September 2014 Update

Obviously I’ve been quite negligent in updating this blog.  To be honest, I haven’t competed much this year.   I had a lot of big plans for the season but, as is often the case, life got in the way.  To a large degree, I put my automotive competitive aspirations on the back-burner this summer and spent much of my free time working on my personal fitness.   This April I hit a peak weight that set off my internal alarm bell.  I decided this was the year  I was really going to do something about getting in shape.  I changed my eating habits, starting biking a few times a week,  then added a couple days of swimming per week half way through the summer.  By my early August vacation to the Colorado Rockies, I had dropped 35 lbs and was able to do over 60  miles of biking for the week in the high altitude, including a 20 mile bike ride around Dillon Reservoir which is 9017 feet above sea level!   Now in early September I’m down a total of 40 lbs and am up to doing 2000 meters per hour-long swim workout.   I’ve joined United States Masters Swimming with the intent of competing in a few meets next year and, with the purchase of a new, modern road bike, have even given some thought to trying a sprint triathlon.    Besides my renewed commitment to fitness, I also have had a very busy year at work.  New Subaru sales are great, but it has taken a lot of effort to keep up.   Family life has required more of my attention, too, as my junior-high aged son branches out into various new activities while my wife has doubled-down on her college course load.  In short, it hasn’t been the automotive competition season I was envisioning in the last off-season.

Author’s new bicycle sports the classic “Gulf Racing” color scheme!

That’s not to say the year has been completely uneventful automobile-wise.  The biggest news, as was hinted at in the last post, is that the 2006 WRX has been replaced with a 2015 model.  Back in April, I took delivery of the new car.  I have been completely blown away by how much of an improvement this vehicle is over the old one.  The turbo spools significantly quicker, the handling is vastly better, and the gas mileage is 15-20% better to boot!

The new 2015 WRX parked at the “3-4-Three Challenge World Headquarters.”

I took the new car to it’s maiden autocross at the Champaign County Sports Car Club  “Speed/Chaos” event in late May.  I was quite disappointed in my personal performance, but my co-Driver for the day, Dan Marx, showed the car’s potential with a 6th-place-overall (PAX Index) finish.  I took the car back to Rantoul in August and finished  8th place overall (PAX Index) at the “Bergfest” event.   But for a nicked cone on my fastest scratch time, I would have finished 5th.  Despite the unfortunate cone, I was quite satisfied with that performance given my relative lack of recent experience (only my 4th autocross since the 2012 Nationals) and the fact that I’m still running on the stock tires.  With a little more repetition and some top-tier tires, I believe I could be in the running for top overall honors at local events next season.  Hopefully life will allow it.

2015 WRX at a CCSCC autocross, sporting a more conservative look than the old car.

One downside of the new car is that the suspension upgrades mean it’s no longer suitable for rallycross in it’s stock form.  It simply sits too low and has too much front overhang; one run on a rough course and the car would be shedding plastic bits and bending sheet metal.  I’ve been working on a deal to purchase an older Impreza specifically for rallycross, but it hasn’t yet materialized.  I’m not sure I would have had time to rallycross at all this year anyway, but I’m still interested in getting a second car I can use for such should I find time in the future.

On the Road Rally front, the 2013 SCCA National Championship points were finally tabulated and published.  I had a chance at the Expert, Tour title, but missed a couple events at the end of the season and finished in 3rd place. That’s my 3rd “podium finish” in the Championship in the past 5 years.   In February 2014 the old 2006 WRX rolled it’s last competitive miles as part of the 3-4-Three stable at the Kickaboo Winter Rally with Dan Marx at the wheel and myself as navigator.  We managed a second-in-class finish.   In June I teamed up with Adam Deffenbaugh in his Mazda 3 for the CCSCC Winding River Roads Rally.   Adam drove excellently for a relative novice, and I did just enough as navigator to guide us to a 1st place overall finish.   The 2015 WRX made its maiden Road Rally voyage later that month  on a Friday Nighter with myself navigating and my wife Angela at the wheel.  We finished 3rd overall with a score of 11 on 4 legs, a performance I thought was very good given that we haven’t installed a wheel-mounted sensor for the odometer and were using a less-accurate GPS sending unit instead.  (Watch for a new blog entry in the near future with more on this new portable set-up).  Angela was less than pleased, however, and is anxious for me to get the more accurate equipment installed in the new car. I teamed up with Adam again in July for the Watershed Adventure Rally.  We nailed the first 3 legs, but both blew an instruction on the last one which ended up costing us a repeat overall victory.   I had intended to compete in the the Hoosier Hills SCCA National RoadRally in Indianapolis in July, but family commitments kept Angela from attending.  Instead of finding an alternative driver, I volunteered to help at the event as a checkpoint worker and gained valuable insight into what it takes behind the scenes to put on an event of this magnitude.

