Systems Check for Toledo

The Toledo ProSolo is only 2 weeks away and today was our last chance to do a shake down of the new battery wiring and verify that the weird sputtering/misfire behavior we observed towards the end of day 2 at the DC ProSolo had been fixed by this. There were 37 drivers running Pro index and the fast nationals style course made the event extra fun. Also, it doesn't get more "memorial day weekend" than seeing 94F temperatures during our heat. This is such stark contrast to the near 40F weather we had on day 2 of the DC ProSolo. Go figure that mother nature would go directly from Winter to Summer and skip Spring altogether.

NNJR SCCA - Meadowlands, NJ - 5/28/2016

The heat made for some interesting changes to the car's balance. We had to revisit our tire pressure differential front to rear in order to compensate for the increased rear grip right out of the gate. Thankfully, Bumblestook is so finely balanced now that a small 1 psi change is all that's needed to shift the balance enough to make a significant difference. We were also fighting heat soak on the ITBs and oil temps were running quite a bit hotter than I'd like due to the relatively fast driver change overs providing minimal cool down time between runs.

Even though we were going to get 6 runs each, Hez and I were both focused on thinking more like we would during big events with plenty of early aggression. We put in decent times but my desire to try and get closer to the cones to shave a tenth here and there resulted in most of my fast runs being in cone trouble. The video of our fastest times below shows my fastest dirty scratch time and you can see I'm nowhere near the cones on the left so I must be turning in too early on the right and hitting cones on that side. I'll have to work on adjusting my visual cues to shift where I think my car is by about 2 inches to the left and I should be both faster and cleaner.

NNJR SCCA - 5/28/2016

More importantly Bumblestook felt good today. With higher temps during the big events coming up, we're going to be switching from pump gas back to ethanol for Toledo so we were just trying to use up the left over gas in the tank. This meant running lower than ideal fuel levels and we both had occurrences of fuel starve with the high G sustained sweepers after fast slaloms giving us grief. You can hear a bit of it in my run as I try to power through the walloms after the right hand sweeper in the bowl. I'm ok with that because the rest of the time, we didn't encounter any misfires though my TPS is still frequently throwing a voltage range error but doesn't seem to result in any problem with power delivery. She's going back on the dyno at Evans Tuning when I come back from Toledo just to have her checked out properly before Nationals.

Hez was able to get Bumblestook into 3rd spot in Pro with his fast run. I think the car had the pace to vie for top spot as Hez's fastest clean run wasn't without several instances of him sliding around and counter steering so there was plenty of time left to be had. My fastest clean run was achieved by dialing back (a bit too much unfortunately) so I languished all the way down in 16th. Oddly, despite the heat exhaustion today, I had plenty of fun and was generally quite happy with my early run aggression. If I can make those moves stick and stay away from cone trouble then I think the necessary driving improvements can be achieved.