Wilmington Match Tour, April 11-13th Options

[Bobzilla]

So, finally almost healed up from my 2nd hernia surgery (surgery 4-1-14) and drove the 3 hours to Wilmington, OH for the first national event of the year, and my first overall event. Still sore, and moving slowly while taking pain meds at night, I wasn't 100% but there was no way I was missing it!



got there Friday the 11th, got the car setup and went out on the Test n Tune course. Got some things sorted and readjusted myself to the car. The concrete there is super grippy (more on that later) and super smooth. Once the TnT closed in the early afternoon, they got the main course set up and got a few walks in. The first 1/3-1/2 was a tight and technical section. The last 1/2 was a pure power course.



Cars in the class for the weekend included the Forte with 2 drivers, a mini with 2 very competent drivers (Already won the first 2 Nat events this year) and a Mazda 2. We were giving up 200lbs on the mini and 400 on the 2, but we were putting down 60 and 70 more hp/tq respectively.



Saturday, we ran second heat. temp was in the mid-60's and sunny with a stiff breeze. Car started out strong, running the almost mile long course in 70 seconds on our first runs. I never got faster, co-driver though found another 2.4 seconds getting it down to a 68.2. That would have been enough for 2nd in class, but he caught a cone in the slalom to kill it. So we ended up 3-4 in class.



Sunday was the shootout with 1 practice run and one timed run with the top 2/3 moving on. After our first timed runs we were 6th and 16th. This day I cut down the time difference to less than a second but I was still leaving a crap ton of time on the course. We moved on to the second round. Co-driver catches the 3rd cone in the slalom, kills his time and puts him 19th (top 17 move on). I catch 2 cones in the slalom trying to make up lost time moving me to last of the remaining people. So our day was done.



Some interesting things happened this weekend. The concrete was so sticky, that my previous tire pressures were allowing the tire to roll over onto the sidewall. This had never happened before. Once we bumped up our pressures in the front end, turn in became so much quicker and more responsive (the main reason I nailed both cones on my last run) and we recorded our highest lateral G's. Steady state in the sweepers we were recording 1.1G. Our peak mid corner was 1.4G. The last 2 runs I was into the rev limiter entering the final 7-cone slalom at 63mph.



Overall the weekend went well. I am still really sore. Walked almost 10 miles in the course of the weekend. Considering I haven't done anything in almost 2 weeks, that wore me out. But the car showed me just how capable it was and I learned some new things about it and my setup. Overall a very good weekend.