Da Groj

Special thanks to EVERYONE for having a lot of fun today. My wife let me drive her 93 Crown Vic and several of us had some fun with it AND she rode with me all 5 runs.

Okay I was Officially in DFL which is no surprise BUT Drew who won FTD also finished .06 seconds faster than me with his two runs in Moby. So he almost won First and Last in two different cars. I liked that as normally Drew beats me in my own car by multiple seconds. Proved to me I was pretty much at the peak of performance for those Firestone AS 215x70x15" tires.

Anyone who saw Ron Rice take his 3 runs (rode with him) were laughing all the time. He was definitely having flashbacks to his youth tossing that whale around.

Also interesting on the double loop Jamie, Philip and I all finished within 0,1 second of each other. To be fair they only drove the car once. So I'm quite happy to be DFL for probably the first time with FAST? Maybe not? I drove the 84 Mustang for along time on AS tire too.

Both Maria and I had a great time.

Thanks to all for your hard work.

Doug

It was my first time at the Dog Track, and after reading and hearing how "awful" it was (no traction, tight course, tire killer, blah blah) I was expecting the worse, but I was pleasantly surprised. Leave it to Loren and Steve and Company to come up with limited space and iffy pavement to come up with a tight and challenging course that still gave you room to open it up.

Took a ride with Mike Redmond in his Insight in the first run group and was very impressed how he got his car around the course. Just goes to show that "smooth in and out" is how to drive a autocross course; I can say if I didn't take a ride with him, there's no way I would've finished as well as I did.

I didn't notice any excessive tire wear when I got home. Maybe some guys are just over driving the course.

Good to see everyone again, and it was fun to watch Doug drive the crap out of his "breaker breaker 1-9" cop car !

Man was it slick out there today. Had the wrx looser than I've managed in the past several times today. Mark's drift runs were a blast to watch though. That was some nice driving (fast or not). Car felt good today and managed a best clean run of 30.1. Wish my 29.6 would have been clean, it was so darn close but ,hey, 5th overall and 3rd overall in the challenge makes for a good event. Mike Lawson in that FRS... wow. Don't you want to move to M2?

Trash talk done...please refer to Futurama Episode 31 Re: Fastiva disposition...but Rob P's Civic Si took the M4 prize home...

Here's what happened with Bluesight..https://vimeo.com/201478398

B

Haha glad people enjoyed. I felt like a real idiot making people pick up a few cones but I feel like I've made people work harder certain days when I was actually going for a good time. Hopefully what I did today wasn't frowned upon by too many, I had such a blast finishing off this set of tires!

Really fun day! The challenge dragged on a little longer than I expected. (20 second runs should equal 3 per minute... if 20 people did the challenge, should have taken about 20 minutes... seemed like it took more like an hour, but it was fun!)

Thanks to everyone for spending their day with FAST. Couldn't do it without you.

Mike... enjoy it while you can. We've got a new set of RE-71's ready to go on the car as soon as we feel like we've gotten our money's worth out of the RS-3's.

So, the main course was fun. Better than I expected it to be. The surface is slippery, but the course seemed like it worked with it to make it mostly fun and slidey rather than frustrating... and probably required just a LITTLE bit of letting the car slide here and there to be really fast.

The mini challenge course we ran at the end was a lot more fun that I expected, too! For those who missed it, we put together a very simple mini-course with a clockwise loop, a short straight, and then a counter-clockwise loop with the finish beam 3/4 way around the second loop. And we handed the FASTiva to anyone who wanted to take a run or three in it. Hilarity ensued.

I had fun - felt like Magellan exploring unknown territory; the day went too fast - see everyone in two weeks!

EDIT: Waiting on photos; otherwise it's not real!

Double EDIT: Was not DFL - just saying!

The Insight worked well.
Mike, you won it fair and square.
Just wait til next time!

dan wrote:I had fun - felt like Magellan exploring unknown territory; the day went too fast - see everyone in two weeks!

EDIT: Waiting on photos; otherwise it's not real!

Double EDIT: Was not DFL - just saying!

A lot more pictures coming thanks to Andrea and Chad Myers Some time tomorrow I hope ( over 1,000 pictures ).

Woohoo pictures! A lot of odd cars and actions out there today especially considering the small crowd. Always the best group to run with.

Carracer wrote:A lot more pictures coming thanks to Andrea and Chad Myers Some time tomorrow I hope ( over 1,000 pictures ).

Philip, you and your friends were shooting pics during the last run group, and two "things" went on over on the south side of the course. There was a white pick up on the interstate that "hit something?" on exit ramp, and a Tampa "best" was talking to one of your friends for a while. Just wondering.

