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We are going to add a simpler and much lighter defroster, then the dash pad will go back on, as will the factory gauges and main gauge binnacle. The wipers, lights and a few other bits will stay but the A/C and a lot of interior and under-dash bits are coming out.
We've started removing and weighing lots of parts, and you can see the lightweight defrost unit that will go back in (above right). The glass is all out and weighed, as is the A/C bits. Look for more updates on this project in my next update in this thread with more weights and cage pics. The rear and side quarter glass will be Lexan in the final iteration.
Lone Star Drift at TMS, Round 4, June 29, 2014
Lone Star Drift is a drift series here in Texas that is pretty popular. I will admit I don't know much about drifting, other than we used to practice this skill set after autocrosses in college, to learn better car control (notice the sideways silver Fox notchback in the post above? That was normal "autocrossing" for me back then). Still, the only time I have ever been at an actual drift events was when I was doing something like Global Time Attack events where they had a crossover with Formula D or something similar.
One of my buddies who does drifting with Lone Star Drift contacted me about a month before this Lone Star event, Josh Garcia. He races his 1UZ Toyota V8 powered AE86 Celica (shown above, left) in TT3 on street tires with both NASA and GTA and also drifts a bit in this car and some other cars he has. So Josh called and asked me to find a few NASA TT drivers that might want to participate in an exhibition race at TMS on the road course there.... running against 5 or 6 drifters. They called it a "Grip vs Drift" race, hoping to promote road racers to drift and drifters to road race. It sounded pretty crazy, so I called the craziest mofos I know. TTB racer KenO was going to be in Mexico that weekend and TTU racer Paul Costas was too buried with work, but I did manage to snag one crazy TT driver.
TT1 Corvette driver Marc Sherrin wanted to join us, so we showed up the day of the Lone Star Drift event not knowing a
whole lot about what was going to go down, but we were down for whatever. This was a one day (Sunday) event, from 8 am until 7 pm, and lots of drift entrants arrived. They were using part of the infield road course for drift competition, and we used the entire 1.1 mile road course in our two sessions on track (practice and race). Yes, the same course Marc and I both ran at the
Optima event in March, where I took
1st and Marc took 3rd place in the Time Attack portion of that 3 day event. My best time in 6 sessions in March on street tires was a 39.803 second lap and Marc had a 40.236 (but his day was cut short by a rotor that popped). We were curious what we would run on our normal NASA TT tires: Hoosier A6!
With good Hoosiers, real aero, and previous experience on this course we both had high hopes this day, but had no idea how a fast the lighter and more powerful drift cars would do here. We got to the track before 8 am and set up our trailers next to one another, unloaded our two TT cars, checked a few things (we both left the same set-up and tires on from Hallett a week earlier) and waited a bit. Shop manager Brad and his wife Jen (both SCCA racers) arrived and stuck around all day to help with car prep, taking pictures (see gallery below), checking fluids/tire pressures, and loading the car up at the end of the day. I was still in a bit of pain (and still using the back brace 24/7) from the Road Atlanta injury, so that help was much appreciated.
Event Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/Lone-Star-Drift-TMS-062914/
We went to the driver's meeting at 9 am. There we met Aaron Losey and Derick Rogers (who I knew already), who talked about the overall event then the "Drift vs Grip" exhibition. They admitted that this was the first time they'd done this and asked Marc and I what we thought should happen. We had discussed a 10 lap sprint race, we talked about passing and point-bys (which never really happened, heh!), and warned the drifters that our cars were not caged and asked them to "pass with care", but of course... be ready to be passed.
The 6 drifters chosen to join us were all veteran drivers with beastly cars that had lots of "tandem" experience - almost all of them RWD Nissans with 500 whp or more. I told all of them that their cars were much lighter and probably faster than mine, and maybe even Marc's TT1 Corvette (which is a handful of pounds form being TT2 legal), but that our tires... might give us an advantage in turns and braking. Marc and I took Aaron's truck out on course after the driver's meeting and set up braking markers into Turn 1 and looked for debris to move on the rest of the course, but we only had about 5 minutes so it was a quick look at best.
