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This weekend was the first race of this season. I was really excited to start racing, and at the same time, a little nervous about this weekend, as a couple VERY fast cars were showing up, and I was wondering how I was going to stack up.

The long weekend started out well with Friday’s testing. The car was pretty good right off the bat, but I decided to make some air pressure and shock adjustements, as well as drilling an additional hole in the rear sway bar to stiffen it up. Those changes worked like magic and the car worked AWESOME in the first session back from lunch. With that, and the fact that I pretty much used up all my testing tires, I decided to skip the last session of the day and just drink some beer. The only sad news of the day was that the pimpy VS camera mount still did not work with my Canon HV10 MiniDV HD camera. Boooo. That night, we stopped by walmart and picked up a cheapo Panasonic camera to see if maybe the MiniDV tapes were to blame. As luck would have it, that camera was DOA…..the in car video curse continues.

Saturday brought the first qualifying session. I went out and the car felt awesome the first few turns. As soon as I started my first hot lap though, I got fuel cut. Realized I forgot to put gas in the car. DOH! Even with those hiccups though, I still put her on pole for the afternoon race. The race started out very exciting right from the beginning. I got a great start, and came alongside an RX-7 for turn 3. He totally did not see me coming and hit me and forced me off the track. 97 mph in the dirt, foot to the floor, and I manage to keep the car from spinning, but lose a lot of ground to the lead pack. I put my head down and start driving my ass off and manage to catch the lead group, pass them, and go on to take the win in ITA. The only thing better would have been %$#*$&*# in car video!!

Sunday morning, I get a wild hair up my ass and decide “I’m gonna give it ONE last try for video”. We head back to wal mart and this time pick up a nice HD Samsung camera to borrow. Qualifying comes and the weather is much better. I go out and run a great lap, but its only good enough for 4th place. 1st is at a 1:21.8 but then 2nd through 4th is all on the same tenth at a 1:22.2 lap. Should be a doozy of a race! Even better, the new camera worked! I have flawless video. Woohoo! That 1:22.2 lap is about as fast as any ITA FWD car has ever gone at Roebling, so I’m VERY happy with my times.

I had another good start in the race, and ended up right behind Mike VanSteenburg for the beginning part of the race. I was able to battle through the ITS cars with him, and ended up catching him, as well as the polesitter Kip VanSteenburg, and passing them both to take another win! They fought hard the whole way, and I had to spend about half the race driving with my eyes in the rear view mirror to not let Mike by. I’ll let the full video I post tomorrow do the rest of the talking, as it was a very exciting and fun race for me.

The next race weekend is at VIR on May 9th and 10th. Looking forward to this one, as I love the track, and if the weather holds up, I’ll have a good shot at the track record!

Here is the Qualifying lap. I’ll be posting the full race tomorrow morning, as YouTube is doing maintenance right now.

You can check out the full HD footage by clicking here or just play the smaller embedded version below

Update: Read on for the gauge part, but now I’ve finished off the alignment toolkit with a Ryobi self leveling laser. Put that baby in the middle of where the car will be, and use Home Depot $0.59 vinyl floor tiles to get the work area absolutely level before you use the following gauge. With that projecting a horizontal level laser and a ruler at the corners to setup the tiles, you won’t ever have to zero it against the ground anymore (every time you power it off, it goes back to default). I’m within 1/16″ at all 4 corners, with the highest corner getting 0 tiles, and the lowest corner getting 9.

A few years ago I used someone’s “Smart Camber” digital camber gauge. It was awesome! You could zero it on the ground and measure your camber on uneven ground with 0.1 accuracy. I was going to get my own, but the $250 street price kind of discouraged me. Being the DIY type, I decided to make my own.

Take:

• (1) Digital Level from Sears with 0.1 accuracy which can be found on sale for $35
• (1) 20in long, 1″ wide, 1/8″ thick piece of steel from Home Depot Racing
• (2) 1″ long 1/4″ thick metal spacers from HDR
• (2) Allen head 1.5″ bolts
• (2) Nuts and washers

Drill a hole on one end of the sheetmetal, then 3 holes for 15, 16 and 17″ wheels on the other end. Put in the bolts into the spacers, through the sheetmetal and throw a washer/nut on the other end. The pictures at the end of the post show what I’m talking about. The level attaches to the sheetmetal and is very sturdy as it has a nice big magnet in it.

edit: This part is no longer necessary if you do the above laser/floor tile leveling of your surface. Only if you are doing this on uneven ground. To do an alignment, just set the gauge on the ground in front of your tire and level out to 0 with the “zero” button.

Then place against your wheel and do a tiny bit of math. 88 degrees on the gauge = -2 degrees camber. Easy, accurate to 0.1, and under $40 including all materials. It’s been working great the last season and between this, and stringing up the car for toe, I can do pro alignments in the garage or the pits whenever I please. After the lift, the Jeep went to the shop for an alignment, so I got to verify the accuracy of the gauge and it matched their Hunter machine.

