my best pax score ever. On top of that, about 15 Integras showed up - 12 or so more than usual.

Autocross results

Results from the the autocross that Brian and Dave and I went to are now up. Despite feeling pretty slow and running on street tires, I PAX'd my second highest score ever. Brian still beat me by 20 points, but that's nothing unusual. Not bad at all, imo - I should drive that car more often! :-)

Lots 'o driving

If my friend Dave ever invites you to his place in Tucson, you should go. Not only do you get to lounge around on some pretty comfy furniture, but I have no doubt that you will eat so much food, you won't be able to move from said furniture. :-)

Brian picked me on Saturday morning to help Dave move the new furniture in. Heavy stuff, that furniture. The following day, we autocrossed in Sierra Vista. It was:

1. My first time autocrossing on concrete
   
2. My first time autocrossing on street tires in a couple years
   
3. My first time driving either Brian or Dave's cars, both of which are much more civilized than mine. ;-)
   

The course itself was pretty boring, basically two loops. It was still a good time, a good learning experience, and it was probably 10°F cooler than the Phoenix area. I got sunburned once again, despite trying to stay in the shade. Sierra Vista really needs online pre-registration. Between the three of us there were six entries in two cars, and only four run groups. As could be expected, that didn't work out too well. Timing got all messed up, and I'm not even sure if they have my timing sheets or not. Oh well.

Lots 'o driving

If my friend Dave ever invites you to his place in Tucson, you should go. Not only do you get to lounge around on some pretty comfy furniture, but I have no doubt that you will eat so much food, you won't be able to move from said furniture. :-)

Brian picked me on Saturday morning to help Dave move the new furniture in. Heavy stuff, that furniture. The following day, we autocrossed in Sierra Vista. It was:

1. My first time autocrossing on concrete
   
2. My first time autocrossing on street tires in a couple years
   
3. My first time driving either Brian or Dave's cars, both of which are much more civilized than mine. ;-)
   

The course itself was pretty boring, basically two loops. It was still a good time, a good learning experience, and it was probably 10°F cooler than the Phoenix area. I got sunburned once again, despite trying to stay in the shade. Sierra Vista really needs online pre-registration. Between the three of us there were six entries in two cars, and only four run groups. As could be expected, that didn't work out too well. Timing got all messed up, and I'm not even sure if they have my timing sheets or not. Oh well.

Last month

I no longer feel bad about not updating the site that often. I don't do much that's news-worthy. I'll try to cover the last month here though.

I started playing golf again! Hadn't touched a club in several months, but the weather has been perfect lately, so I went out there. Shot a 44 for 9 holes my first time out, then an 81 (38/43) a couple days later on the same course. I'm really looking forward to more golf this summer - one of my golfing buddies in Tucson is coming back to the game after surgery, and his brother is going to be back up here this summer to work. Plenty of opportunities to play more! That said, I'm going to work on that web-based golf stats program I made a few months ago. I have a local test environment this time, so hopefully things will progress a little quicker. I plan on starting from scratch and planning it out, rather than just hacking the whole thing together as I learn php and mysql a little at a time.

A couple weeks ago I went to Speedway for the first time with some autocrossing friends - it was a blast! Not quite what I expected (in a good way). Results can be seen here. We're going again this weekend, so I hope to make a decent improvement.

Shortly after my last update I started the Atkins diet, and it's going pretty well so far. Today is the first day my scale has read less than 225lbs in a long time. My first goal is 215, then 200, then my driver's license weight of 190 (when I was 16 and only 5'11"). Eventually I'd like to get to around 175 or so.

NASA-X

First NASA-X event at AMP - it was pretty fun! I thought the new suspension was great, and I was pretty happy with my times. Unfortunately, I corded a tire and had to run the second course with street tires on in the back...that cost me at least a few tenths. I really didn't feel like buying new tires this soon. A few pics from the event are here. Pics of the tire and new suspension are here.