Matthew Braun teaches me the difference between fast and quick
At a May Northwest Ohio Region (NWOR) SCCA autocross, I managed to pick up another driver for the Miata: National Champion Matthew Braun. He messaged Josh and I out of the blue, asking if he could drive my STR car at a local event, as he was planning on running STR nationally as a codriver. Well, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put someone really fast in my car, so of course Matthew got a seat in my car. Josh and I ran the STR class, while Matthew ran the local “Pro” index class.
Matthew would end up driving my car a couple more times, one weekend with Josh at a local Toledo event while I was away in China, and once with me for the Peru Match Tour, and event that Josh couldn’t attend due to a conflict.
It’s one thing to watch someone do very well in your car and show you what your car is capable of, but it’s another thing for you to experience firsthand what the difference can be, and though I suspect he didn’t mean to do it, Matthew did just that at the Peru Match Tour.
The Peru Match Tour took place dead smack in the middle of summer, right after the Toledo Pro Solo. For this event, I flashed the car back to the latest Moto-East EcuTek tune, giving up the ability to do aggressive launches (which isn’t as critical a problem on non-Pro Solo events) in order to gain a little bit of speed at the top of second gear.
The STR class, as a whole, didn’t really put on a good showing on Saturday. We got raw-timed by STX, which is a class that is supposed to be slower than ours. Because of that, none of us, not even Matthew, managed to get into the Super Shootout on Sunday. We’d have to go through qualifying runs on Sunday morning for a chance at the Club Shootout in the afternoon.
On Saturday evening, I was debating as to whether I wanted to join Kenneth Tsang and Allen Chen in an exciting evening of data analysis back at the hotel, or tagging along with Matthew Braun for an exciting evening of data analysis at the Olive Garden. I decided to choose the slightly more exciting option of joining Matthew and what turned out to a small group of damn good drivers, including Sam Strano, the man whom I described simply as “a fast guy with a fast F-Stock Ford Mustang” four years ago. (Well, I didn’t know any better back then…) Suffice to say, in this group of esteemed drivers for which I was clearly an imposter, much discussion ensued about driving lines and handling quirks, from which I took in far more than I ever gave out.
With my newfound knowledge, it was time to put it to work on Sunday morning. I managed to survive all of the qualifier runs into the Club Shootout, as did Matthew. At the instruction of Matthew, and with the benefit of having now seen the course many, many times, I was charging much harder through the course than I did on Saturday. As it would happen, I was consistently tapping cones on all of my Challenge runs, fortunately not moving cones enough to incur penalties — or when I did incur a penalty, I was lucky enough that the person I was matched with in the bracket also tagged a cone.
Matthew puts in a flyer of a run that should have been The Run he put in the day before, but now, in the Challenge, the pressure was on him to match that fast run on every bracketed match thereafter. (The Challenges are bracketed matches based on dial-in times, and your dial-in time is based on your fastest run up to that point. Going faster than your dial-in time is called “breaking out,” and resets your dial-in to your fastest run. So unless your opponent also breaks out, it’s more advantageous to be consistent in the Challenge than it is to break out.) He knew that he couldn’t match that run, so he was patiently waiting for someone more consistent to knock him out of the Challenge. He’d make it all the way to the finals, though…
Myself, I was having a blast. Sam Strano was hanging around our grid spot giving Matthew endless amounts of good-natured shit, and doled out plenty of wisdom and encouragement for me as the Challenges progressed. After adopting his advice on driving the Miata as if it were three inches wider than it really was to avoid tagging cones, I came back from a run and Sam said to me, “for that section of the course, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between your driving and Braun’s.” Hopefully, someday that will expand to all of the course and not just one section of it, but it’s a start.
I made it all the way to the semifinals, where I’d be squared off against Kenneth Tsang. Asian vs. Asian, Detroit Region vs. Detroit Region, Mazda vs. Mazda. I was staged right behind Ken at the start line when I watched him take off for his run. He managed to completely screw the pooch on launch, going into the marbles and wide on the first corner of the course, before he even got to the timing lights.
Matthew was standing next to me, and also saw what happened. He told me, “Hey look. Ken’s screwed up. Now all you have to do is not hit cones and you’ve got him.”