They had drifting going on until our Practice session started at about 10:50 am. We did a 20 minute practice session and I went out in two stints for most of that time. I first did a couple of "feeler" laps to check the set-up. The bleachers were pretty full and the crowd was having fun watching the three TT drivers and another 6 drifters sharing a small road course and making hot laps.
The practice was fun, but it was pretty hot. We were all asked to wear driving suits, and Marc and I both did, and were both boiling in no time. Speaking of boiling - the Hoosier A6 tires on the back of the Mustang got pretty hot, and I spun it pretty good on lap 3 of the practice. Of
course I have excuses: first of all, the track was VERY DIRTY in a few corners, as the drifters tend to drag tires in the dirt and bring a lot of it on track with them. Second, my tires were fairly burned up from 2 drivers racing for 2 days on them at Hallett. And, well, its a solid axle Mustang... in these fairly low speed corners I had very little downforce to help add some rear stick. It handled about like it did in March with Optima on the street tires, just with better braking and more front end grip than back then. Still kept the rear tires on the friction circle on all corner exits, with a little bit of yaw.
"When in Rome..."
When I spun (see above) I was 3 laps into the practice, and had JUST ran my fastest lap of the day (39.02 seconds), so I was feeling a bit too confident and the rear tires were HOT. I was fastest on this tight, low speed track once again with a LOT of slip angle on the rear tires. The crowd was going crazy and the car was loose on the exit of the last turn before the bleachers, so I was show boating a bit. I managed a couple of good saves in the video above, but one time was just too much (not enough steering angle!) and I spun it like a jackass. I came into the pits to face Amy's wrath. She was NOT happy, as you can hear in that first video.
The crowd loved it and were all clapping and I was laughing, but Amy wasn't smiling one bit. No sir, she was PISSED. "Don't
mess up this car at this event, now..." I went back out for a few more laps, calmed down, but didn't find any more time. The tires got hotter and hotter - these A6s are not made for continuous lapping on a heavy, somewhat powerful car like this. I've warned people countless times that A6s are for autocrossing and VERY short lapping stints (1-3 laps) for Time Trial only. Was it going to hold together for 10 full laps? I was also getting pretty hot, so I came in after about 15 minutes, talked briefly to Amy, then headed for paddock to let the car and tires cool off. I couldn't get out of that driving suit fast enough - it was HOT! It was only 84°F in that session but I got really hot anyway after 25+ minutes in the car (I sat in the car, belted in, for about 10 minutes before we were sent out). Marc was still out there trying to get me to do some lead follow laps but I was overheated and done.
After this practice session Amy was questioning my sanity, with the potential risk of spinning and tagging a concrete wall here (it happens) or having a drift car bump into our car, for an event that "doesn't count" towards our normal NASA TT or Optima goals. But the truth of the matter is we make a lot of LS1 V8 swap kits for various cars (see above), and a certain percentage of those are purchased by drifters, which I reminded her of. So it
was our customers here.
We had a LOT people come by our trailers after this session to see the Mustang, take pictures of both of the red TT cars, and even had people ask if they could sit in the Mustang (and lots of requests for rides on track, which we weren't allowed to do). We even had this picture taken that showed up on the
SOUTHERNFRESH Facebook page, where it got over
7000 likes and 164 shares - yowsa! This crowd loved the sinister look of the Mustang - so much so that I don't think we're going to paint the bumper red after all, but leave it
black.
Drifting started back up right after our practice session and ran non-stop all day and into the night. They never really stopped for lunch, and it was getting hotter and hotter. We drank a lot of water, but never ate anything. By 12:40 when they had us go out for the exhibition race it was up to 98°F and humid. The heat was exacerbated when we sat in our cars, suited up, belted in, and engines running for a good 10 minutes before they had all of the drifters off course and the track set-up for us. Turns out only Marc and I wore driving suits, too.
