Competition for Nationals began in earnest on Tuesday, the day after Labor Day. Because it’s pretty much impossible to run 1100 drivers in one go, half of the autocross classes run on Tuesday/Wednesday, while the other half runs on Thursday/Friday. STR was one of the classes that ran on Tuesday/Wednesday. For Tuesday, we’d be running on the East Course.
Chris and I ran decent times in the Miata, with Chris making a run for the upper third of the class. The handling balance of the car was very good now, with a slight tendency to push, though that allowed us to get on the gas sooner upon corner exit. Unfortunately, another issue now popped up: the limited slip differential was locking up way too quickly and way too aggressively, and as such, we couldn’t get on the throttle as aggressively as we wanted to without the rear end of the car immediately stepping out on us.
Still, I was happy to have reached my goal on Tuesday: get at least a single clean run in the books for my first day of Nationals. In fact, I had two clean runs. I whacked four cones on my first run, so perhaps that got the cone-killing out of my system for the day. Sololive, the online live timing and scoring tracker, crashed halfway through our heat, so all of the folks back home only say my first extremely dirty run and none of the good runs thereafter, and probably assumed that I had done the usual and killed many, many cones for all three of my runs. If I could get a clean run in on Wednesday, that would already make my year twice as good as last year’s!
Meanwhile, James Dunham simply couldn’t catch a break all week. During Shane Chinonn’s second run in the car, the camshaft decided to slip, forcing an early end to the car’s action for the day. Shane managed to grab a drive in an S2000 to round out his third run, while James found another MX5 to finish his runs in. The breakdown had enough of an impact on Shane’s runs that he was effectively out of the running for the top spot at the end of Day 1. Which was too bad, as he was on pace, scratch time-wise, for a good showing.
And because James’ car was down, that meant that Heidi Ellison, running the car in the STR Ladies class, needed a ride. I offered my car to her, so my Miata finished the day wearing a different set of numbers. She also managed to hit five cones on her very first run out in my car. Perhaps that lends credence to the idea that it’s the car itself that attracts cone hits? Or maybe that my cone murdering tendencies spread, like a contagious disease, to all those who drive my car…
James pulled a long evening getting his Miata back together in time for the West Course runs on Wednesday. (It’s amazing how much help and know-how there is in one place when you have a literal tent and trailer city of nothing but race cars and wrenchers.) That meant that Shane, James, and Heidi were back to running James’ silver MX5 on Wednesday.
For Wednesday, Chris and I decided to put on the stock Miata rear sway bar, a tiny little thing with a diameter the size of a pinky finger, in an attempt to loosen up the car a tad. I don’t know if there was any advantageous effect in doing so, and Chris theorized that perhaps putting the rear sway bar on was not the right idea, considering that it meant that we had to be even more ginger with the throttle on corner exit to keep the rear end of the car in line. If only my rear diff wasn’t set up to lock so suddenly…
We go out and make our final three runs for Nationals, with Chris just missing the trophies by 0.6 seconds. The course was fun, but cone intensive in that there were one hell of a lot of cones out there to hit. (There were many slaloms with doubled-up or tripled-up cones, along with cone walls, that were mighty easy to take out, earning you many cone marks on your bumper or side sill, and pissing off the people working that corner.) Amazingly, I only killed cones on my very first run, though a slide on my third run meant I nearly killed some cones on that run too. My second run was my fastest, and it was clean. Thus, I had achieved my goal for Wednesday: getting at least one clean run. With two clean and respectable runs on both the East and the West courses, I managed to finish 15th out of 41 drivers. Chris would finish 12th in class, and if I didn’t have a car that was so eager to transition into power-on oversteer, I bet he would have done better and trophied in my car.
While I improved greatly from the year before, I was still way behind the leaders in the class. Nick Barbato would finish in the top spot, and when the dust had cleared, I was 3.2 seconds behind him on overall time. That’s one hell of a lot of time. Still, I’m happy for the progress that I’ve made over the past two years.
That point was driven home when Noel Leslie, fellow grid mate for the past two years, came up to me right before my last run on Wednesday and gave me props for my improvement as a driver over the past year. It was a small, additional dose of validation that I had gone from “not all that good” to “good,” and his comments meant a lot to me. It’ll probably take me quite a while to go from “good” to “really good” when I can consistently challenge for trophies.
