I've been bleeding like a stuck pig, but the car is definitely getting there.

 

No progress on the car, haven't raced since July. In August my sister got married back in MI so we took the dually and camper there as mom's house was going to be way too packed full of people for us 5 to sleep.




About 2700 miles round trip for the truck, it took it in stride which was good because not even 2 weeks after getting back to CO I hitched up the trailer and dragged the Camaro out with me 1100 miles to CA for 3 months for a class. Thanks to @AgFormula02 for the OBDII stuff, I'll be converting my 93 LT1 to a 4X batch fired 411 powered guinea pig.





Since my arrival early in September though I've really been plugging away at the trailer. I decided I wanted to paint and insulate the left wall to match the right wall that I'd painted and insulated back in 2016. So I did.




Here I'd yanked a couple of panels off to paint outside. The panels surrounding any doors or openings weren't coming out without removing the frame so I got what I could in there for insulation. Even though the wall is mostly insulated here, it serves as a good before pic for the front of the trailer. I have a lot of crap in here.



I was pretty well done with the insulation here, but not very happy with the front of the trailer. . .



Scope creep! I also decided I wanted to wire this thing for power. More to come on that. In the meantime I figured why not upgrade the lighting that is there.





Pretty noticeable difference. I got a few for the dually as well because its dome light blows.

I'll put the rest up later, gotta go for now.

 

By the time I got to the point above, it was less than 10 screws to yank the bench and shelf so I did just that to be able to use up the remaining insulation and paint the panels outside where I wouldn't have to mask anything off.



10 sheets was a pretty good guess, this is all the morsels I had left.



And here's the interior view of what jacknifing a camper jack into the front of the trailer looks like.



Pounded it back out the best I could. I also put a few layers of aluminum HVAC tape over itand yes, I wire brushed the rust off the bottom.



This side caught a stud, so while it didn't puncture the skin like the other side it still fucked the trailer up. I used the battery (junk) as a battering ram to straight it out the best I could which is what you see here. I'd need to remove the skin to pull it our the rest of the way.



Having all the walls the same color makes it look so much better.



I think at this point I'd removed about a jillion screws. Now you understand why I've been putting it off for so long.



What a feeling to be at this stage. I've vacuumed the e track front to back a couple times now, trailer hasn't been this clean in ages. But that chunk of insulation hanging down is bugging me and I'm not convinced HVAC tape is the right tool for the job here. So what's the way ahead? I'm going to grab 6 4x8 sheets of plastic wall paneling stuff from Lowes to keep the insulation pinned in, protect it, and provide a finished appearance. I need the trailer usable for next weekend as there's an event at Buttonwillow that I want to make.

 

Well this was a fuckup on my part. I was originally gonna get 2 smaller lights but couldn't resist the allure on this beast, all 4000 lumens of it.



Well crap. Luckily there was enough room to move the marker light up.



I'll wrap this up in the daylight tomorrow. Can't wait to get it wired, I turned it on once already, not on the trailer, and it's pretty damn bright.

 

I still need to decide how I want to plug the original holes for the center marker light.




It's not wired yet, but I couldn't resist testing it once darkness fell.



Don't let the street light fool you, this thing is bright! I can't wait to have it and the rest of the trailer all wired up and plug and play. To that end, I picked up 6 sheets of hardboard. It resembles MDF and comes prefinished. It's also half the cost of 1/4" plywood (which also requires paint) and more rigid than the plastic crap I was gonna get.

 

Glad the LT1 parts will work for you.
keep this thread going man. I am stealing a lot of ideas!

 

So I either suck really bad at tagging or it's not a thing here. I'm about to see how feasible it is to hang the ceiling by myself, I suspect it's not going to go very well.

 

I quickly deduced that hanging anything on the ceiling by myself was an effort in futility so I swallowed my pride and phoned a friend and got the ceiling hung. Last night I piddled with making sure it was 100% fastened, reran the speaker wires to the back, reloaded the tire rack and got that all tied down, and put all the crap back on the top shelf.




