93FD

First event went down over this past weekend… It was standard operating proceedure, we got there the night before at 1am because of all the things that were not ready to go. Woke up the next day to 25 degree temps and snow on the ground and ice on the track! Was a bit sketchy for the first couple sessions but it started to warm up later in the day. Once again we hit the place in Elkhart Lake for a Raj Pall (steak) saturday night. Sunday was much warmer, with temps starting in the 40’s and getting to the 60’s. Overall good weather once again at RA.

Unfortunately on the second day I ate up all the brakes I had by the second session, and I went into turn one at 140+ and my brake pedal went to the floor 4 times before I gave up and slid the car sideways through the turn. I got back to the paddock without any brakes and the front left was smoking alot. Checked it out and I had actually put the piston all the way through the metal distribution plates, through the backing plate, and through what was left of the pad and onto the rotor itself!!! Needless to say that wiped out the piston quickly and I pushed it right out of the seal. So all I was doing was pumping brake fluid onto my wheel. I did manage to get everything back together for the drive back home, but my brakes were really poor. I’m going to have to do a caliper swap for the next event this weekend and then rebuild the calipers.

Other than that the actual driving went real well. I felt more confident in most turns, the new RA-1 tires worked really well, and hardly wore at all. I’m hoping to get at least 10 events out of them so that’s a good thing. The car ran like a champ the whole time. The only issue I have is with the oil catch can filling up. I’m going to attribute that to the carousel, since it doesn’t happen at any other tracks. I was pushing out 1/2-3/4 of a quart every session. At other tracks I don’t even fill it half way in 2 days.

Damian and I were testing out the new bullet cam setups, and after not being able to figure it out saturday we had to check the manuals back at the hotel and got it working for sunday. We’re going to be able to get some killer footage with these deals. If I ever have time I have a great couple vids to make.

Just wanted to get an update out there… The car was really left alone for this winter for the most part as I had other things to do/take care of. Plus we had alot of work on other cars in the garage as well. I did get started on my interior swap (going black) and relocated my flaky wideband O2 sensor downstream a bit to try to get the overheating issue taken care of. Picked up another new sensor too just in case that was the issue.

Got to take the car out on Sunday and it seemed like the wideband (and the rest of the car) was working well. We will see if that’s still the case as the weather warms up.

My first event for the season will be at Road America on the 8th and 9th of April.

Checklist for the event:

1. Get the new tires in and mounted.
2. Get the new bullet cam in.
3. Get mounting parts for both cam setups.
4. Test out the camera setups, with the bullet cam in a couple places.
5. Check the brake pads, bleed brakes.
6. Change the oil.
7. Tune a bit more if the weather is nice. (12psi? )
8. Bolt in coolant catch tank.
9. Re-do the catch tank lines with Viton Hose.
10. Get exterior buffed, and holes filled.
11. Get the new Radiator duct installed.
12. Get the new splitter installed.

There’s a bunch of other optional stuff too, but that’s what I need/want to make sure happens.

I also still have more footage to edit. The 2nd Autobahn video has been partially done for a month, I need to finish that up. I also have a fair amount of RA footage from the fall that needs to get done. Hopefully I can finish up last years vids before I start collecting this years footage.

Finally finished up the editing on the first video. This is from the October Northwood Shelby Club Autobahn Event.

Check it out in the gallery, under the movies section.

Just a quick note now that I’ve had a week to recover… I was trying to make the VIR Audi club event with the 93FD, but didn’t register in time (and wouldn’t have had a way to get the car there anyway) so I didn’t take it. However we did end up taking Damian’s car down there and had a great weekend. 22 Hours of driving straight each way was less than ideal, but oh well. The Jeep didn’t have an issue pulling the car and trailer so that was good. Bruce hooked us up huge again with a place to stay and food. Thanks!

The track itself is great. Lots of elevation changes, high speed straights and technical sections. Very cool place. Met a couple guys from the forums there (Fritz/Section 8/and others) which was cool. Got rides from Bruce (Cobra R) and Fritz (Killer Bee - Rx7) Tons of other cool cars there including a Carrera GT that Randy Pobst was driving. Beautiful to watch a 500,000 car be drifted around all the corners. The thing sounded like a F1 car.

I took 700 pics and a bunch of video. Alot of them are junk, but I don’t have time to edit/prune them so I just dumped the whole lot into the gallery under the ‘Other’ section. Damian is working on the video, should be totally sweet when complete.

Had another event this past weekend with the Northwoods Shelby Club at Autobahn CC. Event went well, I got to use Damian’s R compound tires again so the car was flying. 1:13 on the north track and 1:39 on the south. It was a good time all around except for early on Saturday where a couple people wrecked their cars. It was pretty slippery at the start. Massive thanks to Bruce for the place to sleep and food for the weekend.

Car worked quite well once again, the only issue was a blown wastegate gasket (again.) Ate up most of the dudes in my run group. The other cars there running the opposite track we were amazing as well. It was all member cars and there was some serious hardware out there, all the way up to an Enzo! Great to see those out on the track where they belong. I posted all the pics up in the gallery. Hopefully soon I will have some track videos to share as well.