At that instant, something switched inside my head. I took Matthew’s words to mean, “I can take it easy now.” I left the start line and made my way through the course, making absolute sure that I didn’t come anywhere close to a cone.
Ken finished his run half a second off his dial-in time. I came in a full second off mine.
I will never forget the confusion in the announcer’s voice as I came through the finish line. The run looked clean and tidy, so how the hell could it have been so slow? Even Ken came by after my run concerned that something had happened to me or the car.
I’m pretty sure Matthew knew what happened. He apologized to me, but I brushed it off. In hindsight, it’s obvious that he meant “drive clean, but still drive hard,” but I was an idiot. And to be honest, while it was tough to swallow the fact that I pretty much let Ken walk away with the win in that matchup, it was a valuable lesson learned for myself: the difference between driving hard and on the edge, and the comfort zone I’d been driving in for years. Hard to dispute the difference on the timer when both examples of driving are of yourself.
So Ken moved on to the final of the Club Challenge, matching up with Matthew. Matthew, still unable to match his flyer of a time from earlier in the day, conceded the victory to Ken, who was consistent throughout the Club Challenge with the exception of his match against me…
The road to Nationals, Part Two
The last two National events that I would end up running before Nationals were the Wilmington Pro Solo and the Wilmington Champ Tour. Josh would be my codriver for these two events, and Matthew would stay on in STR, codriving Honda S2000’s for the remainder of the year.
I received a new tune from Mike at Moto-East after he inspected the datalogged launches I did at the Oscoda Test and Tune. He still wasn’t exactly sure what was causing my bogging issue, but he turned down the launch control, whatever that means, on the tune. I was cautiously optimistic that this would be the solution to our launch bogging problems, as it really sucks having to choose between being able to do a good Pro Solo launch and having a higher top speed in second gear.
We flashed the modified tune into the car for the Wilmington Pro Solo. After morning runs, the bogging issue still persisted. Fuck. Even better, Tim Viars was now also experiencing the issue himself, having moved from an old tune to a new EcuTek one. Interestingly, he was using Dynotronics and not Moto-East for his tune, which suggested that the bogging issue that Josh and I had was not a problem with Moto-East, but one that was systematic across all EcuTek tunes, at least for NC1s and NC2s.
Josh suggested that we ask Mike at Moto-East to completely remove launch control from the EcuTek RaceRom. So while Josh flashed the car back to the stock tune, I was in contact with Mike, asking for the exact same tune but without all the fancy RaceRom launch control stuff. Thanks to Mike’s awesome support, we got back a new tune file without launch control at the end of lunch, but we played it safe and ran the afternoon session with the stock tune; it became another case of us deeply missing the raised rev limiter.
At least we could change the tune on our car. Tim only had one tune, and that was the tune on his ECU. His previous tune was done with a now out-of-production flash, and could not easily be translated into an EcuTek tune file.
On Sunday morning, we flashed the new tune into the car, and HALLELUJAH there were no bogging issues upon launch! I could now do burnouts as I wished and we could hit 62mph in second gear. I told Tim about our findings and suggested that he take the launch control off his EcuTek RaceRom and see if that helped. I also emailed Mark Dudek and told him the same thing.
Data analysis after the event showed that the tune was also helping us power out of the corners, to the tune of a 10% gain in corner exit speed compared to the stock tune. This was good news, as it meant we were actually seeing the effect of an increase in power, something that we weren’t sure of before as we hadn’t dyno’d the latest EcuTek tune that was sent us.
Now, I just had to drive the car. And drive the car, I didn’t do well. I placed 12th out of 23 drivers, with Josh coming in 18th. Matthew Braun finished at the top of the class, though there was no Nick Barbato present at this event.
Finally, there was the Wilmington Champ Tour, taking place the weekend after the Pro Solo. With the car running as it should, the only excuses possible for a poor showing would fall directly on the driver. Saturday runs were plagued by rain, right in the middle of our heat. Still, everyone had at least one dry run, and it was obvious from the start that that run would be the run that would count for the day — and of course, I coned it away. The following runs were in the wet, run after a slight rain delay as the course got pounded with heavy rain.