About an hour before this race Aaron came by and told us a lot of the drifters were asking for a shorter race, so we all agreed to 5 laps instead of 10. This was a good turn for me, as the Hoosier A6s were getting really greasy after about 2 laps, but I figured I could nurse them to 5 laps. They asked the TT drivers to start at the back, to give the drifters a fighting chance. I was wondering if we could pass 6 or more cars in only 5 laps, as there was really only 1 or two good places to pass. As I noted in practice - we could WAY out brake these guys, most of whom didn't have ABS and were all on street tires. The safest place to pass would be into Turn 1, which was after the longest straight and had a WIDE turn-in area, and went from tight to increasing radius on the exit. Of the 7 turns on this course, maybe we could make some passes into the decreasing radius/off camber Turn 5 (right before pit in), but that would be tricky with a drift car that had flapping/disposable body work right next to you...
Aaron lined us up, and put me and Marc on the back row side by side. Turns out only 3 drift cars + Josh's Celica on street tires made it the race from the practice session. We were lined up 2 by 2 on a dirty patch of track at pit-out, just before the start-finish line. I was hoping for a good start, and as the green flag dropped the 345 rears
dug in and I cruised by a couple of cars on the first straight.
I had a good run on the lone remaining car ahead, "Fielding" in his 500 whp 2JZ powered 240SX. He was going fairly deep into turn 1 but I had a lot more brakes left. He guarded the inside line, but I had my nose in place... but backed off at the last second. Glad I did because as the corner opened up on exit he was 45 degrees sideways and yawing a good bit. I got a better exit out of Turn 1 and clawed my way side by side with him towards Turn 2, expecting him to leave me room so I could pass him in the Turns 2-3-4 high speed switch back. Nope! He didn't see me and I had to drive 2 in the grass to avoid contact, but he saw me at the last second and gave me room and I got around.
Marc and I had devised a strategy when it was going to be 10 laps of slowly picking off the cars one by one, but with 5 laps I didn't think we had the time to wait. Marc wasn't as fortunate at the start and had to pick his way through a couple of cars for the first 3 laps. Meanwhile I got out in front by corner 2 of the first lap, put my head down, and pounded out a bunch of 39 second laps with zero traffic to deal. That put me about a 1/2 lap ahead of everyone else pretty quickly. The title screen of the video says my best lap was a 39.6 - I really ran a fastest 39.4 second lap and some more mid 39s, but once Marc's TT1 C6 Z06 was around all of the drift cars he was clipping off 38 second laps and running me down. I could see him back there but wasn't worried, as we only had 5 laps and I had a healthy lead. I figured he'd only be on my bumper well after the 5th lap.
Turns out the evasive grass move on the first lap packed the lower grill opening's mesh guard with grass, once again, and the engine started running hot by about lap 4. Damn! I've got to get our crew to fab up something that doesn't pack up so easily. I started nursing the car a little on lap 5 but was still enough ahead of Marc to get the win. But... where's the damned checkered flag? I had my AiM SOLO lap timer on the wrong mode all day so I couldn't see predictive timing or the Lap Counter, which is normally visible on my preferred screen. With the red mist of an actual wheel to wheel race and the damned heat I lost track of the lap count pretty quickly. I was looking for a flag anywhere but never saw a thing. By lap 7 I was already using 5th gear on 2 sections to keep engine revs down, and that let Marc was able to catch up and get my tail as my temps were too hot to push. So I let him go by into Turn 5 on lap 7, and it was another 3 laps before somebody put the flag out to where someone on track could
see it and cars started coming in.
By then I was cruising around running 42-44 second laps, trying to keep the engine cool. I didn't want to "pop" the radiator cap like I did at Hallett (also when I plugged the grill mesh with grass), so I was just glad to have held on for 2nd. I didn't realize until days later that I had the lead through laps 1-6, heh. Oh well, Marc was definitely faster and he deserved the win. The crowd was going NUTS when we came in (I edited out a lot of the "Awards ceremony" in the video above) but we all had a lot of fun. I left the engine running in the pits and as soon as I piled out of the car I removed fistfuls of grass from the grill mesh and the coolant cooled down quickly (the electric fan was whirring and finally had a supply of air to cool the thing down with).
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