Trailer June 27, 2007
Have been giving serious thought to buying a utility trailer . The biggest hassle with loading everything in the car is that it has to be packed in just the right way. Canopy on the floor, tires on the folded-down rear seats, jack handle in the umbrella holder, bin-of-crap-and-tools and cooler placed just “right” in the trunk, floor jack in the little trunk space remaining to the left, folding chairs on top of everything, helmet on the passenger seat floor. There is no other way that all the stuff fits in the car and once loaded there is hardly any room to spare.
With a 40″ inner width on this trailer, my 245mm tires on 17×9 wheels should *just* fit on the back. On the front I’d mount a cooler and a locking bin that would hopefully be big enough to hold the jack, tools, and miscellaneous crap. Leaving just the canopy and chairs for the car and freeing up a seat. Besides being easier to unpack and re-pack at events, whatever goes on the trailer could stay on the trailer between events.
Of course, every silver lining has it’s cloud…
Where the heck do I put the trailer?
Decoupled June 26, 2007
Blew out the intercooler coupling again on the way to work (besides the autocross incident, it also happened Friday on the dyno). Silly me, didn’t put the necessary tools in my car, so I had to “Ghetto Rig” it on the side of the road — removed the clamp and prayed for it all to stay together under minimal throttle. Got to work and emailed the vendor for the spec on the coupling so I could buy a longer one and they offered to just send me one, so hooray for WBR Performance. I’ll just have to take it easy until the new part gets here…
EDIT: Taking it easy didn’t work, clamp came off again and I think it may be lost this time. My prior ghetto fix would not work at highway speeds but fortunately I still had a roll of “autocross tape” in the car…
EDIT 2: Scrounged up a working clamp from the pile o’ parts in the garage, whew! Was wondering why the ECU didn’t go into “limp mode” to keep the engine going with the leak and some random web surfing brought me to an answer: disconnect the MAF sensor. It’ll probably run rich as sin, and sans boost of course, but it should at least get me to my destination if I get stuck decoupled again…
Tools are now loaded in the car. Will hit my neighborhood Advance Auto Parts in the morning for some extra clamps and see if they have something I can use as a temporary coupling.
Moroso Autocross June 24, 2007
First, my brother bailed on Pit Crew duty. I got a late start, fortunately I’d packed the car the night before, but my cooler was empty. The plan was to fill it at a Publix en route to Moroso but Murphy stepped in with a fuel leak to suck up what little extra time I had. It was an easy fix but an empty cooler is a terrible thing on a hot summer day.
The course itself was pretty damned good. Moroso’s Kart Track is basically a very small road course and ER wisely chose not to screw it up by putting in autocross features. Instead they blocked off the lower section and moved the start to the left, creating very long straights ahead of turn 1 and after our newly created turn 2. Cones were placed on the edges of certain areas and they added additional penalties for each tire that entered the grass. Turns 8 - 12 on the map provided a nice challenge but overall it was just plain fun.
The layout also allowed for up to four cars to be running at the same time, so despite the turn-out of ~165 drivers we were all given five runs.
Except my car stopped running shortly after starting my fourth run. A coupling from my intercooler came undone. Not a big deal but it took me a few hours to get it secured such that I was confident it would make the drive home. Another plus for Moroso, they have staff available with gas-powered “golf carts” that were able to quickly extricate my car from the course and deliver it back to my parking space.
After all that time in the sun working on my car, I was wiped. Done. Barely able to function. Skipped my work assignment so I’ll probably get bitched at real good next time. Thankfully a fellow Pastellito took a little sympathy on me and helped with the tire change. Murphy striking again, one of my lugs was cross-threaded so I’m going to need a wheel stud replacement (or whatever the heck it’s called).
Possibly the next event at Moroso will be done on a Saturday evening, starting around 5PM. Not all that beneficial at the start of the an event but packing up after sunset would be somewhat less unpleasant (unless there’s a late afternoon thunderstorm, 10PM is still around ~85F during the South Florida Summer). If that happens I will probably check it out. Otherwise, I think I’m done with autocross until cooler weather returns…
Hotness June 22, 2007
Today was perhaps not the best day to be tuning. Final peak numbers were just shy of 340whp / wtq after swapping the OE exhaust manifold (headers) back in. Heat soak was so bad that we gained 30whp after taking a ten minute break and soaking everything with water.
We also tracked down the cause of my boost spikes. Good news is that it’s fixed and I don’t have to worry so much about blowing up the rebuilt motor. Bad news is that those spikes really made the car faster, Big Time. Guess I need to start seriously researching how much more boost I can safely run with Water / Meth injection, more boost may get priority over rear brakes…
Gone in 60 Seconds June 21, 2007
Two Speed World Challenge SRT-4 race cars, along with the trailer they were on and the tow vehicle, were stolen overnight from a hotel parking lot in Michigan.
This sort of thing is always on the back of my mind when I think about the Subaru Challenge. Lots of highly modified, high value cars, with faily weak factory anti-theft systems, left unattended overnight in one hotel parking lot. Think I’ll be taking my car’s ECU with me…
| older posts »
