Project Update for June 3rd, 2014 Let's cover two final April events - NASA @ TWS and ordering a 2015 Mustang - then get to the May events to get more caught up. We had two events on the same weekend of May 3rd - double booked! - and I missed competing in the SCCA ProSolo to be able to attend a car show. It sounds crazy but there was a good reason for that. Let's hit it...
Ordered a 2015 Mustang GT - April 21, 2014
I ordered a 2015 Mustang GT in late April. I ran over to Five Star Ford of Plano and met with Corey White on April 21st to pick the options on our 2015 5.0L 6-speed Performance Pack GT, to get first in line at this dealership... before they even knew prices on anything. "Real" ordering started on May 20th, but they had options listed as of that April day, without prices or many stats, so we made some educated guesses and got our order staged in line FIRST! As you can see from the screen shot, there are some extra options we added to the Performance Pack, which include: leather Recaros, touch screen NAV, and the 401A interior package/equipment group.
There's one reason why we got the car a little more loaded than you'd think for a "Race Car" - resale value. As long as it took to sell the base model 2013 GT we picked up, and in case the rumored GT350 voodoo engined car comes out within the next 12 months, we want to keep this 2015 as sell-able as possible. We have no idea when we'll see this 2015 GT - it could be late July to as late as the end of August. I will post up here the MOMENT it arrives, and quickly start a new S550 build thread. Our initial development plans include wheel and tire fitment, immediate camber plate development, weighing and track testing. We want to test it against a stock 2012-13 Boss 302 at a local road course (ECR) within days of arrival.
NASA at TWS April 26-27, 2014
The rear uprights was the last project Ryan Begham worked on - sad to see him leave us but we wish him the best of luck in school!
Once we had the new AJ Hartman wing installed the next big test for the 2011 Mustang was NASA at Texas World Speedway at the end of April. Since Amy and I both knew this track fairly well we didn't go ahead and sign up for the Friday Test-N-Tune event. With a competitive car that has recent changes you would normally do that, but NASA Texas had an 8 hour enduro event scheduled for 2-10 pm on Friday, so we would have had to arrive very early to get any testing in. Driving from Dallas towing our rig takes over 3 hours, so we'd have to leave by at least 7 am to get any testing in... and Amy didn't want to burn a day off of work (she works 2 jobs: her normal day job and also at night, here at Vorshlag) so we blew off the test day. Our replacement front 18x12" wheel also still hadn't arrived, so we only had one full set of race wheels. We mounted up a set of new sticker A6 tires (winnings from the last NASA event, thankfully, as these are $1710 per set!) and hauled down to College Station.
With the decals still wet and backing paper drying I drove to the local Shell to fill up the tank with 93 octane. #becausestreetcar
Getting the car ready on Friday was actually pretty tricky, as we were still finishing the wing install until around 6pm. Amy, Jason and I were also having a bit of trouble with some new material purchased to use in our vinyl cutter, but we got the old TT3 number boards re-created and installed. Ended up leaving the Optima door decals on, after removing them (carefully) and moving them back about 4 inches to make room. Some Hoosier decals, NASA decals, and the car went onto the trailer and we were rolling out by around 7:15 pm. Then we stopped at a Sam's Club to get drinks, snacks and ice for the weekend which put us on the road by 7:45 pm. We got to Costas' place by 10:45 pm and stayed up late talking about work, racing and stuff for another hour and a half. Late night!
Vorshlag TWS Photo and Video Gallery:
http://vorshlag.smugmug.com/Racing-E...SA-TWS-042614/
Note: with no Vorshlag crew, and no Brandon here to shoot his amazing pictures, and Amy feeling under the weather, we didn't get a lot of great shots from this event. Luckily Anna and Paul Costas shot a lot of pics and I used a number of their images in this event write-up. Matt Ruiter (a local TAMSCC racer) also took some great shots, which I have used with his permission as well.
My favorite shot of our car all weekend was this one taken in our paddock by Matt Ruiter.... Full rez version in our TWS event gallery
We got out to the track EARLY Saturday morning and dropped the trailer next to Costas and Matt White's trailers, who got a great paddock spot next to grid days earlier. Unloaded the car, topped off fuel, and got the sticker backing off, and went to a very brief TT driver's meeting where I handed our our TT maps.
Our paddock housed: our Mustang, Costas' GT1, Matt's ST1 Mustang, Misty's ST2 Camaro, Adam's E36, Toth in a Supra, and Norm's TTD BRZ
Amy and I decided that I would drive in the first TT session, which on Saturday is always a TT Practice that doesn't count towards anything except grid placement. But
that still makes it pretty important, as gridding poorly only makes it harder to get a clean lap all day. You have to earn your place up the grid, and getting stuck behind slower cars can ruin your best TT laps. If you do poorly in Practice Saturday you often spend most of the remaining 3 sessions "working your way up the grid". As driver's get faster the grid placement shuffles, hopefully to keep faster drivers always ahead of slower drivers for the first few hot laps.
This first Practice TT session was super packed, with
61 cars on grid. Yes, not only did we have a record number of TT drivers but we also had all of the Competition school students joining us. TWS is only 2.9 miles so you can imagine that with 61 cars out there at once it was going to get crowded. NASA TT driver and instructor Jason Toth rode shotgun with me in the TT Practice, to see the driving line on this configuration before he hopped in with his students and in his TT ride later that day.
Getting ready for that first session, Costas took off these Goodyears and ran his this weekend on Hoosier slicks
See, we can take students or others with us in TT, but if we set our fastest lap of the day with a passenger our times will be automatically DSQ'd. They actually encourage some TT drivers to take HPDE students along if we are instructing that day but we only told to drive no faster than about "8/10ths", for safety reasons. Since this was just a TT Practice it wouldn't hurt, and I knew it would be slow, so Jason rode along. We got to grid pretty early and luckily started out in 5th place. There were two TT1 Corvettes and two Vipers ahead of us, and a
whole bunch of cars behind us.
We had quite a variety of cars in the first TT practice session, with the Comp School thrown in the mix!
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