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Left: We got to slog it out in deep puddles while... Right: The 4th run group had completely dry runs by day's end
Overall this event was a bust for testing with the Rivals. Why? Well we're only testing these with tires to use at the Optima Ultimate Street Car shootout in November, which is held in Vegas. The chances of rain for the ENTIRE day of that event in Las Vegas are virtually ZERO, so wet weather testing does us no good for that series. I will say the Rivals have surprisingly good grip for as wide and as bald as they were on this day.
Oh well, we got to see a lot of old friends and drive around
really slowly. At least we didn't have any tire wear, ha!
Vorshlag Kart Fight 3
We are lucky to have a world class outdoor karting facility on the East side of Dallas called
Dallas Karting Complex (DKC). Virtually all of the track, autocross, time trial and karting racers in DFW know about this place and have driven their rental karts before. We had a couple of Vorshlag sponsored Kart Challenges in 2011 and I was on a team of 4 in the first DKC 4 hour enduro in December of that same year. We got really busy in 2012 and 2013 and didn't have another Vorshlag-sanctioned karting competition for those two years, but I drove rental karts there many many times.
Instead of the structured, all day Saturday, 3-round shootouts we held in 2011, this time Vorshlag just held an informal night competition event at DKC on April 17th, 2014. This was a Thursday night and we posted up
a Facebook event on our main Vorshlag page a few days beforehand just telling people, "hey, come join us from 6-9 pm, run a few races, turn in your time sheets, and the fastest time of the night gets a trophy".
We called it the Vorshlag Kart Fight 3, as this was out 3rd karting competition event since 2011. For something kind of thrown together at the last minute we had a surprising number of racers show up. By the end of the night we had nearly 40 people who came out to fight for the VKF trophy.
Kyle and Olof built this awesome trophy out of some broken Subaru drivetrain parts, TIG welded together and bolted to a base. The competition format was simple: show up, pay $15 a race (each race is about 10-12 minutes in length), and your best times run that night from 6-9 pm in the regular We had some swag and gift certificates for 1st through 3rd places. We also used NASA TT rules for offs and spins: if you put 4 wheels off or spun 180 degrees or more on track
ALL times from that session were voided for that driver. We all spotted for each other.
Left: I went over the driving line, as I run it, with anyone who'd listen. Right: Fastest time of the night went to Alpha LS1 Miata tester Jason Toth!
I kept getting the same slug of a kart all night (excuses - I has em!) and while I had an early lead, I never improved on my first session times and could only manage 2nd quickest time of the night, a couple of tenths back from 1st. NASA TT racer Jason Toth was the winner, and (taking myself out of the running) 2nd place went to Billy Jack Smith and 3rd place swag went to NASA TT racer Jefri Tan (who runs in TT3 with me in a red EVO). We had one guy flip his kart (no injuries) and another
NASA racer who put his kart so far off track he ended up in
the sippy hole, and went home sopping wet. But no injuries and everyone had smiles on their faces.
"Helmet-Cam" Video from Marc Sherrin
NASA TT1 racer Marc Sherrin took the video above with a Go Pro strapped to his helmet, which is a compilation from about 3 sessions. As you can see we started off in daylight but it quickly got dark, and the track cooled off. They have excellent night lighting, so that made for extra fun NIGHT RACING! He even caught a glimpse of the kart that flipped in his video. We had 6 NASA TT racers, a lot of SCCA autocrossers, and various other local gear heads in attendance.
Vorshlag Kart Fight Photo Gallery: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-E...-Kart-Fight-3/
Five people from Vorshlag were there and Brandon managed to snap some pics while we were there. Thanks to everyone that came out to join us - we'll do it again soon!
New Massive Rear Wing on Mustang!
Let me first start off saying: I am
not an aerodynamics guru. I have a mechanical engineering background/degree, and I understand some basic concepts of aero, but Jason here at Vorshlag studied hydrodynamics in college and I rely on his expertise. I also know other people are aero gurus that I listen to, and read from. So I will try to cover rear wings in this section without butchering the science of it too badly.
We have had an APR GTC-300 "3D" wing on our 2011 Mustang for the past 2, almost 3 years? This was supposed to be a
temporary fix until we found a better 2D wing, from APR or another source. At the time APR was only making 3D wings, but have since come out with their own carbon 2D design. I initially bought this 67" wide GTC-300 carbon fiber wing element to use on another car, and we actually did use it on
Brianne's Pikes Peak Subaru in 2012 for the PPIHC event that year. It is a good low speed wing (PPIHC is fairly low speed, as are many of our Texas tracks like ECR, MSR-C, MSR-H, HHR, TMS and others) but is somewhat "draggy" at higher speeds, and never was meant to work at the heights we ran it with on our car.
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