Recent Posts

So.. more King Kong burgers Rich.. ?   

A few other tidbits:

• Many thanks to Mike Feher for loaning us a couple gallons of 93 octane.
• Mike Ucker is 4th in CP after day 1, and Brian Hoover is flirting with the trophies.
• The west course is an absolute hoot to drive! As I mentioned earlier, it is one of those courses that even if you don't do well, you will leave with a smile on your face.
• We had a very nice dinner tonight with Travis, and Jeff and Stefanie Mabrey. Good times had by all!
• I am so flippin' tired, I can hardly see straight. Still, it is a euphoric fatigue.

Thursday Update:

Kathy and I picked up T-Bone at 6:45a and made it to the site before 7a. Travis and I did a quick walk and then he walked with the Evo school instructor. I walked on my own.

8a came around pretty quickly and we had the car on grid and ready to go as required. After a very nice singing of the Star Spangled Banner, accompanied by the Color Guard of the Nebraska National Guard, we were ready to go. We had the course nailed in our minds, the car was ready, and we were caged animals after a piece of meat!

I went first, and turned a 64.2 but with cones. A respectable first time (raw) sbased on what others were turning. Travis turned a 63.8 clean.   Next run I focused on a clean run and my lines, but got slower with a 65.2 or something like that.  Travis got slower also, and as we analyzed it we realized that this was a course you had to attack. Being on line without aggression meant you were slow. 

By the third run, the leaders were in the low 62’s and last trophy was around 63.0. For my third run, I took off like a scalded dog, and had everything going when the car starved for fuel in the first sweeper.  Icing on the cake for the week.  What happens when you effectively let off the throttle  in a FWD car in a turn? The front tucks in, the rear comes around. This pointed me exactly at the wrong place to be. I recovered but it put me behind on for the slalom that followed, and I hit the 3rd and 4th slalom cones.  After that, I spent the rest of the run looking for cones out of place in hopes of a rerun.  It was all for naught.

As soon as I got back to grid, I took off to get the gas so Travis wouldn’t have the same issue. Unfortunately, he did not improve on his time on his third run, and in the end he is in 16th and I am in 25th. Travis has a shot at the trophies if everything goes well tomorrow, and I can only redeem myself by being incredibly quick tomorrow.

After our heat, we headed back to the paddock to prep the car for Kathy’s runs.  A quick change of tires and seat, and before we knew it we were back on grid for the 4th heat and her runs.  Kathy’s first run was a solid 65.1 clean. She was in 2nd at this point, and then her next run was a 63.8, fast, but with cones. Class leader Leslie Cohen was at a 63.1, and this was within reach.  For her third run, Leslie turned a 62.1 which would have LEADING open class.  Kathy basically did the same thing I did on my second run by focusing on lines, and ran another 65.1.  Short story is sometimes you just have to put the gas pedal down. 

This leaves her in 3rd,  about 1.3 out of second. Short of Leslie hitting cones on every run, second is a stretch but reachable. We walked the East course three times this evening. It is essentially a bunch of acceleration sections connected by sweepers.  Not all that challenging or interesting, but we will need to attack it. m

The big drama today is that somebody started noticing that a lot of the top Civics don’t have the model number stamped into the block, indicating the block has been shaved.  This will unfold itself over the next 24 hours I am sure.

More tomorrow. Or maybe Saturday.

I'm selling this car for a friend.  It is currently in Cincinnati, but will be available at my house in Hilliard starting Tuesday (9/14).

Info:
- 84,xxx miles
- Options can be seen in image below of window sticker
- One owner, female driven since new
- Dealer Maintained its whole life (should be getting all records from the dealer)
- New A/C 2 years ago (Compressor I think.  I will get details)
- New tires 1.5 years ago (will post tread depth when I get the car)
- Will check brakes when I get the car, but I assume if they are anywhere near low, the dealer would have replaced them

The car needs nothing.  It has spent its whole life owned by a girl who did whatever she was told needed to be done. 

Asking $12,250.
(btw, if anyone would rather buy my 04 jetta GLI, then I'll buy the CRV  )











[/QUOTE]

did you get my pm i sent you a few days ago. still waiting an answer.

Rich should write a book...........

My sentiments exactly! I felt like I was reading a book when I read your posts.  Good luck today, and glad you got the car fixed and put back together!  I bet you were sweating bullets when you couldn't get the parts off the car at the boneyard......any more news on the Lotus guy, make sure he doesn't "accidentally drive over a nail" 

Thanks, Mark.  Once we got the part it was pretty straightforward.

I heard bits and pieces of BS on the radio.  Congrats on your finish - 18th in a 52 car field aint't shabby!

Travis and I are first heat today on the west course.  Kathy is fourth heat.

Rich,

I heard about the Lotus incident. Total bummer-I meant to come find you at some point to see if there was anything we could do to help, but got pretty involved in tire scrubbing (OPR=teh suk).

I finished 18th of 52 in BS, and my co-driver Marc Pfannenschmidt was the class winner (fairly easily).