Solar wrote:It was my first time at the Dog Track, and after reading and hearing how "awful" it was (no traction, tight course, tire killer, blah blah) I was expecting the worse, but I was pleasantly surprised. Leave it to Loren and Steve and Company to come up with limited space and iffy pavement to come up with a tight and challenging course that still gave you room to open it up.

I was in the same boat with you, but as soon as we pulled up and and walked the course I knew it was going to be a fun day with A LOT of quick runs!

I have to give a big shout out to Loren and Steve for both helping me yesterday. They both took the Focus for a few runs and really showed me that I could really attack the course a lot more aggressively. Shortly after that I managed to put down a 1st place run in M2 of 30.802!! Even thought the points don't count, it feels good to know I can push my car harder and it'll get me there if I trust it.

Here's a video montage of all 8 runs. Fastest run is 1st.

https://youtu.be/X-dsNV2XpmE


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Kdub085 wrote:
Shortly after that I managed to put down a 1st place run in M2 of 30.802!!

& Good show, A sticker in M2 is a sticker earned!

ADVISORY: Stickers may become addictive and lead to irrational levels of time and money consumption

Kdub085 wrote:Shortly after that I managed to put down a 1st place run in M2 of 30.802!!

You're a quick study, sir. Good job!

JasonS wrote:Man was it slick out there today. Had the wrx looser than I've managed in the past several times today. Mark's drift runs were a blast to watch though. That was some nice driving (fast or not). Car felt good today and managed a best clean run of 30.1. Wish my 29.6 would have been clean, it was so darn close but ,hey, 5th overall and 3rd overall in the challenge makes for a good event. Mike Lawson in that FRS... wow. Don't you want to move to M2?

Thanks, but when my friend totaled my STU 350Z, it was modded to the point where the only time I enjoyed driving it was at the limit. The car was not much fun when all I wanted to do was get from point A to B. With the FRS, I am hoping to stay in the SCCA's street (stock) class.

This was another great FAST event. I love running with you guys because I always get challenged with something outside of my normal routine. This course highlighted a hole in my skill set that I'm usually ably to ignore, and forced me to work on it. I have a mental block for coming back to first while moving. My Z's synchros all but forbid it and it had so much torque, I didn't really care. With the FRS, there's nowhere to hide. The cost of letting the revs drop into the bottom half of the tach is painfully high. I managed to come back to first for the finish, but I really should have done it for the other two turn-arounds as well. 1 out of 3 is still better than none out of 3 I guess.

The Fastiva was a lot of fun. It definitely lived up to the hype. Also, I guess I'm one of the few people that think Phillips car is well balanced. (It was a little floppy, but I liked it overall)

In other news, the data logger showed my wife with a run that was less than 0.2 seconds off of my best run until halfway through the green-cone slalom where she messed up both the end of the slalom and the turnaround entry. Before that, she was moving pretty well. She's making a lot of progress in the car.

I forgot to record my fastest run but this run is only a tenth off of that:

https://youtu.be/uMEyZ1mVE40

I hate designing courses that require a shift to 1st gear, but parts of this site sort of require it. Particularly the narrow end of the large middle section. I like try to make it at least POSSIBLE to carry a turn in 2nd. Such was the case with the first two turn-arounds on this course. You could carry 2nd through them just fine. Maybe there was a LITTLE more speed to be had by grabbing first, but ONLY if you were doing everything else right. For most people, focusing on getting everything else right was the bigger payoff than focusing on nailing a 1st gear shift.

That said, my fastest run was when I shifted to 1st for two of the turn-arounds.

And as slick as this surface seems, I think I'd have easily been at least a half second quicker with a set of RE-71's.

Loren wrote:That said, my fastest run was when I shifted to 1st for two of the turn-arounds.

And as slick as this surface seems, I think I'd have easily been at least a half second quicker with a set of RE-71's.

Once the course cleaned up during the first run group, say after 3-4 runs, then it was possible to get on a line and stay there. I considered using first gear for the second turn-around, rather I focused on driving a better line around the turn-arounds; however, the car was bogging on exit from turn-around one and two so maybe next time I'll use first gear to exit if the course has such tight mid-course turn-arounds. I knew from previous events at the location, the third turn-around required a first gear exit; I had just enough gear to make to the timing lights without too long on the limiter.

Huh? Downshift? None of us in Moby Dick ever left 1st gear Excellent course for some cars.

Even Dan B. in his first ever automatic trans autocross hit nothing and was right with the best times going from FWD to RWD too.

twistedwankel wrote:Huh? Downshift? None of us in Moby Dick ever left 1st gear Excellent course for some cars.

Even Dan B. in his first ever automatic trans autocross hit nothing and was right with the best times going from FWD to RWD too.

Some of us, good sir, were trying our best to get into the 29's, while others were trying to see what 28 looked like. Unfortunately, there could be only one.