June Autocross Report

I'm not sure if the Michelin Man is related to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the M&Ms, or Casper the Friendly Ghost. You never see them all together, that's for sure!

On June 8th NMS-North returned to autocross action at our favorite South Carolina location, the Michelin Proving Grounds. Mostly I just like mentioning 14 ACRES OF TOTALLY FLAT GREAT CONDITION A1 PRIME TOP RANKED ASPHALT! 

NMS #4 at Michelin. Plenty of pavement for autocross. Wait a minute, here comes the rain!

With 42 drivers entered and a mix of Porsches and non-Porsches, the weather man said that it would be on the warm side and with a chance of rain! See, the good thing about driving events in South Carolina is that you KNOW it will be hot. Compared to driving in Iraq, I can imagine it's even HOTTER and NO CHANCE OF RAIN most of the year. At least that was my experience in over a year in Iraq, but then again I wasn't there to drive cars! As it turned out, it rained when we were going to start, but it didn't last too long, we delayed the start a bit, and then we started our 10 runs for the day. 

A big thumbs up for hitting cones today!

The day followed the normal pattern, two driving sessions, and two work sessions during the day. Typically the Porsche Club manages 5 runs in the mornings, and then a lunch break and 5 more runs in the afternoon. This format works pretty well, and keeps you either driving or working during every session all day. Some other clubs with a lot more competitors may run just 4 sessions all day, where you only drive once and then work once, with two more sessions where you don't have to do anything. For what it's worth, that's one way to do it, but the last event like that I did had me drive in the 2nd session and work the 4th session, which seemed weird since I was there all day and had a lot of down time. Oh well, I've seen a lot of ways to run events, and since I'm not in charge, who am I to complain!

Here's the run group with almost all Porsches. Row 1. 
3rd car back is a Honda Civic R. 

Porsches Row 2 in grid. Order is just random, go line up somewhere!

Instead of talking about my fastest driving, let's take a look at my SLOWEST run! This is a great example of what NOT to do, because in at least 3 spots of this video I approached a corner too fast. In the first one I braked too late and sailed past an apex, and kept going. The 2nd one is about 24 seconds in, and I brake too late and go into a cone (which adds a time penalty, so this run already won't be any good.) Then at the end of a long slalom, about 37 seconds into the video, I try to super-hero my way out of the slalom without slowing, and sure enough the car spins to the left and I slide into I don't know how many cones. After stopping (tick, tick, tick the clock keeps going) I cut out a part of the course and finished the run for practice. 

TOO FAST VIDEO!

That run was a Did Not Finish, so no time given. That's a good thing, because just the cone penalties would have made it very slow. Add on the stopping time, and it was maybe the slowest "run" of the day out of all the drivers. Oh well, let's chalk that one run down to experience gained that didn't cost much!

NMS #4 heads off row 3. 

I finished all my other runs, hit another cone or two, probably won my class, but we're still waiting on official results. I had fun and will go back and do it again! Thanks for reading! 

Porsches Row 4. 

Road Trip!

A road trip is all about what you do when you get there!

Like eating BBQ at Rays in Grayling Michigan!

School is out, I'm still retired, so we hit the road!

We drove a lot of miles from home in South Carolina to visit relatives in Michigan, then down to Cincinnati for a family graduation (and some Reds baseball!), and then back home. All in all, we had no car issues, and the 2023 Honda Accord Hybrid cranked out the miles and still got over 40mpg over hill and dale!

Along the way we drove over this cool covered bridge in Ohio. 

Sure, we had to buy gas. $3.99 in Michigan for regular. 

Trip wise, we enjoyed seeing lots of family, enjoyed some great food (yes, Skyline Chili on two occasions) and had fun seeing plenty of countryside. Oh, the baseball game included the Reds winning over the Guardians in the Battle for Ohio. One of my theories that no matter how many ball games you've seen, you generally see something new at each one. In this case, we saw two different runners get picked off of 2nd base, one for each team. This might be one of the rarest plays in baseball, I really don't know for sure, but to have it happen twice was crazy. Base running mistakes like this seem pretty dang embarrassing for professionals, but I guess it happens. 

Along the way we visited two different Buc-ee's stores, so that was crazy too. Nothing like 120 gas pumps and a ridiculous number of snacks and etc. in the store. We probably don't need to go back anytime soon. 

Pictures or it didn't happen. I think this is the one east of Knoxville on I-40. Earlier the same day we visited a Buc-ee's in Kentucky on I-77. 

Without boring you to death with the actual driving details, let's just say that there's still a lot of drivers out there that get a grade of "Needs Improvement" from me. Here's a few tips: 

Julie and I with our nephew Joel Nixon. 2LT Nixon is the one in the middle. 

