NASA Championships Day 2 Sep 14, 2007
Day two at the NASA Championships saw the first real competition of the weekend, with each group running a morning warm-up, a standard qualifying session and then the first of two qualifying races for Sunday’s championship race.
Project Spec E30 was mostly behaved during warm-up, but we were still on the pokey end of the field. The time had come to run some shaved Toyos, so our friends at Vilven Tire mounted up a set of new minimal tread-depth Toyo Proxes RA-1s before the qualifying session. We dropped 2.5 seconds from our personal best lap in the next session, so the shaved tires really do make a huge difference.
We also had a weird noise and vibration at the end of the session, so we put the car up and poked around. It didn’t take long to discover that one of the rear wheels was only barely holding on as the wheel hub splines were backing out of their threads. We re-torqued all the splines and had no issues during a caution-filled race, where we finished about 13th in class.
A few drops of rain hit the windshield in the race, but nothing more; tomorrow should be clear and cooler, great weather for racing. If you’re in the vicinity, Sunday should offer quite a show, as several classes are already showing heated competition. The massive Spec Miata field will be vying for the nearly $10,000 that’s slated to go to the winner, so we’re gonna grab some popcorn and a seat for that one.
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