Of course, everyone says that about their own!  Oh wait, that’s kids.

Photo from the SCCA booth at the 2010 Silicon Valley Auto Show.  Photo credit to Viet-Tam Luu, thanks Tam!

At the 2010 Auto Show

The 2010 SCCA San Francisco Region race schedule has been released.  It starts with the annual free test day around New Years, which will be a good opportunity for me to test out the engine and see if I’ve finally moved beyond the cooling issues.

The first regional race weekend isn’t until April.  That’s a long time from now!  And, unlike past years, it’s at Thunderhill instead of my favorite track, Infineon.  In fact, we only have one weekend listed at Infineon, and it’s not until August!  That sucks.  Maybe that’s a good reason to do a couple of NASA races this year too.  I’ll have to think about it.  The good news?  All the weekends are doubles.  Same number of races, but fewer weekends.

Unfortunately my mechanical issues made it such that I didn’t get to spend much time getting the word out about Pro Autobody.  This shop in San Jose is owned by an SCCA member and autocrosser.  They repaired my badly-bent race car after the June wreck and did it for a VERY reasonable price.  If you need body work, it should be your first stop!

First post since early August.  What happened?

I guess a really tough racing season made it such that there really wasn’t this great desire to share.  To summarize:

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Since so much of the car needs to be repainted (only the roof, hatch, doors, left side skirt and left fenders will be untouched), I’m playing with new graphic designs for the car.

The goals are to keep costs down.  I think I’m just going to paint all of the new panels black and then do graphics again.  Here’s what I’m thinking now.  Just playing with Photoshop here.

What do you think?

Readers will remember that with 2 laps to go at the last race weekend, I blew up the engine in the race car.  What a bummer.  But I’d been sitting on a spare engine that I got from a theft-recovery 328i for a year or so.  The intent for that motor was to build it up into a killer race motor, but prices were high and it was very hard to justify spending the money with the small ITR turnouts that we’ve been having.  So it sat on an engine stand in my storage unit for a long time.  Vic Sias helped me diagnose the motor with the help of my compression tester and his leakdown tester, and we determined that the #6 cylinder had no compression and it was leaking past the piston.  So, with only three weeks until the next race weekend, I decided to just put the spare engine in the car.

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The next race is coming up next weekend, Father’s Day weekend, at Laguna Seca.  I still think the spare junkyard engine will be up and running in the car by then, although it isn’t quite there yet.  Let’s hope.

In the meantime, the entry list is looking much better than the April Laguna race.  In that one 10 days out, there were only 189 entries on the entry list and I posted that it looked like the economy was taking its toll.  This time, summer, a double, we’re at 280 entries as of yesterday.  Sounds much healthier!

Not only that, but group 5, the IT group, is right now the largest group at 59 entries.  The Spec Miata group is 2nd at 58.  Specifically ITA is the largest class at this point, even larger than SMT (San Francisco Region’s flavor of Spec Miata).  Here’s hoping the new (used) engine helps me stay in front of all of that mess!

I failed to get the new video camera started for the race, but I did use it in qualifying.  Qualifying videos tend to be pretty boring, but I use the camera so that if I mess up, you’ll all get to see it!  This time, there was only one interesting moment, when I nearly lost it going through T8.

Playing with a new camera, new editing software, new posting mechanism, so this is really just an experiment!  If I continue to like this software, I’ll buy it.  It’s tied to the computer though and I’ll probably get a new one soon, so … for now you have to put up with that annoying text in the middle of the screen.

Camera is a cheap Aiptek HD, worked great, but has no provision for a wide-angle lens.  Wish you could see my hands in this one.  Bummer.

Due to an upcoming business trip, I planned to only do the first of the two races this weekend. Practice and qualifying were Friday, and the race was Saturday.

Things went pretty well in practice. Although I was over 1.5 seconds off of my personal best lap time at Thunderhill, the car felt great and I was fastest overall. The new video camera and lap timer worked great.

Qualifying wasn’t quite as good. I was slower than I was in practice, and ended up in P2 overall (P1 in ITR, being the only entry) behind Doug Makishima. Still, I actually kind of like being in 2nd place. Hunting down the car in front of me is a ton of fun. Trying to run away from the car behind me is a lot more stressful!

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The entry list was updated, up to 234 entries overall.  Still all alone in ITR, although with 7 ITS entries there could be some good speed at the front of the group 5 grid.  I am actually going to do only the first race of the weekend on Saturday and then head home, due to work pressures … flying off to the UK on Tuesday and there’s just too much to do between now and then.