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Only one wk away 🙂 76 people signed up. Looks like maybe Jason got the Elise running. B) Ah, maybe some competition. 😉
Markmy car seems broke… 🙁 and I don’t think I can fix it by Saturday.
anyone in AA want to let me co-drive with them?
-Brian
Ok, so remember at the track after the 3rd session, I said there was some sort of weird slight steering clunk? So I decided not to drive the rest of the day and just get the car home.
But on the way home, I had to make a stop in Davis first. It seems to drive fine on the highway but I could still hear an occasional slight knock beneath the floorboard. When I exited and stepped on the brakes, the brakes sounded awful, like a grinding sound. I didn’t think much of it because the freeway off ramp pavement was rough and I thought it was just tire/ road noise. As I was driving locally at low speeds in Davis, the knocking and clunking got worse! It seems to come from the front of the car and it didn’t necessarily correlate with speed or braking, it just happens randomly. So I jack up the car on one side and check as best I could and didn’t see anything funny.
I decided to drive all the way back to SF and luckily I made it without any problems. I did notice that anytime I braked hard, there was something wrong. Sounds like a grinding or scraping sound. And seems to clunk more after I step on the brake. So I’m thinking that I definitely overheated my pads at the track (Axxis Ultimates), and either cracked my pads, guide pin came loose, or sheared a guide pin.
Anyways, on Sunday, I got in there to take a look. The brakes look fine! Everything was in place, no loose parts, nothing broken. The pads seem fine, maybe one had a slight hairline crack in it. The rotors seem fine. Calipers and brackets seem fine.
Then I crawl under the front of the car and look at everything else. Last weekend, I replaced my front control arms, tie rods, and bushings. So I check those again and all the ball joints to make sure they’re tight. I checked the sway bar end links and mounting points, engine mounts, transmission mounts, X-brace. Seriously didn’t see anything wrong. The only thing I noticed is the foam insulation in the drivetrain tunnel is sagging more than before. And the driveshaft has a really clean spot where newly paint chipped off of it.
So right now I’m at a lose on what the problem is. I haven’t checked the rear of the car yet or the guibo. I was way too tired on Sunday to do anymore. So now the car sits in the garage and I’m driving the e30 this week.
[quote=”Hal” post=138]You got some big changes out there! No parking along the perimeter any longer?[/quote]
We want to use the bump-out as the primary paddock area and believe we can fit all the cars there. If we need to overflow, we will work it out.
Marina Motorsports still blocks off half that space and if more than 4 trailers show up we won’t make it.
With the diagonal parking pre-grid, have you decided how to handle interleaving the 2-driver cars?
I suppose we could have them park at the end of the line, and rely on the pregrid person go through half the grid, then jump to do the first drivers of the 2-driver cars, then go through the rest of the grid, finishing with the second drivers of the 2-driver cars…
We’ll see how this goes at the first event… I want to try to make it work for us. The chevron is pretty nice for making sure people run in the same order, giving people a place to leave their “stuff”, and eliminates the need for everyone to inch forward thru the whole run group – eliminating a lot of engine starting/stopping or idling.
I’ve been thinking about it too. Normally the chevron would look like this…
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/ / / / / / / /We are space limited, so perhaps splitting it up like this would work…
/ 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 2 / 2 / 2 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 /
Pre-grid would send 2’s and all to the right, then 2’s and all to the left. We can indicate the 2-driver cars with blue tape on the fender or headlight or something like that.
Open to suggestions and will think on it more between now and Saturday. If it ends up being a fuster cluck, we can always go back to the old way.
I personally like the idea of the chevron gridding. It will make T&S a little easier too since the cars will end up in the same order, even if they have re-runs.
The challenge of doing it like this:
/ 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 2 / 2 / 2 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 /is that you’d have to know how many 2-driver cars there are versus 1-driver cars for each run group.
How about putting a big cone on the right end of the chevron (leave this one in a fixed position) and having the 2-driver cars park to the right of it, and everyone else park to the left? Then put a cone halfway thorough the 1-driver cars once everyone is gridded so the gridder knows when to grab the 2-car drivers?
Like this maybe:
/ 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 * 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 / 1 * 2 / 2 / 2
(where the *s are the big cones)
PCA uses Chevron Pre-grids and it works nicely. Usually I would just have the 2 driver cars identify themselves and then I would just send them whenever I passed them from either side, we don’t usually have more than 3-4 two driver cars in a session, so it is pretty easy for the pre-grid person to manage. I would just tell the 2 drivers to let me know when they are ready.
The only funky thing about a Chevron at Marina is that the pre-grid area is sloped away from the cement pad, so drivers need to remember to set their parking brakes when they are gridded in a heavily sloped position. PCA has had a couple incidents of ran away cars on pre-grid…
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