Project Update for March 22, 2012: Sorry it took me nearly a week after the last double-header event weekend to get this update up, but we've been slammed at Vorshlag and with a 3 day work week last week I'm still way behind. I was also hoping that the TX2K12 folks would have some sort of results posted for the track day, but alas - the only results up a week after their event weekend are for drag racing. I checked the usual forums that have TX2K threads (which usually have more info than the Tx2K website), but they are just full of street racing stories, videos showing who had the biggest burnout at the "street meet", their "dyno day" numbers, and other things I don't care about.
My pictures and videos from TX2K12: http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-Events/TX2K12-MSR-H/
So let's back up a tick. Where we last left off here the Mustang was being hurriedly prepped, washed, and loaded into the trailer. There was some wheel bearing noise I noticed at the Harris Hill Road track event (RTTA) and it was louder at the last autocross earlier this month. Ryan and AJ pulled the rear axle apart, yanked out the right side axle shaft, and we inspected the bearings, shaft, and differential for wear.
It all looked perfect. Was I hearing the noise correctly?? I know it was from the right rear... or was it? Weird.
We had found some 275/35/18 Hoosier A6 (autocross compound) DOT tires to mount to the D-Force 18x10" wheels, which were to be used at the MSR-Houston track event held by TX2K12 last Thursday. Our newly repaired tire machine was finally ready to use for the first time... but one more little issue cropped up (fixed this week!) so we took them to Discount Tire once again. I hadn't run the Mustang on track with anything but street tires up until now so some R compounds were long overdue. I could have thrown the 315/35/18 Kumho V710s on there but... I just had a bad feeling about the event and didn't want to burn up brand new tires at this one. That was a smart move.
The 275/35/18 is super short and looks ridiculous (to me) on the Mustang, but hey, its the spec tire for the GRAND AM Mustangs so I went ahead and tried it. Meh, it works I guess, but has a ton of wheel gap at the fender. A little skinny for an 18x10" but it had some grip. We got the car loaded up, strapped in, and AJ and Ryan loaded out the trailer with the toolbox and all the track gear for the first time. First long tow with the trailer, and no spare wheel/tire to be found. Oh well, wish me luck! We left Dallas around 5:30 pm (rush hour traffic = FML) but got to Pearland around 10 pm and crashed out.
The next morning we got to MSR-H early and set-up our trailer next to Costas & Anna's set-up, right next to Track Entrance where NASA normally grids... but with only 40 cars split amongst 4 sessions, there were very few cars to grid, so it worked. Great trailer/paddock location, whatever - thanks Paul!
We went to the driver's meeting, turned in our self-tech forms, and made sure they had our AMB transponder numbers registered. It was clear that Peter and the TX2K crew had stepped up their game for 2012; this event was better organized, safer, and more enjoyable than in 2011. Costas and I were put both in group Advanced 1 (A1) which had 8 cars, there was an A2, and we had to work with beginner (B1, B2) drivers all day.
I took a GT500 Mustang driver around the track in my first A1 track session with the 275s at all 4 corners and he had a BLAST (you can see his GT500 in the bottom right pic). He'd never done a track day, autocross, nothing - so his eyes were huge as we bombed around MSR-H on Hoosier A6s, drifting the rear out of most corners - these tires had been sitting for over a year before I bought them, so I was "cleaning off old rubber".
Managed nothing better than a
1:49.48 lap in this session, going the ClockWise direction, meh. I was shifting around 6K to keep from hurting anything, as it makes peak power around 6200 anyway. The laps
felt slow, and it was loose as hell out back. Was the splitter actually helping front grip and the lack of rear wing hurting the overall balance? All I knew was that it was loose in high an low speed corners. And the track was BUMPY... coming out of turn 10 there's a huge dip, so if I do any more track events in this car the 175# rear springs (which work great for autocross) we might need to bump up a tick in rate, to keep the rear from bottoming out on tracks like this.
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