The big Road Rally news is that later this month I will be going to Chattanooga, TN, to compete in the United States Road Rally Challenge, the one piece of the 3-4-Three Challenge I couldn’t complete back in 2012.  I will be navigating for veteran Chuck Hanson in his Mazda 6 in the Limited equipment class.  Chuck and I performed very well together on the Badger Burrow RoadRally last year and have very high hopes of a class win.  Stay tuned for an update on that event in the near future!

Autocross Success Recipe? Drive a Faster Car!

I recently received an invitation from customer and friend Dan Cummings to co-drive his 2013 WRX at a Champaign County Sports Car Club autocross event.  As Dan’s car is essentially a clone of the car which won the National Championship in my class last year, I wasted no time in accepting.  I have been eager for the chance to drive a newer WRX in competition.  I was thrilled to get to drive one with National-caliber preparation.  While I certainly had great expectations for the car, my personal expectations were a little more reserved as I hadn’t autocrossed since I was thoroughly stomped at the aforementioned National Championship event nearly a year ago.

Dan Cummings (right) invited me to co-drive his 2013 WRX

Being rusty and in an unfamiliar car, I was  quite tentative at first.  After two runs I found myself over 3 seconds behind Dan.  I was starting to feel a little more confident by my 3rd run, however, and cut the deficit in half.  I ran a similar scratch time on my 4th run but had hit a cone so I did not improve.  Dan graciously allowed me to ride along with him on his 4th run.   The extra weight slowed him down as he was about a half second slower than his previous best.  I was able to observe, however, that he was pushing the car a lot harder in the turns.   The BF Goodrich Rival tires on his WRX seemed much more tolerant of high slip angles than the Dunlop Star Specs I drove on last year.  I had been reflexively backing off at the first sign the tires were starting to slide.  From the passenger seat, the BFGs appeared to actually respond well to a more aggressive driving style.

On my 5th run I drove much more assertively, particularly in the long high-speed sweeper at the back of the course.   When the front tires started to slide I kept in it instead of backing off.  The car continued to grip and I was able to use a little more steering angle to adjust the line instead of having to lift the throttle.  When the slip angle did exceed the point of maximum grip, the fall-off was gradual and the recovery quick.  Compared the the Dunlops, which have a narrow window of slip, a steep drop off, and a long recovery, the BFG’s felt amazingly forgiving.  I executed a perfect 2-1 downshift for the last hairpin, kept the car tight on the cones in the last slalom, braked early for the final tight right-left maneuver, and finished with a time that was 1.8 seconds faster than my previous best.  It was enough to move me in front if Dan for the class lead by a little over a tenth of a second.

Dan’s WRX is quite a bit faster than mine, despite a distinct lack of racing stickers!

When I pulled back to the grid Dan joked “that’s the last time I let you ride with me!”  He seemed a little surprised at my pace, and expressed some concern about his ability to eclipse my time. On his 5th run he was about a tenth of a second behind and had picked up two cone penalties.  I could sense a bit of frustration in his demeanor when he got back to the pits.  Dan has been focused all season on preparing for the upcoming 2013 SCCA Solo National Championships where he expects to compete for a high trophy position.  Having had a similar goal last year, I could totally empathize with him.  There were times along the way where I hadn’t performed as well as I expected at a local event and questioned my worthiness to even compete at Nationals.  At this point, I really wanted to help Dan get ahead of me.  I was thrilled with my time and pretty certain another run wasn’t likely to result in any improvement.  I was also concerned about putting another hard run of wear-and-tear on Dan’s tires, the ones he intended to drive on at Nationals, for no good reason.  For all those reasons, I opted not to take my 6th and final run.  That allowed Dan some time to cool the tires and regain his composure before his last attempt.   As I expected, he moved ahead of me with a clean run that was a little over 3/10ths of a second better than my best.  He seemed relieved.  I was a little bit too.   I was glad he was finishing on a confident note.  He will be off to the Championships in Lincoln soon with my co-driver from last year, Emanuel Martin.

At the end of the day, my second-in-class performance was good enough for a third overall out of 55 drivers on the PAX index.  For comparison’s sake, I finished 36th out of 75 at this same event last year driving my own car.  Needless to say, I was quite pleased.  I learned a few things too.  Firstly, I got a good sense of just how outclassed my car was last year.  Secondly, I reaffirmed that I can be quite competitive if you put me in a competitive car; much more competitive than I showed all of last year.  Thirdly, I think I found the next autocross tire I want to own.  The forgiving nature of the BFG Rivals makes good-but-not great drivers like myself feel like heroes.

Check back soon to see how I rolled the confidence gained in this event into a strong finish at the Subaru Challenge Autocross!