I did quite a bit of drifting around the course on my wet second run. At that point, I didn’t care too much about my time, and had a blast going sideways through most of the course. Unfortunately, as I came towards the finish, I managed to wipe out the first cone of the finish slalom, knocking it out a ways away from the course. The corner workers put the cone back, but in the wrong spot; several of the drivers following immediately after me got caught out by that until Josh stopped on his run, pointed out the misplaced cone, and got a rerun. Whoops, sorry guys…
Sunday, I didn’t do much better. I was still significantly off pace from the leaders in the class. I wound up 12th out of 17 cars, thanks to my coned first run, while Josh managed to place 8th in class. If I hadn’t coned away my Saturday dry run, I’d be right there with Josh in the final standings. Nick Barbato, having put down a flyer of a clean run on Saturday (to the tune of a 1.5 second lead on the first day!), easily held on to the top spot on Sunday to take the win.
The 2014 Pro Finale and Nationals
After taking a dance break traveling back down to Cincinnati with three friends for the Cincy Lindy Exchange, I had two weeks and one shake-down event at Toledo to get the Miata ready for the Pro Finale and Nationals.
I had a frustrating two days with the car on an alignment rack that was either a) not calibrated correctly at all, or b) simply not working right, I had a set of untrustworthy numbers on a paper printout that supposedly indicated that the alignment was good to go. Still, after driving the car at Toledo, the car seemed fine enough, so I didn’t bother making any more changes to the alignment. I packed my tire trailer with my autocross tires, tools, and a bicycle, and mounted my new street tires on Mustang Bullitt wheels on the car, because worn 245 width tires don’t make a 2500 lb Miata happy in heavy rains.
I had originally signed up for the Pro Finale and Nationals as a single driver car, as Josh didn’t have any vacation days to devote to going to Lincoln, and I generally have no friends who would jump on a last-minute codrive offer. The Thursday before Nationals, however, I got a Facebook message from Chris Lin, a fellow STR competitor that I barely knew. His STR Toyota MR2 Spyder was having fueling issues, and he was looking for a ride for the Pro Finale and Nationals; was I willing to let him codrive my car?
Of course the answer is going to be yes. I never pass up the opportunity to have a fast driver in my car, and the fact that Chris had trophied in STR at a previous Nationals driving a 6-speed Miata was damn fine endorsement.
My trip to Lincoln began with my departure from the parking lot at work, packed tire trailer already in tow. (I did stop by Southeast Michigan to take a look at a Model A on my way out west, because I have the weirdest priorities.) I continued traveling until I hit the Quad Cities in Iowa, staying for the night before heading out again on Friday morning to travel the remaining six hours until Lincoln.
I parked my car in the Central Illinois and St. Louis Region part of the paddock, where I was parked next to Clark Walker, longtime STR competitor with a black BMW Z3 from my original car club, CCSCC. As soon as I parked the car, I was joined by Chris, who had driven himself all the way from the East Coast to Lincoln in his own car, and we set about swapping the tires on the Miata and switching the exhaust from the relatively heavy aftermarket dual exhaust to the super buzzy and annoying-as-hell-on-the-street single outlet race exhaust.
Since Clark and I were seemingly alone in the paddock row, over the course of the weekend, we really didn’t spend any time there. I spent most of my time hanging out with the DC Region STR folks in their paddock area, or hanging out with the Detroit Region folks at the fabulously low-key and slightly redneck RV and trailer park (replete with old, decrepit RVs, Mustangs on jack stands, a super classy pool-on-a-trailer, and the occasional beat up Neon).
In order to register for the Pro Finale, you either have to a) have enough points won from previous Pro Solos to automatically qualify, or b) attended at least three events. Because I suck, I got in through Option B — sheer number of events attended rather than being awarded points for any sort of driving prowess.
Saturday morning rolls around, and the with it, the start of the Pro Finale. Chris is the first driver out in the Miata, taking the number 90 while I took the number 190. The car was set up to be slightly pushy, I warned.
Chris takes his very first run, and when he comes back to the staging area, complains that the car is very loose and very twitchy. How could that be? “Where is it loose?” I asked. “Corner entry? Corner exit?” Chris’ answer was simply: everywhere.