I’ve thought about making a better mount for the level, which would allow me to zero out the gauge vertically, but this has been working so well, I never bothered. If someone comes up with something better, send me a note.

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She’s almost ready for the ARRC (American Road Race of Champions, the Improved Touring National Championship). Got a good amount of work done today. New radius rod bearings, coolant flush, radio install, caliper rebuilds, etc etc. Pretty much all that is left is to bleed the brakes and do a once over on all the nuts and bolts. I also put the new “REDRUM” sticker on the front bumper. I was going to paint it and then put the sticker on, but I decided I’ll be doing lots of bump drafting at the ARRC, so I might as well make it pretty during the offseason. Last but not leas, but front splitter is coming in a few weeks. That should give me a bit of downforce in the high speed turns, but also free up a mph or two on the top end. I’m looking forward to that, as started to get to the point where I was going to make the car looser with a bigger rear bar. I think the splitter will be just enough to make it a tad looser then it is today, without going overboard. We’ll see!

I had another awesome weekend at Road Atlanta. This time it was a super super hot July weekend with a SARRC 15 lap sprint race, and an ECR 90 minute enduro race with the old car owner as codriver. The sprint races are the ones I focus on, while we were just running the enduro so Dan could keep his competition license. In SCCA, you have to run 2 races a year to maintain a license.

The weekend started out with qualifying, and I put myself on pole by 2 seconds for the SARRC race. I only ran a 1:44.3, but considering the hot weather, it was a pretty good time that I was happy with. In the afternoon, Dan got in the car and shook some rust off, putting us middle of the pack for the start of the ECR. Saturday evening was eventful, with me leaving the new brake pads I needed at work. We had to drive back from Road Atlanta and ended up spending the night in Marietta. Next time I’m making a list before leaving the house

We put on the older Hoosier tires for Sunday morning’s 90 minute ECR. Immediately, I noticed a vibration above 100mph, which was probably an out of balance tire or two. I came into the pits after about 15 minutes instead of my 45, as I didn’t want to hurt the car. It wasn’t worth continuing with everything shaking, as this wasn’t a points race or anything. We took the tires off and got them balanced with enough time for Dan to get 45 mins in the car, and finish out the race. No damage, no real wear on the car, success!

Sunday afternoon was the SARRC Sprint. I put on some fresh(er) tires and got ready to kick some butt. It was a fairly uneventful race, which on one hand was nice, but I would have like to have a little more of a fight. I drove hard for 5 laps and put some time on the rest of the field. After that I put it on cruise control and finished off the win. It was the first win (out of 2 races) in the new car. The last one I broke an axle with a 15 second lead on the last lap Brian Cembor also came out to watch and took my camera for a spin. He ended up with a few great pics of my car, as well as Kirk’s Golf. These are also the first “evidence” of the new car on track! As a photographer, I never get to take pictures of my OWN car.

On a sadder note, it was a weekend full of carnage for some other racers. Everything from spins, to wall hits, to totalled cars, to flips. I got lucky avoiding the bad luck and came out of the weekend with no damage, other then the scrapes on the front bumper from some bump drafting

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After what seemed like an eternity I finally got to work on the race car this morning. The next race is Road Atlanta next weekend. All the qualifyings will be on Saturday and then I will be doing a 30 minute sprint race by myself on Sunday morning and then splitting a 90 minute enduro with the old owner in the afternoon. Late July in Atlanta should be scorching so I’m going to start drinking water starting Monday. This should be a well attended weekend, so I should hopefully have some on track photos of the race car finally. Its nice being a photographer, but no one takes pictures of YOUR car. This time I’m going to set loose my camera with a bunch of friends and we’ll see what comes out

On the car note, I finished rebuilding both axles today. Just need the boot clamps and those can go back in the car. Holy CRAP that is a messy job. The grease that came out of the old ones was super nasty, but other then that, they looked great. Not sure if I’m going to drop the $300 on raxles unless I keep on breaking them. Hopefully the redline grease prevents the failure I had last race. Other then that, just need to bleed the brakes, a quick oil change, get the new tires mounted up and make sure all the bolts are tight. Might also do a quickie alignment to make sure everything is still square.

Lastly I broke out the powerwasher and washed all the mud off the jeep. It looks sort of weird being clean! We probably won’t get another chance to get her dirty again till August

Even though I really wanted, I couldn’t race this double weekend because of my broken hand. I went out instead with the Conover guys and helped out as much as a 1 handed gimp can do and took shome shots. Here are the ones from Sunday. I seem to have “misplaced” the pics from Saturday so I’ll try to find them tomorrow