continued from above
My dirty driving and her smoothness allowed Amy to "skirt" me pretty badly for both days - around .9 sec. She had me by .4 sec on Saturday and .5 sec on Sunday clean. It was already frustrating enough but then every announcer in each run group on both days had to rub that it in continuously. "Terry's getting skirted!" comments were popping up every 5 minutes, even in the 2 heats we didn't run in... Ugh. Here's a tip -
don't co-drive with your wife if she's fast and you have thin skin. 
Amy was a good sport and didn't kick me while I was down, at least.
Amy drove some solidly quick runs but still barely won the PAXed "women's class" at the event (a class we have in this Division to avoid having a dozen 1 car entry Ladies' classes), and the win pushed her to the 3 event Division Series W class championship. She had to fight for it, beating some quick drivers/cars. My STX class win did the same for me, but with the Maxcy & Ledbetter STX cars not in attendance at 2 of the 3 SW Div events, it was a hollow victory. More important -
our PAX times were NOT good, slotting us well down in the 29th and 34th places. Yeesh... This again points clearly how far back the car still is, better than anything else. We weren't keeping up with the two fast STX cars/drivers at regional events, and not PAXing well at these Divisional events,
so why would we take this car to Nationals?
Long story short -
we aren't going to take it to Nationals this year. Its more than just the poor performance of the car (which has been consistently slow over 3 drivers, all of whom have trophied or won at National SCCA events) that's keeping us from bringing the red Mustang to STX/Nationals this year. There's lots of other reasons, but the lack of performance in the car with 3 somewhat proven drivers, and the wacked out steering problem we haven't nailed down yet, are reason enough.
I'm also swamped for the entire month with moving Vorshlag into its new building. What I thought would be 8-10 days of construction is looking more like 20-25, including days, nights and weekends. We had to gut the commercial space to make the layout work for us, but at least now we'll have a pretty big shop - that's air conditioned. When its 100-107°F outside its still 100+ inside a non-climate controlled shop. Everyone here will be glad to get out of this crushing heat and into a well lit, spaceous, and air conditioned shop space.
I could point to a bunch of other reasons, like the continued allowance of the ST>STX "upclass jumping" (aka: poaching), which is finally supposed to end in 2012. Then there's the expense of going to Nationals; we'll drop $3000+ in entry fees, fuel towing to/from Lincoln from Dallas, hotel rooms, and food + each of us will lose a
week of work. Mostly its the performance of the car and the timing with our shop move.
More preparation needed - Costas and I would consider the car about "half-prepped", at best. We still have the single adjustable shocks on there, and however good they may be, they are still single adjustable shocks and can only get us so far if conditions change or we need to alter the set-up. We do have the Moton Club Sport doubles revalved, and pretty much ready to go onto the car, as of last Friday - but its going to take 1-2 days of testing to get the car reliably fast, possibly including a revalve of the shocks, and we just don't have the days to attack that this month. We're out of time, and the car is just not ready.
We've had a dozen people say "just slap some Hoosiers on it and run ESP", but there's a lot more to ESP prep than big gumball tires, and I'm not fool enough to think we'd keep up with Madderash, Merideth, or Strano in an STX prepped car with Hoosiers thrown on at the last minute.
We're not giving up on the Mustang. I agreed up front to give it 2 years in STX, and that's what we plan to do. Next season we will have time to make a better lateral locating device for the solid rear axle, like a Watts Link, which the car needs for several reasons. Plus there are lots of rear suspension tweaks in STX, unique to a stick axle car, we can still exploit that we just haven't touched. We also never got a chance to swap in/tune/test with an aftermarket differential, which any autocrossed car with over 400 whp desperately needs, especially one that comes with a craptastic clutch-style diff like this car. The electronic steering "issue" is also pretty massive, getting worse, and Ford cannot seem to fix it at the moment. You don't take a broken car to Nationals. And the car isn't even competitive
locally, yet. It's as simple is that, and all 3 drivers were in agreement for this year. We ran out of time with respect to testing and additional parts development, and just were not seeing the results we needed to see in the last 2 months of running events to then invest thousands of dollars to go get ~30-40th place in STX at Nationals, especially when ST cars were allowed to run in STX that weigh
half as much as ours'.
I hate excuses, but we do have quite a long list amassed this time.
We've had several choice co-drives offered for Nationals for Costas, myself, and Amy, and as much as those are appreciated, the business construction/move work is really where we need to be spending our time this month. So we'll spend August setting up the new shop instead of last minute testing, parts installation, and a week in Lincoln. We have the $2011 Challenge to prep for in just 2 month's time as well, and our crapcan E30 V8 needs a
lot of repair and set-up work to get ready for that. After that event in early October, we'll jump back to the Mustang (and also the TTD 330 with it's new motor, the E46 LS1 Alpha car development, the black E36 M3 LS1 car, and many other project cars in the Vorshlag shop). Its a bitter pill to swallow, and I'm going to miss being at Nationals this year, but I've been enough times in a row to afford to skip this year.
Click the thumbnails above for HiDef videos from Day 1 (Amy, left) and Day 2 (Terry, right) from the Divisional
An opportunity popped up and we will have the Mustang in a booth at the
Yellow Rose Classic car show Aug 13-14th in Ft Worth, if you happen to be going stop by and say "hi". Look for us right across from the SCCA Texas Region folks. I don't know if I'll be there both days, but the car and someone from Vorshlag will be.
Since we won't be at the Solo Nationals, please
go here to request Vorshlag decals for your car. We can make them to order in a few different colors, but already have lots of 24" decals ready to mail out in black, silver and white. VTPP Testers at Nationals need to be running Vorshlag decals, per VTPP agreements. AST/Moton will have their trailer at Nationals and will have a
limited number of Vorshlag decals on hand.
Good luck to all of the drivers at Nats this year!