Then it was my turn to take the car out. I tried to flat foot it through the first shallow corner of the course, and get very sideways in the process. Holy shit, Chris was right. How was it possible that a car that felt pretty much right on the money at Toledo could be so damn loose here at Lincoln?
Suffice to say, Chris and I had to ease the car around the Pro Solo courses on Saturday morning.
While I was up in the staging area with my tire pressure gauge adjusting Chris’ tire pressures in between runs, I watched some of the other STR cars take off from the lights and navigate the course. I was watching Shane Chinonn, driving James Dunham’s 6-speed Miata, bog on launch, with the audible telltale sudden drop in rpms that I was so intimately familiar with. I went up to James and asked him if he’d just recently reflashed the ECU. Yes, he had, to an EcuTek flash. Oh, fuck.
Shane, naturally, wasn’t happy with the car, though because he’s a damn good driver, he still managed to put in more-than-respectable run times, despite the terrible launches and 60 foot times. I advised him to try the Josh-style of launching the car, which involves a lot of slipping the clutch on launch, in an attempt to blunt the flawed ignition cut that the EcuTek launch control does for some reason. It helped, some. But that wouldn’t be a good solution for someone who is in contention for capturing a Pro Solo championship.
Fortunately for James and Shane, I had my laptop and EcuTek cable with me in grid — standard operating procedure for someone who has had to flash his own ECU more times than he cares to remember while in grid. I told James that I was willing to bet good money that their bogging issue was caused by the same thing as mine, and recommended that he call Dynotronics and request a version of the tune without the launch control in RaceRom. If they could get a new tune file, they could use my EcuTek cable and my laptop to reflash their ECU.
After sending Dynotronics the ECU and EcuTek hardware information via email during the lunch break, we received a new tune file just before the start of afternoon runs. James’ Miata was already in grid, as another driver, Heidi Ellision, was slated to drive the car in the Ladies’ class, when I loaded the new tune file into the car. I felt like the dude uploading the virus into the alien mothership in the movie Independence Day, finishing the ECU flast with barely a minute left to go on the clock before the cars moved to stage.
While James tells anyone who asks that it was I who saved his bacon at Lincoln, he was also the one who saved my bacon in helping me get the alignment of the car back in the right ballpark. During the lunch break, he helped me dial in more rear camber on the car, an adjustment that I now knew from experience (the benefit of testing one’s car and knowing what does what) would tighten up the car.
We had good results from our lunch break thrashes. James’ car no longer bogged on launches. My car was no longer super loose. Shane and James, and Chris and I all got good times in for our afternoon runs. It would later turn out that those afternoon runs would be the times that we’d have to stand on the Pro Finale.
Once the Saturday afternoon runs were over, James and I took his car out for a little bit of datalogging, returning to the paddock to upload the datalogs to Dynotronics so they could fine tune the EcuTek files. The next morning, we’d end up getting a new tune file to flash into the car, which adjusted the base tune to provide more power — power that Shane and James couldn’t use because…
It rained on Sunday for STR’s final set of runs. I got to practice doing wet launches, and practice hitting lots of cones and doing some pirouettes here and there. Yeah, Sunday was not a productive day for me.
Chris finished the Pro Finale 14th out of 21 cars, while I finished in 18th. Yeah, I didn’t do so well. I didn’t get into the Super Challenge.
After the Pro Finale, James spent some time on my car again, as we checked the camber once more and adjusted the rear toe. Like I said, he was a lifesaver. I’ve done alignments before, but they’ve always been on lifts with the assistance of a computerized alignment rack — I’ve never done an alignment in the paddock before.
Monday was an off day, reserved for goofing off in addition to the usual tasks of registration and check-in for Nationals. Slowly but surely, more cars started arriving in the paddock, starting on Sunday and continuing throughout the day on Monday. I spent most of my time hanging out with Kenneth Tsang and Allen Chen, who had arrived in town the night before and were splitting a hotel room with me, but I also hung out with the DC Region STR guys and spent plenty of time eating the grilled food and drinking the alcohol at the Detroit Region RV and trailer park.