It has been 4 events since my last post. The new set up is working well and I'm finally comfortable with how the car behaves. It is quick to step out in the back end. It turns in much quicker than before. I have to be right on top of it at all times. On tight courses it does much better than it did before. At the Evergreen Air and Space Museum event I PAXed 5th. I was the fastest car in my session running against much smaller cars, some of them on race only tires. The last Hoodoo event was the last hurrah for my RE71 tires. They are no longer made and I made the switch to the Yokohama Advan A052. Those were just installed Tuesday. I've driven the car a couple of times on the street to heat cycle the tires before running this weekend again at Hoodoo. Everyone that runs these tires describes them as vague or numb. Very little feed back to the driver. That includes my friend Steve that runs a 2015 GT in CAM C. The counterpoint is they grip like crazy, both wet and dry. It will be an interesting learning curve all over again with this car. I have the event this weekend and one more at Evergreen on the 27th to learn how these behave before the Champion Tour Event in Packwood, WA in July. Hopefully, I like these. They aren't cheap. I wish one could test drive a set of tires before buying just like we do with a pair of shoes or a car.
At the last Hoodoo event a friend of mine got a video of my GT using his drone. It is an interesting perspective of an Autocross run. You can really grasp how quick the GT accelerates, even at 6,000 ft altitude where it is down almost 80 hp. This was an "interesting" event in another sense. Although it is rare, there was a serious accident at Hoodoo that weekend. Watching it happen really drives home how things can go horribly wrong in an instant. I've always been concerned about the access road we race up and back down at Hoodoo because it is quite narrow. No room for mistakes. The WRX was screaming up the hill and started to slide out in the rear when going through the slalom. He went all the way around backwards and slid all the way to the edge of the road and over the bank at about 35 mph cutting two trees in half and rolling 2-3 times. I lost count. It was actually horrifying to watch. There are very large boulders and stumps on that hill side. I think it was a stump that crushed the rood in about a foot right in front of where the driver was sitting. Miraculously, the driver was fine. His car is/was toast. That happened in the first run group. We took a few minutes to secure the wreckage and racing continued. I really had to mentally block out what I saw in order to take the hill the way I normally do. You can see the wreckage in the drone video. At the end of the day the WRX was extracted by a large wrecker.
EESCC event 2, Roseburg Speedway. The banked track makes this an "interesting" place to Autocross.
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WMC event 2 Evergreen Aviation Museum. Racing around concrete islands, rockets and airplanes.
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ACCO Event 2, Hoodoo Ski Area. Racing at 6,000 ft out in the forest.
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EESCC Event 3, racing in the rain, splashing through standing puddles. There wasn't enough tread depth left on the front tires to channel the water. Normally, RE71s dominate in the wet.
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EESCC Event 4 Hoodoo Ski Area. I'm having to baby the GT at this event. That's actually taking it easy compared to what it will do on a fresh set of tires. The RE71s were done at this event. They had 157 runs on the front tires, 121 runs on the rear tires. There is still quite a bit of tread, yet, they do not grip well anymore compared to how they performed last season. This run is the same run captured by the drone.
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And the drone video.
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My fellow club member's WRX. Yes, that is a tree branch that impaled the door.