Ready for Nationals!

Got a little behind on the posts due to real work getting in the way, so this post will be covering 2 events! With just a few short weeks to Nationals, we’re packing in as much as we can in order to get the car sorted out and try to catch up on seat time!

First up was a Houston Regional autocross at The Houston Police Academy. It’s not our favorite site as course variety is pretty low, but we needed seat time so we made it anyways!

Alan, Donna, and Jackson Bartling were also in attendance.

Both Alan and Donna made very quick runs. It was great to see them running on pace once again!

Gene and Barbara Beaird were also there in their LS1 powered 3rd Gen Firebird. They put in some quick runs too while still sorting out a few setup issues.

Todd and I ran in X-Class instead of CP, so we were in the last heat of the day. The course was fun, though not very typical of a Nationals style course. Huge thanks to my Dad for taking some great pictures of Todd and I while we were running!

The car was really hooked up! With our softer setup we scraped the bellhousing in a few spots on course. We’ll be addressing this before Nationals with a “skid bar” that we’re going to install under the subframe.

Todd and I had a good battle. We had passengers on a lot of the runs which made it a lot of fun! This was my fastest run, good enough for 3rd overall PAX!

Todd’s fastest run was good enough to put him in 1st place for PAX! Check out the full results list here: PAX

This last weekend we had a practice event in College Station. This was our last chance to get the car dialed in before Nationals.

Other than some shock setting tweaks and Alan helping out with our carburetor, we called this one good to go and focused on just making runs!

The practice course wasn’t too bad. Vivek was the designer and while a little long a practice, it was at least more representative of a real autocross course than what we had been running on earlier in the year. I struggled most of the day with being too late on elements and driving straight at things instead of making an arc. This is really visible in the bumper cam footage from my run vs Todd’s.

The bumper cam shows all your sins… This was my 1st run on the course without having walked it, not my best work, but that’s to be expected on cold tires and no knowledge of where the course goes. Need to try and work out why the focus is off on our ReplayXD, but I love the camera angle!