Hi All,
Last weekend I participated in an SCCA "National Tour" event in Ayer, MA.
The event was a two-day autocross preceeded by a driver school. As I had
driven my "other" car in an AutoX school a couple years back, and as I
had promised myself to try one in the TR6, this event was a must do.
This event was also part of the New England Region SCCA points series, so
my friend Bob Totten was there with his '64 LeMans replica Sptifire. Bob
runs on the D Mod SCCA category. More on that later.
Anyone that keeps track of these things knows that I still haven't dialed
in my Webers, but I'm a lot closer. In fact this story ends with Weber
news. But the bottom line is that the car ran pretty well but not perfectly.
The fact that I wasn't running well was compounded by the fact that this
driver was not driving well. In short, I came in 14th of 14 cars in the
DSP field. Not a performance to write home about, but I had fun and
that's what matters.
I learned some stuff in the school, and I highly recommend these shools
to anyone that has an interest in improving your AutoX times. How often
do you get to be critiqued by nationally competitive autocrossers? Even
if they tell you get a Neon...
At any rate, I'll take full blame for my crappy performance. To give you
an idea of how bad I did, my total time was slower than 1st place by over
25 seconds. I'll admit that the second place DSP car was slower than 1st
by over 10 seconds, and the next 5 or so finishers were pretty close
together all within a second or so, so my performance was not that miserable.
At any rate, Bob and I pitted together, and our cars got a lot of
attention. However, the comments that folks made were sort of
interesting. Instead of folks saying "Bob(s), these cars are pretty
slow.", they were saying "You guys looked great out there." Preumably the
unsaid part being "for such slow cars". But they were pretty positive
about the "look".
What more could you ask for?
Bob's Spitfire was also running against some pretty serious competition
in D Mod. Chris Bernard was there with his Toyota Twin-cam powered
Caterham Lotus 7. Wow, is that sucker fast! 200 HP and 1100 pounds. It's
a rocket-ship fer sher!
As for my Webers, when I got home from the weekend, I found an envelope
with my mail. The contents: 6 F9/50 idle jets. Even before making my
dinner, I ran out to the garage and installed them.
They work great! The car starts right up and idles smooth and pulls in
all gears from 1000 RPM's. Way cool.
So, if you see my Carmine Red '74 TR6 at an upcoming Autocross event,
look out! I usually run as 40 DSP.
SCCA Nationals here we come!
bye,
rml
p.s. I will not be able to attend the Ft. Worth VTR event due to a number
of reasons. So, looks like someone else will get to win the Mod 4
category this year. Look out next year, though. I will be dialed in then,
and my car is def. better than it was at Albany!!!
Unless I win the lottery, of course.
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