Tales of the Arwing: AutoX

"roflcopter" (roflroflroflcopter) 07/14/2014 at 15:15 • Filed to: None

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As I posted about !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , we took the Mustang out to the local SCCA AutoX and threw it around yesterday. This is the first event my parents have attended and even though my mom couldn't drive the Mustang(she was too short to reach the pedals/see over the wheel lulz) she had a blast watching, helping, and she even rode along in a properly fast C6 vette. My dad drove though, and after his first two runs where he got a bit lost on course, he figured it out and had fun trying to find the limits of the car, and put down a decently respectable time as well.

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The day started with us running a bit late, but still manageable, to get to my buddy's house to pick him and the car up before driving about 2 hours to get to the location. The minimal lateness soon turned into us rolling out just under an hour behind schedule because my other buddy's R32 decided it didn't need a battery anymore. So after pulling the one out of the RX7 in the driveway and somehow making it fit in the R we were on our way for reals. Only got lost once on the way there and ended up taking a mile long detour through some gravel/dirt road that both of my friends(one in the R32 and one in a WRX) were cursing us for blocking the whole road with our truck and trailer.

After we showed up we met some opposition to letting us run more than 2 drivers in one car. I've seen them run 9 drivers in one car at events hosted my the other local SCCA and proceeded to tell the guy how it was going to work, he didn't take kindly to the instructions and after a short debate he decided to let us do it if we all registered in the Novice class so it wouldn't affect anyone else's standings. Whatever, it's not like we're competing on a serious level anyways. At this point we got the car off the trailer and found out that my mom wasn't going to be able to run(I think she was actually a bit relieved).

The next slight issues was tech. Now this car is a Lemons car and can easily pass tech there, or at any NASA road course event, or at any SCCA road course event, so we normally don't have any trouble at all besides convincing them that yes, it will in fact run. Yesterday was a little different though, they didn't give us any crap about our rusted rollcage, or the lack of lights, or the ziptied/JBwelded engine parts, but instead some guy decided to start trying to jiggle our wheels. Well turns out the front passenger wheel had quite a bit of play in it(ohhhh, that explains the chirping we heard at the last event) and we quickly told him that we were swapping tires anyways and that it was probably a bushing issue or not torqued properly wheel. It was obviously a wheel bearing, but we made it through anyways. Now we were taking bets on whether we would lose the wheel or the rear end would explode first.

Morning runs went fine, although my times kept slipping and I ended up doing my best on the first run with a 51.022 and my dad figured out the course and was sitting just under 60 seconds. When the afternoon rolled around I managed to figure out the course a bit more and had a few very tidy runs that put me with my best time being a 49.430, beating out a vette, two Toyobarus, two camaros, a few Miatas, and plenty of other things. My dad got his down to 56.268 and was quite pleased with himself.

The peculiar thing I'd been noticing all day was that the car was having a odd ticking sound when at low RPM and that is was having TONS more overrun than usual and was burbling with the best of them. Decided not to check it out until we had the car back home and didn't discover until then that 3 header bolts had gone MIA and we were definitely leaking hard on cylinder 3, oh well. All in all the car held together, shot wheel bearing, no fluid in the diff, header barely attached, and didn't give us one lick of trouble, well besides the 7 or so degrees of random camber/toe change we were getting.

Here's a link to the results if you want to take a look:

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XJDano > roflcopter 07/14/2014 at 19:10

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5 things STL checked was

Battery hold down in place

Wheel play like you discribed

Throttle spring to ho back to idle

Class & number on side of car.

helmet

roflcopter > XJDano 07/14/2014 at 23:34

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Normally they check for the throttle return and battery hold down, but that's it. Most people running here don't have their own helmets anyways and borrow them from the SCCA people.

I'm glad we didn't lose the wheel, they probably would have been pissed, although it would have been quite hilarious.