 Update for Wednesday.

I was bummed I didn't get to watch any competition runs on Tuesday as we had our hands full with our own issues. I really wanted to watch STS, STX, and EP.

Early wake to pick up Travis and head to Omaha to the recommended boneyard.  The plan was leave at 6:45a, be at the yard when they opened at 8a, find a car, remove the trailing arm, and be back on the road to Lincoln by 9:30a. Then, we would get back to Lincoln by 11a, and have the new arm on the car and brakes bled and a basic alignment by 12:30p or so.  That would give us plenty of time for test sessions, and even a window we could take it back to Inland if we felt the alignment was way off.   

Have you ever tried to remove parts from a 20+ year old car at a junkyard?  The good news is that we quickly found a suitable donor car, and the plan was to remove both the right (needed) and left control arms from a 1990 - 1991 car as they are more desirable (for very subtle reasons), and it is a superseded part number. The bad news is that we spent a good hour attempting to remove them before concluding that we couldn’t remove them.  Some of you have maybe experienced the pleasure of having a suspension bolt become one with the metal sleeve inside the bushing.  Damn near impossible to remove, particularly with hand tools.

We went to another car, and experienced the same, and by the third car, we were pretty adept at figuring out which bolts were problematic. We thought we had one but then when we pulled the hub off, the inner race of the hub bearing stuck to the spindle!  ARRRGH!  Two hours wasted as that was the last Civic at this particular yard.  So, on the road again to find another yard and Civic.   The GPS gave us a nearby yard which required us going through a significant detour to get to, but lo and behold, the first car we found had the right part and we removed it without drama.  $25 later we were back on the road by 11:30a.

I didn’t mention all the drama about the Ingalls camber adjusters earlier.  Short story is these are what we and many others had and they were deemed illegal. Since we didn’t want to get caught at the Nats, we fixed our car by borrowing Skunk2 upper control arms from good pal and sportsman Will Lahee from Indy region. The Skunk2 arms are the preferred solution, and everybody wants them. Too bad that   these control arms are on national back order from Skunk2, and between Jeff Mabrey and me, we contacted at least 30 vendors on them.   

Since we borrowed Will’s, he needs them back by Friday the 17th so he can get them on his car for an event that weekend.  Travis, being ever conscious of economy of effort, figured that he would search the web  to find them.  “Hey, it says on Amazon, they have them in stock and ready to ship!.”  My reply was that you can’t believe everything you read on the Interwebz and, trust me, I have already been down that path. 

I am really not sure if T-Bone thought he would find them, or he just wanted to use the air card on his laptop.  In any case, he called 5 or 6 places on the way from Omaha to Lincoln that all said online that they could “ship immediately” or had them “in stock”.  Of course, I let him pursue his folly being the Older and Wiser One on the team, and found it quite humorous.  But, it kept him busy and his mind off the Lotus that put us in this spot to begin with.

Back in Lincoln around 12:30p, we picked up Kathy and Sami (the dog) and got to the site shortly thereafter.  A mad thrash on the car, brake bleed, and a quick alignment check (the Older and Wiser One marked the toe arm prior to disassembly),  and we headed off to the test course to get the other $80 of value from our investment in test sessions.

Test session results were somewhat mixed. We felt the car could go faster but it wouldn’t.  Half way through the 40 second course, the car would start pushing. Travis felt the car wasn’t as tossable as it was during the first part of his ill-fated test run yesterday. Still, I felt it was better than it was during the Pro Solo.  After the session, we came to the conclusion we were running low tread Toyo’s every 9 minutes and it wasn’t enough time to get them to cool down, even with spraying them.

Back to the paddock, and we went through everything to get the car read for competition on Thursday.  Jeff and Stefanie Mabrey have also been our paddock mates, and been good sports with all the stuff we’ve been through.  Jeff has had a great season and has a legitimate shot at a strong finish in ST. Unfortunately, he is gimping around with a torn meniscus, and so has had his share of issues also.  I really appreciate the fact that he has always been there with a wrench or has crawled under the car to look at stuff.

We have everything packed up in the truck to take to grid, and the car is good to go.   We walked the course twice with Kathy’s coaching as she was able to watch runs and see the troublesome spots.   Finished the day with a nice Porterhouse steak dinner cooked on the grill we brought, and a couple Woodford Reserves’ to help mellow out the evening.

We are all really looking forward to tomorrow. The course is great – lots of transitions, sweepers, and a couple of “gotcha” sections.  There is the usual drama going on around us, but frankly we’ve had enough of our own excitement that I haven’t been able to keep up with it all. A few tidbits I heard (take this with a grain of salt):

•   Tom O’Gorman finished 3rd in STS in Geoff Chambers’ Miata.
•   Fred Robertson’s car broke and he drove a borrowed car to finish one out of the trophies in EP.
•   I wish I knew what happened with Jeff Robinson in DS!
•   There is probably a ton of stuff I am missing!

See you tomorrow!

Here's a link to the unofficial National results if anyone wants to track them live.

http://sololive.scca.com/

Bruno