April « 2010 « Tom Hoppe

Archive for April, 2010

Dupont State Forest MTB Ride

Monday, April 26th, 2010

Was heading up to VIR this past weekend, and on the way there I decided to do a stop just south of Asheville to hit the finest MTB that NC had to offer. After looking through some connect.garming.com logs from other riders, Dupont State Forest seemed to be the winner. I fired up a 28 mile ride onto my Garmin 705 and got going. Thursday night I camped out in the truck at the trailhead and got going early Friday AM.

The Garmin was an absolute awesome tool. I didn’t have to worry about getting lost in any way and any time I hit a fork in the trail, I just looked down at the map and went the right way. Awesome purchase, and I would highly recommend one to anyone doing any “unfamiliar” riding.

The ride that I ended up picking out was also awesome. Started off with some fire roads and rode next to some waterfalls. Then after some single and doubletrack climbing, had a long climb up to hard rock trail. This is Moab style riding on just rock. The uphill was difficult as it was hard singletrack, but the downhill was AMAZING. There was a bunch more awesome singletrack with super rocky descents and some of the most technical downhill stuff I’ve done including a challenging section that had a couple of trees down in the middle of rocks that I tried to go “under” and got my camback snagged on a tree. The ride ended with some very flowy downhill and jumps straight into the parking lot.

If you are in this area, I would very much recommend this ride! Here is the link to Garmin Connect http://connect.garmin.com/activity/31413904

View the pictures using a Picasa slideshow instead

Posted in All, Biking, Pictures | No Comments »

Working on the race car again, finally

Monday, April 5th, 2010

So after almost 5 months off from race cars, its time to get back into the swing of things. I decided to take the beginning part of the year completely off and then also have a light racing season. I’ve been slacking a bit on getting a roommate so the racing budget is going to be a tad tight this year. I also didn’t want to get out on track with the same setup I had last year, as I wanted to improve some things. I guess I could have run more events as is, but I don’t think I would have been happy and would have been less safe. I’ll be doing the May 9/10th weekend at VIR, July 17/18th at Road Atlanta, September 4/5th at Barber and the ARRC at Road Atlanta. Depending on what happens with the budget, I’ll add August 1/2/3rd at Mid Ohio, August 7/8th at Daytona and October 9/10th at Roebling, but those 3 are “if’s” at this point.

Having said that, there are a few things getting upgraded for this year. After much much much deliberation I decided to go with the final drive. I think the $$ outlay will be worth it. Definitely at tracks like Mid Ohio, CMP, VIR and Barber, and also hopefully Road Atlanta. If/when I go back to Daytona I’ll have to run a 225/50/15 on the front to not run out of gear, and I might be a tad worse off at Roebling, but I’ll take that trade off. I also got a new ASR rear swaybar. The 1″ solid bar I have now isn’t cutting it anymore, so putting a 1.25″ NASCAR style bar on the car. The softest setting on this bar is stiffer then the stiffest setting on my old bar, so I’m just going to slap it on the car and hold on. Also doing some things for power such as a crank scraper, thermal intake gasket, and also getting my header collector reworked. You can see in the pictures my “exhaust leak” and how bad it was. I bet that was mucking with things in the exhaust flow. Lastly, after watching a Porsche 944 on fire at Daytona last year, a fire system is ready to go in as well.

Along with those upgrades, I also did some off season maintenance. Wheel bearings, ball joints, fresh calipers, and a rebuild of my leaky power steering pump. I also noticed today that my front brake pad seperated from the backing plate, so that’s also on the list to swap out before my first race at VIR on May 9th/10th.