1: OK, cool, you have a newer car with Daytime Running Lights. Yippee for you! Did you know that a lot of these systems ONLY run the front headlights? What I'm getting at is that as you're driving around with your DRL's on, if it's getting dark, or if it's night, or if you go into a tunnel like in West Virginia or North Carolina, or if it's raining cats and dogs, I CAN'T SEE YOU FROM BEHIND BECAUSE YOUR TAILLIGHTS ARE NOT ON! Please turn your lights on. 

Reds baseball behind 1st base. The Reds defeated the Guardians. 

2: Didja know that your car has turn signals? Didja know that you could use them to indicate a FUTURE lane change?  Based on my analysis of this issue, using your turn signals will COMMUNICATE to other drivers what you're about to do, and makes us all safer! Use your turn signals every time. 

Here we're entering the fun part of I-40 between Knoxville and Asheville NC. This was our first time since the hurricane last fall sent chunks of the Interstate into the Pigeon river and closed the road for months. Currently this stretch of I-40 is open, with one lane in each direction. It's a huge reconstruction job going on that will last a while. 

3: From my ancient driver's education training in high school (and yeah that was a LONG time ago, in the last century!) you should LOOK OUT FOR THE OTHER GUY! This lesson comes to mind thanks to a clueless SUV driver on the Interstate that jumped into my lane really close in front of me just in time for them to BRAKE HARD to avoid hitting the huge semi truck directly in front of me. I'm not sure what this person was doing, but it appeared that my existence and the existence of the 18-wheeler was unknown to them. Look out for the other guy. 

When in Asheville NC, we recommend the Sierra Nevada brewing company taproom. Great food, and as you might imagine, all their beers are nice, but don't drink and drive. 

I'd like to think that someday everyone will be a good driver on the road, so let's just shoot for these top 3 tips. Have a great day, let's be careful out there, and LOOK OUT FOR THE OTHER GUY!

Nissan 350Z Racecar Update

Brembo brake caliper from the 350Z, ready to rebuild. 

Recently the NMS 350Z (the real race car one, not the one that was just sold, or the other one in the driveway at NMS-South, let's keep this organized!) headed up to Virginia International Raceway for Gridlife. Following a lot of work to prepare for going on track, things were going GREAT! I mean REALLY GREAT...right up to the point of finding some problems and having things not going so great! We have to report that there was a problem with an oil temperature sensor that resulted in a leak that made the car undriveable. While that was unfortunate, Brian was still able to hang out and see a lot of cool drifting, cars, and get on track as an instructor with several students. 

(The photos today will show some later work we started on rebuilding the Brembo brakes, so that's kind of a 2nd blog post inside the written blog post. Hey, you're getting 2 for 1 today! At the same price!)

As you might guess, these brakes are what master mechanics call "used."

His students included a first time track driver in a Honda Civic R, and a 13 year old driver in a Miata! If anyone is worried about the future of motorsports, I'd say this is a great example of new people coming into the sport, even if it's just for 20 minutes on a real track with an instructor. This also answers the question, "Do I need a driver's license to drive on a closed race track?" Even for Max Verstappen in Formula 1, the answer was "no" since he was racing at that level before he got is official road license in the Netherlands. 

Here's the two front brake calipers, also "used." These are much larger, and each has two pistons. 

Brian reports that VIR remains an awesome track, and believe it or not I recently read something from Jeremy Clarkson (Top Gear, Clarkson's Farm, The Grand Tour, etc) that listed VIR as one of his favorite tracks. That's not bad coming from a guy that's probably driven just about every kind of car on just about every kind of road and track on the planet. 

The two pins hold the pads in place, and each pin has its own cotter pin. 

Anyway... on a related note...  in other news... and now for something completely different... as scientists say...

Just to really get into this brake job of replacing the seals, we even took apart each caliper. 
Here's one half, you can see the round plastic housing where the pistons live. 

Over in Alabama they've got a track called Barber Motorsports Park, and NMS will be there in July for some track driving. NMS-South lists it as a great place to visit and drive, and since NMS-North has never been there, LET'S GO! You can read all about it at their homepage: BARBER MOTORSPORTS PARK AND MUSEUM

Here are the pistons from the rear brakes. We removed the outer and inner seals on these, and then have to put the new ones on. Once you're taken it apart this far, the seals are easy.  

Besides the track, Barber is the home to maybe the largest motorcycle museum in the country, so we're booking a little extra time there to check out the museum too. Oh, and the Indy Car drivers race there too, so it's a nice track. The Guinness Book of World Records lists their museum as THE LARGEST MOTORCYCLE MUSEUM IN THE WORLD! Shoot, I bet it's the biggest one in the SOLAR SYSTEM TOO! That tiny motorcycle museum on Mars is not worth the visit!

This piston has a new seal on. We learned that the front and rear calipers used three different sizes of inner seals on this set of Brembo brakes. Don't be confused; Brembo is the automotive brake company, and Bimbo is the snack food company!