While I could have aligned the panels better, overall I'm super happy with how it turned out. The insulation panels are now properly secured, I didn't spend an arm, leg and a left nut to do it, and it reflects even more precious light. Now that the trailer is back in a usable state, I can (and did) shift my focus back to the car having signed up for Buttonwillow this weekend. I finally popped in a throttle pad shim to raise the pedal to a more appropriate location for downshift blips. It was perfect before I did the Stoptechs, but then they decreased brake pedal travel to the point that reaching for that blip was very difficult for the needed big blips. Back at High Plains Raceway, I decided a 5-3 downshift was the way ahead. I'd get a couple laps in with that approach and start grinding that downshift. I had similar, though surmountable difficulties at Hallett with the 4-2 downshift I grew to love. Really I was just being lazy because working down there on a race car with fixed buckets sucks ***. I finally got the correct length screws and summoned the motivation to knock this out. It went as quick as it should have which made me hate myself for waiting so long to do it. Next I whipped out my new coarse rotor hone. Let me tell you this thing blows away the medium hone I bought earlier in the year. I'll have a sober look at the rotors tomorrow, but I anticipate minor cleanup prior to switching over to the medium hone and then reassembly. I'll load the car tomorrow or Thursday. Friday after class I change clothes and head for the track. I am so ******* stoked to drive Buttonwillow. I've been watching videos and really watching for camber and elevation changes. I plan to walk the track on Saturday and really hope to get it all to click come Sunday and maybe even snipe a lap record there. CMC had been dead for 100 years out here and the temps are quite cool this time of year, so this is an ideal opportunity to ****** a record that is unlikely to be broken for years to come. It's petty, sure, but I'll take it.

 

Tonight I finished knocking down the remaining rotor deposits I could see, wiped them down, and threw them back on the car with new pads. I didn't completely remove the transfer layer as I didn't change pads, so my rolling roadblock pace at a new to me track should be good for rebedding naked bits of the rotors. Out back I found that the new pads I bought will come in handy in the future, apparently they were new for the last race and I brain dumped that bit. Fair enough. The car is ready to load along with the tools and crap I've offloaded to this point into the garage.



Yes it's dirty, yes it'll stay that way, and yes I'm bringing the quarter panel bandaid. ​​​​​​But I've said it before and I'll say it again: I am so damn stoked to be heading to a new track! And I'm planning 2 more by December. I really hope to experience things that I haven't yet and develop new tools to use back home.

 

Well I'm loaded up now. Trying to see if I can reclass into ST4. I'll be down on power, but could likely still beat a few of the slackers. They do their Dyno forms a lot differently, but since I'd be down on power I would think it'd be an easy sell. Looks like a bunch of cake eating BMW drivers so that would be satisfying. I can't get enough of this light.



Here's the reflection off the front of the truck and its dually fender. It's not far out of the pic here.

Or not cuz the pic won't upload. F you POS website and your nondescript error! I still have to gas up tomorrow and make sure I'm not forgetting anything. Part of the appeal of ST4 is not only the fact they have 8 cars signed up, but also how much faster I'll learn the course chasing someone who's close to my car in pace.

 

I did make it to Buttonwillow last weekend. We ran CCW #13 and CCW #25 + A Section. What a track! It had a lot of stuff I've never been exposed to before which is EXACTLY what I was hoping for. The decreasing esses are something I did not fully conquer. I floated the gas in a couple of spots and it made for a weak entry to the braking zone. Plus my entry to the braking zone was lacking in testicular fortitude. That theme came about in a couple other areas of the track. In this particular spot, it was a matter of info coming at me very quickly. In order to be a step ahead, I had to keep the car a little unloaded through there. With some more wheeltime, I could have it on edge and determine if the juice is worth the squeeze. I could see it making for a very inconsistent entry to the turn coming off of the esses. Sunday had a bigger exit off the esses (different config here) and is EXACTLY the kind of turn I've pined for for so long: coming out of the esses at what I figure is 100+ into a double apex trailbraking entrance to a low 3rd gear corner. Suzuka has something like this, I remember playing Gran Turismo on that track. This is a slightly slower version, but same basic idea. No straight line braking off of a high(er) speed section. Next up (regardless of config) was Phil's Hill. You slam the car into this hill, turn in, and get unloaded bigtime at the crest. It's dramatic and it's a hoot. I only had one 4 off here, but it seems part of the secret sauce is to apex over the curb and jump the gap. This occurred to me late Sunday after watching somebody do it once and it totally working. The next section is 4th gear for a bit. Head into Sunset, a long banked sweeper and then dart into the bus stop without lifting. The bus stop looked to be about 75-80mph based on the tach, I'll pull data at some point. Then you leave the bus stop back onto the back straight (which was ran on Sunday, no bus stop that day and speeds were around 127) and down a sharp descent. Gotta have most of the braking done before the car falls out from under you because it goes right into a left hander and immediately up a hill turning left again. This one was sporty, it could be deeply trailed, but the car hated that on Saturday with the greaseball tires. I had stickers on Sunday and it made it soooo much easier to maneuver. It was a quick up down to a slow right left, then onto the 2nd to last turn. This one went down a short steep hill again and I don't think I did it right a single time Saturday. The track is slightly uphill at the turn in point, but the entrance has an awkward angle that forces you to choose straigh line braking with bad entrance trajectory or a non-straight line braking section with good entrance trajectory. The distance between this corner and the last one is short, so I think it's 6 of one, half a dozen the other when it comes to navigating this one. The last corner gave me a bit of a fit for as seemingly traditional as it was. Most would go deep before turning in. Sure this was easy, but it was a very inefficient entrance. I never did make the entrance click on this one. Braking late enough to trail it the way I wanted to really kicked my ***. As such, my mid corner speed sucked hard. I could salvage the exit, but gave up a lot to that point. Absolutely awesome track and if you ever have the opportunity I highly recommend driving it.

