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No idea what happened, but I got nothing from Sunday. Too bad, because that was a great race. I had a really good battle with a Ferrari Challenge car for a few laps, reminiscent of my battle last year with a Z06 Corvette at Infineon. Except that this time, after a couple of passes, I passed him and made it stick. Really had a good time with that Sunday race. Sorry you can’t see it.
This weekend was the 2008 season opener, and it was a lot of fun and a little bit exciting! The weather was absolutely fantastic for any time of year, but especially for February. It was only in the low 40s early in the morning, but 70 in the afternoon, and bright and sunny all day with a very gentle cool breeze. Beautiful.
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. 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 …
I picked up the car from TC Design this week, and as usual, Tony and Joe did a great job. What’d they do, you ask? Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Since the first race of the season is likely to be a NASA race, I’m trying to get all of my ducks in a row. My car is legal in two different NASA series: Performance Touring (PT) and German Touring Sportscar Challenge (GTS Challenge).
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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