NASA Autobahn


h1 July 25th, 2006

I missed writing about the FTL held the week after the NASA MAM event. That one went well, lots of cars and lots of people. Had a great time and the car ran great again. Everyone should come out to these events as you get a ton of track time for not alot of cash.
This post is about the Autobahn event though. This was another great weekend for me. Ben A. came out with Damian and I to Autobahn CC in Joliet IL. This ended up being a 3 day event, with one day of practice and 2 days of TT competition for me. Plus, being a NASA event, even when you’re not running there’s a bunch of race classes to watch.

I started out running my RA-1’s and they were cold and I was rusty. Almost spun in the first session. Did learn what not to do in terms of trying to recover though. I had the suspension way to soft, the tires didn’t have enough pressure and of course everything was cold. On the plus side, after a few sessions out there Ben and I were tearing it up. And by tearing it up, I mean my brakes. Tons of fade, and I ate through a set of new pads and rotors quickly. By the middle of the second day, I was totally through them both. Times were dropping consistenly, but most of the TT guys were beating me up.

Swapped out the pads for some HT-10’s and the rotors for a new set and tried to bleed the brakes as best we could. By the end of the second day I was getting low on brakes.

We had a excellent meal Sat night provided by a couple sponsors, and I ended up 5th in class (last) but only .4 seconds behind Damian. I brought my projector down and we watched videos on the side of Eric’s trailer at night. We had a pretty good crowd going. We have a few tricks up our sleve for the next time…

Sunday was a new day, and after warming up the first session Damian let me use his second set of hoosiers. It was a pretty silly transition from one to the other. They are not even remotely close to the same, and the RA-1’s are not bad. Took me a couple sessions to get used to them, but my times immediately dropped 1.5 seconds and dropped another second by the second time out. The last session I took Ben out again for the first time on the Hoosiers. We had basically no brakes left, but there was only maybe 8 other cars left out there (down from a high of 50!) so I went one hard lap, then coasted a lap to let them cool, then one hard lap, etc etc. He was laughing because of the difference in the tires. We ended up dropping even more time off (with a passenger!) and I ended up 2nd overall just behind Jon in the 500+ awhp race Evo. We met him on the One Lap as well, it’s a silly car. I talked to him and they were impressed with my car, since I’m at about 60% of their power and yet I wasn’t falling back when he passed me. :)

All in all a great weekend. Car ran great, Tons of fun stuff going on and people and food. Just really really tiring.



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