Wow, what an awesome weekend at Infineon!

At first I got a little nervous when I saw that Mike Courtney was on the entry list in ITR. He hasn’t been out for a couple of years, but he was very quick in his ITS BMW 325i, which is now in ITR with more power and less weight. But I wasn’t going to dwell on that — someone faster than me is exactly what I need to get me to really push harder. I was also really looking forward to being in group 5. Even though they are in theoretically slower cars, it seemed likely that I would have a great race with the two fastest ITS guys (Steve Borlik in a 2nd-gen RX7, and Doug Makishima in an E30 BMW), and also with the fastest ITA driver, Donna Gilio in an Integra. Someday when I really finish building my car, I’ll be faster than all of these people, but for now … it’s a great race!

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NASA NorCal published the schedule for the April race weekend, and I have to say, it’s pretty lousy.  Each day, there’s a 10-minute practice, a 20-minute qualifying session, and a 20-minute race.  And those times are TOTAL, including pace car laps, cool-down laps, etc.

The SCCA weekends have 30-minute practices, 20-minute qualifying, and 30-minute races — and those are the actual durations of those events.  SCCA includes a buffer between each race group to get one group off the track and another one on.  NASA includes no such buffer so the published times have to include those group setup times.

The preliminary entry list for the upcoming SCCA race was published this week, and I’m very pleased to see 3 ITR competitors for the season opener!  In addition to the two regulars from 2007, a big welcome goes to Michael Courtney in an E36 BMW 325.  Bring ‘em on, I’d love to see more!

Now that I have a NASA race under my belt, I can highlight some of the differences with the way these two clubs operate. I should preface this by saying that I’ve run only one NASA weekend, and with NASA NorCal. Other NASA regions may operate differently, and in fact, other NorCal weekends may be different. I have done SCCA races with many different regions, so those impressions will be more widely applicable.

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Way back in December, I told you all that I would be switching to #22. My usual number, #24, wasn’t available in the race group that ITR had been moved to. I picked #22 because it appeared to be available in both race groups in which I might be racing. Turns out I was wrong …

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This morning I replaced the 2007 version of the home page with the all-new 2008 version. The significant thing is what I’ll call the “final draft” of the 2008 race schedule.

It includes 10 race weekends, from February through November. Pretty full season.

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One thing I hadn’t considered with the switch from group 1 to group 5 is that my car number (#24) might already be reserved in group 5.

Fortunately, Colleen over at the region office sent me an e-mail alerting me to the conflict.  So I checked the permanent number list, and #24 is definitely taken by a Spec Miata driver that also races in ITA. And to make matters worse, for ’07, there were only four numbers unreserved in that group! So I’ve decided to switch to #22 to make sure that I get the same number all year long. It’s available for ’08 in both groups 1 and 5, so that if I want to run both groups, I should be able to get that number and not have to worry about temporary graphics.

NASA doesn’t track permanent numbers at all. But they require unique numbers per-class, not per-group like the SCCA. Must be tough for corner workers and timing & scoring, but I don’t make the rules! Since the classes I could run in NASA are all fairly small, I’ve got a pretty good chance of getting whatever number I choose.

The numbers on the hood were too big anyway, so now I have a good excuse to change them.

For 2007, the first year for ITR, we’ve been racing in group 1.  I had originally hoped that we’d be in group 5 with the rest of the IT classes.

Well, the San Francisco Region has decided to move us to group 5 for next season.

This is good news, in my opinion.  Group 1 primarily consisted of ITE and ITX.  We were faster than ITX but stuck amidst the slower ITE cars.  Now, we’ll be among the fastest cars in the group, so I’ll have a reasonable chance of being on the pole of the entire group!  And since our cars are also legal for ITE (although not competitive there), this means that we’ll be able to do dual entries, and race in both group 1 and group 5 in the same weekend.

Anyway, you can now look forward to some different scenery in the in-car videos for next season.

Some of you might not realize that I serve on the Improved Touring Advisory Committee. This is the group that proposes rule changes and classifications for the set of 5 IT classes in SCCA club racing.

One of the first issues we discussed when I joined the ITAC was changing the ECU rule from “anything that fits in the stock box, no wiring changes.” The intent of this allowance was presumably to allow commonly available off-the-shelf “chips” to be replaced.  More modern systems allow for “reflashing” the memory in the computer, which can update the software.  But there’s a problem with the rule’s wording.  It allows more than just chips and reflashes; it actually allows the entire computer to be replaced with an aftermarket system.  However, it can be very expensive to stuff an aftermarket ECU into the stock housing, and make it work with the stock wiring connectors and stock sensors. It was never the intent of the group that proposed the rules that people would do this, but their wording allowed it, and so, of course, people did it.

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All three clubs where I could race have announced their race schedules for next season (here are the links):

• SCCA
• NASA
• BMWCCA

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