Next up is the Audi club VIR event, but I’m not sure I will make it. Sent in my registration too late and I’m on the waiting list. I already have the list of things to fix for the event if it goes down.

Finally had a car working well enough to make it to an event at Road America! Totally sweet weekend, got 75 laps in over 2 days at one of the best road courses in the country. I’ll make a bigger post about this later, but in short, car ran well, and I had a blast. Thanks go out to Damian for helping me to make this, and to Tom (Black Death) and Bruce (Cobra R) for the excellent rides at the event.

Another event this past weekend down at MAM with FTL. Overall it went ok, however I did have significant brake problems which prevented me from running the car as much as I wanted to. Seems like either the front brakes are dragging, or the calipers are sticking or some combination of both, because I actually lit the front pads on fire. The new ducting I did for the front rotors seemed to keep the rotor temp down, but the pads themselves were obviously having issues. I think the next step is to try replacing the calipers with Damian’s old set and see if that resolves the issue. Then I need to figure out how to test that they are working before I head to Road America in 2 weeks.

On the positive side I did get to drive Damian’s street car with his Dunlop track tires on and holy poop are those tires sweet. It’s really silly fun to drive a car with those. In comparison my car feels like a pushing pig with the tires I’m using. I beat the best time I’ve had in my car by half a second even though I had a passenger, ran less boost, and coasted the last couple turns and straight! I’m sure I didn’t go anywhere near the limits in the braking and turning zones (except 1 ) either and just driving that thing was a ton of fun. Again, massive thanks again to D for the hook-up there.

I have some excellent pics taken by Ben from the weekend that I will get up in the gallery soon.

Not alot to report on the car recently. I’ve been daily driving it to work and getting about 16-18 mpg. Not exactly stellar. Unfortunately it’s the only thing I’ve got licensed and working. Odd eh? 3 cars and the FD is the only one I can drive.

Others in the garage have not been so lucky unfortunately… Ben and Damian both lost motors this month. Ben’s was not un-expected, since his car has done odd things since he picked it up. Damian’s car was running well, but he ate up another bearing, this time it was the front rotor bearing. Hopefully we’ll have that back up and running soon.

I still need to get some tuning runs done to verify my ~10psi (.7 bar) wastegate spring is ok to run with my current fuel maps. It more than likely is, but since the wideband overheats, it’s not easy to test. I have tried a couple different heatsink ideas for the sensor, but have not solved the problem yet. This may end up getting fixed over the winter, I might need to move the sensor into a better location.

Did get a bunch of other minor issues fixed, so that’s good, and the car generally runs pretty well at this point too. I do need to re-do pretty much the whole brake system since I’ve had lingering issues, and then ate up the pads/rotors at the FTL event. After that I just have a few things left to figure out and I will consider the whole project sucessful, even if it didn’t turn out exactly as I expected/wanted.

Finally made it to my first HPDE event on Saturday with Find the Line down at MAM. Car ran like a champ the whole day! I ran the wastegate spring (7.5 psi) because the boost control is still acting up. I’m probably going to just switch over to a manual system. I do also have a 12 pound wastegate spring on the way. Even at 7.5 psi though the car was making close to the same power as many of the others there.

I got close to 75 laps in over the day, and I skipped a couple sessions here and there so I could recouperate. Had a great time chasing Bryce around in his G35c and trying to follow Damian and everyone else around in group A. My best time ended up at 1:50.8, which is a couple seconds faster than my best time last year with the old motor and much better tires. The ones I have now are 20% less grippy than those (1G vs 1.2G+,) so my cornering speeds were down. On the plus side I can drive better. All in all alot of fun. Unfortunately Ben’s car did not do well, so he didn’t get to drive much. I did manage to give him a stomache ache on a ride along though…

I ate my brakes down to the squealers so I need to do something with those before I can hit another event. I really need to get some brake ducting going. I also figured out based on some track data that my injectors are at minimum duty for a bunch of the cells in my fuel map. I need to switch something up and start tuning again to get those back to a controllable range.

I’ve been trying to get the wideband working again over the last few days. Got the new sensors, same result as before. Turns out one of the wires in the harness was broken. Doh. Anyway, rewired that with Ben and the TechEdge is back in business. The new sensors have a tendency to over heat though, so I’m going to have to work on that. In any case I did get to try my new map out with the updated injector settings. Numbers are much much better than before. Aparently the settings in the old map were way off. The idle is improved, but not great, as well.

Unfortunately the boost settings are hosed up somehow because I got a sudden hop from 6 psi to 20 psi of boost today!?! That was no good, but no damage done. I’ll probably disable the boost control for now and rely on the wastegate spring. Hopefully I’ll get a bunch more testing done soon and get the AFR’s on the new map to where they need to be. The 2400 issue is still hanging around.

Also think I will have to rebuild/replace my front calipers. There is some horrible noises coming from one of them. There is also a wierd noise from the right front when you brake hard the first time, and the right side when you go slow. Ah well, one at a time.