 

Just ran Chuckwalla Valley Raceway last weekend with NASA again, managed to hang out with a couple of folks from Buttonwillow and had a great time. I expected the track to be lame due to how flat most of it is but I was rewarded with a hidden level of difficulty that I was able to somewhat overcome. The theme here for me was like a capstone of what the pro had been harping on back in May. Once speed is lost, it cannot be recovered. The idea being that, no matter what you drive, every car is a momentum car to some extent. Boy howdy did this track punish HARD for lack of entry speed into certain corners. Those corners by the way were not traditional throttle in, brake, turn in, gas out ordeals. Fuuuuuuuuck no, it was a **** ton of hairpins all grouped together! Nothing happened by itself, never in my life have I had to blend so many inputs simultaneously at so many points to produce a semi decent lap time. I got accused of having a 70 degree slip angle at some point, the Red Dragon (yes it's a proper noun) is only somewhat able to deliver such refined results. By Sunday I'd gotten the car calmed down a bit more and shaved just under a second a lap off of Saturday's best time and found a bit more consistency. It came with opening up just a scant couple corner entries, and not anywhere near where the school line would place you. I still had a much tidier entry, I'm just assuming that that made me faster as that's the approach that I'm trying to make work. I decided that lateral velocity approaching the apex was now a term that I would continue to use in the future and see if the concept is able to continue making me faster.I put a few more in a word document that I'm keeping for myself. I tend to jam out a document per event to capture my thoughts. While I do revisit them, I seem to suck at making the ideas stick. At any rate, I'm signed up for Sonoma in 2 weekends and am friggin stoked to finally hit a race track in person that I have driven in a video game. For those of you questioning the value of hitting a new track with nobody to truly race with, take my word: if it's sufficiently different as the last 2 tracks have been, it can be a real eye opener in terms of how you approach any given corner.

 

That's a big paragraph.
Where's your Video? What direction were you going?
CVR is a great place to practice car control in long 80mph sweepers.

It was my home track for years.
Both cars gone.
CCW Thunder Roadster

CW 02 C5Z

 

How was Sonoma?

 

Headed there as I type.

 

Hello Mr Weed,
Nice write up/s. So how was Sonoma?

 

Still enjoying it Captain Slow. It's ( . ) ( . )

 

I'll jam out a wordier post tomorrow, I just got back. That trip to and from Sonoma SUCKED! The traffic here is insane. But the track definitely scratched the itch, lots of elevation changes and 4th gear stuff. I'm gonna miss it. Unrestricted Red Dragon at sea level is pretty sweet.

 

Agree I followed my buddy every time we went to Sonoma.
Once at Sonoma I enjoyed the track and the surrounding area.
The SFO area freeways were packed, also some very rough roads and some very old tight off ramps.
Of course our race was last at 4pm, that provided for a very long and late tow home to San Diego.
Got home around 3 am.

 

That'd be even worse than my pull! There's just so many people on the roads and when there's only 2 lanes going in one direction progress suffers. The track was a blast. T1 up the hill really catches the car, it's amazing what the car takes going up there. T2 really dumps the car into no man's land. I found that maintenance throttle applied until the car crests and unloads seems to work. Right after it initially unloads seemed like the best time to start getting back on the power. Same with 3a. Funny thing with the exit of 3a is if you get too caught up in the moment there, you very easily blow the entry into T4 which seemed like an early apex turn. From here, I'd short shift into 4th and the car really stuck through T5. I suck at the entry to T6, I had a lot of tire lock entering. There's a trailing technique here, and likely a double apex line to be made to work, but I never got that far. I had trouble getting the car hauled down into T7 as well. The grip there seemed like it sucked, there was also a surface change right at the entry that you had to be mindful of. I figured out that, once the car's entry to T8 was good, floor it and don't lift through 8a or 9. The car was moving pretty good coming into 10 which required some blended braking to roll the right entry speed. I think I only made it to the exit curb there once? The exit is deceivingly wide. I struggled with 11 all day Saturday, I tried taking a real estate conscious line and the car never wanted to hook. Later in the day I began trying to diamond it off and the car liked that straighter departure, I just couldn't figure where to do it. Saturday night I walked some of the track and decided to try and apex the 4th stack of tires as they were pushed back, so my line Sunday was aim for the tire wall on the left, watch for the 4th stack of tires on my right, chop the entry and get rolling back into the throttle. This straightened up the exit a bit and even if it wasn't faster, made it much easier to be more consistent. I tried hugging the walls down the front straight as tight as possible, it made the car sound meaner. No trouble with the 103dB limit either.