It was an unseasonably cool weekend at Willowsprings Raceway. Saturday was a 1st place finish and Sunday was 2nd in NASA’s TTB class.

The car handled beautifully on Saturday for the win, running a low 1.33 lap time and cornering forces of 1.3g. The brakes were a tentative but manageable. I was expecting a similar result Sunday. What I wasn’t expecting was that the Hoosier tires had fallen off dramatically overnight. As a result, lap times dropped nearly a second each run session Sunday. I was fighting to keep the car on the road in every corner. There just wasn’t any grip left in the tires; the rear wanted to “skate” out but didn’t want to catch. With the season on the line, I tried to balance the catastrophic over steer by setting the rear sway bar to full soft and adjusting tire pressures. I battled to an exhausting 2nd place finish. Admittedly, I can’t help but think if only I had two more fresh tires, but that’s racing. The 1st place driver set an excellent time and drove great.

Usually I would be driving the Hankook Z214 tire. But due to high demand, the US supply has dried up over the last few months. Hoosier makes a great tire, but the performance and value of the Hankook is hard to beat. Hopefully Hankook will be able to respond to demand more quickly in the future. Fresh Hankooks would have made a significant difference in the last two events.

The good news is that I’ve worked through the worst of some recent brake issues. Of course it wasn’t until Sunday evening (after the race!) that I was able to restore them to 100%. A leaking brake master cylinder was replaced the previous day (last minute) and I made repeated attempts to dislodge air from the system. The result was a soft pedal and unpredictable threshold braking Saturday and Sunday. I expect the brakes to be perfect next event.

The Buttonwillow raceway event is coming up, June 21-22. This event is critical that I pick up at least a 2nd place finish. I’m feeling the pressure. TTB is one of the most hotly contested classes in Time Trial and the competing drivers are excellent.

Special thanks: Muellerized Suspension, Gruppe-S / Dynamic AutoSports, Subaru Sherman Oaks, Dana Bradley/Aaron McKinnon.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 4:57 am and is filed under NASA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.