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nearly
sucked the headlights right out of the little Europa. That car had
some serious power and acceleration! A pretty cool piece of machinery,
and both the F40 and the F50 were simply a delight to hear.
On a personal
note, the Toyo Proxes tires I got for the Europa last year were working
very well indeed. The break away has been progressive and smooth,
and I simply can't complain about the grip - they really are a good tire
for that car. But, after putting a pyrometer to the tires, it's clear
that the Europa needs negative camber all the way around. And as
you can see from the newsletter, I have until October to get it done.
Since I had
no way to add camber at the track, I tried to solve some of my more immediate
understeer problems by fooling with tire pressures. I dropped the
pressure in the front tires 2 psi, and raised the rears by 3psi.
That added enough bite to the front, and reduced enough from the rear to
give me better balance. It really made a big improvement to the way the
car handled in the slow corners and I could make it through turn
14 without scrubbing off too much speed. The better balance clearly
paid-off as I was able to get the edge on the 911's through the turns this
time. This gets back to my earlier point of it being nice having
a variety of cars to compare to. I still give up quite a bit to them
on the horsepower side, but now I'm equal, and in some cases, ahead of
them in the turns. I think when the camber gets set correctly, the
little black Europa will be dispensing with the 911s fairly well, but then
there are those damn M3s! Another impressive car, especially when you consider
that they're
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Last
month I wrote about the great time we had on John Zender's rallye and this
month I'm here to tell you that most of you really lost out on another
opportunity to have great fun. I'm speaking of the track day that
the GGLC hosted on July 10. Yeah, yeah, I know that most of you are
saying that you couldn't make it because it was on a weekday. Okay,
I'll cut you a little slack on this one, but only a little since I firmly
believe that these track days could be the most therapeutic thing a car-person
could do for themselves! I can't emphasize enough that you really
should look at in a different way, you would call in sick for one day at
the drop of a hat if you weren't feeling well, wouldn't you? Don't
look at as playing hooky from work, look at instead as preventive health
care because you are not only going to be healthier in the mind from having
such a great time, but you'll also get a physical workout as well!
Okay, enough
about that, let me tell |
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about the day we had and then that might be enough to convince you to attend
the next one. We had approximately 34 cars show up and I'm sad to
report that Lotuses were sadly lacking in attendance. Roughly speaking,
we probably had 7 Lotuses, 10 Porsches, 6 BMWs, 2 Ferraris, 1 Cobra, 1
Eagle, 1 Alfa, 2 Miatas, and a few other assorted cars. But we did
have a nice array of cars that were fun to dice with, and in some cases,
some that were nice to get blown away by. Some of you may remember
that at our second track day at Thunderhill last September, we invited/allowed
a few Porsche club guys, and other assorted makes to fill in some spots.
That turned out to be a blessing in disguise because we've gained some
really friendly guys and a variety of cars. At that event, we had
some Viper club people show up to spice things up a little. Well, this
time we had a Ferrari F40, an F50, and to our pleasant surprise, a Lotus
Exige! I don't know about you, but that little car gets my juices
flowing and it was nice to have it out on the track. Unfortunately,
I was never out on the track at the same time to see how it performed,
but I was out with the F40 for one session. I thought getting passed
by a 500hp Viper was impressive until the F40 passed me! As I've
told a few club members already, I didn't see anyone behind from turn 3
through turn 6. But by the time I was exiting turn 6, all I saw in
my mirror was red! I flagged him by and he |
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