The end of Nationals was marked with the awards banquet, where I arrived late, got food from an extremely short buffet line, shot the shit with a bunch of people, and watched people walk the stage to accept their awards. Then I went out with some folks to do some karaoke, because of course I would.
I got back to the hotel at about 1am in the morning. With only five hours of sleep, I got up before the dawn and hopped into my packed car and loaded tire trailer and headed back home for Michigan. I left Lincoln, Nebraska at 6am in the morning and made it back home to Dearborn at 9pm at night.
Shout outs and thank yous
This year of autocrossing has been my best year yet, and I couldn’t have done it without the support and help of the following people.
- Josh McDonough
A big thanks goes out to my primary codriver for the season. Without his help, I would have never gotten the tune on my car right. Additionally, he is the data guy of the team, analyzing the data from the DL1 at National events and making sense of the data logs from the ECU. Also important was that he did his best to temper my expectations and remind me that we’re doing all of this for fun.
- Clark Walker
Clark is one of the folks I know from Central Illinois, an old friend from the region where I learned how to drive. Like Josh, he also tempered my sometimes unreasonable expectations and kept me from going crazy on myself.
- Noel Leslie
He was the first friend I made on the STR grid. He’s been a good friend and supporter for the past two years, from my first days as a clueless fool among folks who knew what they were doing, to the time when I finally started to figure things out. Having him and Nick Barbato parked next to me in grid for the past year was a very good experience indeed.
- Kenneth Tsang
Fellow Asian and also an excellent wrench. He helped me when I was having issues with my car, from drilling out snapped bolts from my rear hub, to helping me think over car setups. Also, lots of going out to get Mexican food after events…
- Matthew Braun
Like I said before, Matthew did one hell of a lot to teach me what it means to go fast. But not only that, he was a good companion at autocrosses, and was helpful with the car setup suggestions. And while others have preached the virtues of having a car setup up on the tighter side of neutral, it wasn’t until I drove with Matthew that I began to adopt the philosophy.
- James Dunham
He saved my bacon at Lincoln this year. I have no experience making major alignment changes with the car on the ground in paddock, but James helped me out with everything and even had the right tools on hand for making the changes. The ECU stuff I did for him was easy; he was crawling underneath my car working the alignment adjustments, which is nowhere near as easy as pressing a couple of buttons on a laptop. If we hadn’t made the alignment changes, be assured that I would likely be further down in the standings, thanks to lots of slidey hitting cone action.
- Chris Lin
What I haven’t mentioned yet so far is the fact that Chris taught me, in the span of just a couple days, how to drive the Miata to make the most of its advantages. I’ve been driving decently tight lines around courses, but Chris (and according the Shane Chinonn, so does Nick Barbato) cuts a unbelievably tight racing line, taking advantage of the fact that the Miata can actually make the tight lines work and cutting as much distance as possible through the course. I learned that, unless the corner leads to a straight where top speed overcomes the loss of time in rounding off an apex, you always hug tight to the cones.
- Shane Chinonn
Shout out goes to Shane because he fist bumps everybody right before STR begins the first runs of the heat. A small gesture, but an awesome one at that.
Plans for next year
My original plan was to retire the Miata from STR competition and turn it into a track beater. I’ve got the roll bar for the car sitting here in the garage, right now. However, after the promising performance at Nationals, I’ve got second thoughts about throwing an addition 40 pounds of weight up on top of the car; I kind of want to keep developing the car and seeing if I can do better in it next year.
I need to change out the rear diff to something that isn’t so quick to lockup. In the car right now is an OS Giken limited slip diff that was put into one of my spare pumpkins, and I’m wondering if the transmission shop that did the work for me missed a step or messed something up that makes the damn thing lock so quickly. Sitting in my garage is another OS Giken, the unit that originally came off of the Grassroots Motorsports STR Miata project car, that was once in my car; I may put that unit back in, as its lockup wasn’t as aggressive upon power on. Or I might just buy a Quaife limited slip diff and put that in my car. It seems to be working quite excellently in James Dunham’s Miata…
As a result, the roll bar intended for the Miata is now a paperweight in the garage. In the original plan, I was going to autocross the Focus ST in G-Street class next year, and I may still prep it for that class, and simply choose between STR and GS as I so desire throughout the course of next year.
If you’ve made it all the way to this point, congratulations! Whereas everyone else’s Nationals recap is (comparatively) short and succinct enough to fit in a Facebook status update, my recap is a 10k word novella.
It will be interesting to see how next year shakes out, that’s for sure.