Evolution Super Shootout at ZMAX Dragway

With some help from Moton USA/AST Suspension, I finally got the car back out and running pretty well for the Evolution Super Shootout at ZMAX Dragway.

This was my first event in the car since I got the shocks back, but at least they work now! We spent most of the day Saturday trying to get the car dialed in and then I got to run in the rain all day Sunday. Very glad I had new Dunlops on the car!

The event was absolutely awesome and I highly recommend anyone that is within 1000 miles of an Evolution Super Shootout to go and check one out. Great format, great people, great competition and a ton of fun! Check out their website for more info!

http://www.evolutionsupershootout.com/

Here is my first run of the Last Chance Qualifier on Saturday afternoon:

The Shootout portion of the event was held on Sunday and it was raining most of the day, which made the freshly sealed asphalt at ZMAX Dragway really slick. It was raining pretty hard on this run and there was some hydroplaning and some sliding going on. Setup was the same as the dry except for lower tire pressures and I took some compression out of the shocks. I made it into the final 4 in my bracket (top 16 overall) and then had a HUGE slide in the rain and took out two cones in my final run against Aaron Buckley.

I’ll try to get some more videos up soon including one of my first spin ever in the BMW.

Huge thanks to Junior Johnson, Evolution Performance Driving school and all involved with putting this event on. I would also like to thank Bimmerworld and Vorshlag for offering money to the BMW crowd!

STX BMW 2012

Sorry for lack of posts for such a long time. I made a lot of changes to the BMW last year and had some major issues with some of them. We basically wrote 2011 off chasing some severe issues with some shocks. I will post more info on this soon.

The car should be ready for the Evolution Super Shootout at ZMax in April and hopefully ready for some test and tune time before hand. Looking forward to this year and seeing how the ST classing changes play out. I’m kinda sad the EF civics are gone from STX because I am still a believer that the E36 can get it done against them.

The car is going back together over the next several weeks and I will try to post some updates about it! I’m so ready to drive the car in proper working order again!

STX BMW dominates the North Carolina Autocross Championships!

STX BMW set FTP both days at the NC Autocross Championships. It was a great weekend even though Eric could not be there. We got the mechanical issues we were facing at Nationals sorted out and the car was stellar!

Results can be found here:
http://www.thscc.com/autocross/events/2010/2010-1002NCAC%20Indexed%20Results.html

Here is a video from one of my runs on Sunday. This is not my fastest run, but it is the only run that I have video of. I got really behind on one of the elements on the taxiway that cost me a a good chunk of time. I drove very well this weekend and was fortunate to have some great competition there.

STX BMW is Lincoln Bound!

The car is packed a ready. Wish us luck. I will try to update the site as often as possible over the next week.

Thanks to everyone for all of the support over the past few years.

Special thanks to Discount Tire, Mann Motorsports, The Racers Market and Dunlop tire.

STXBMW had both drivers mentioned in SportsCar Magazine’s Who Will Win article.

Seems the BMW’s are the pick for this year… let’s hope so.

Getting STXBMW ready for SCCA Solo Nationals

I will update the post in the near future, but we are working on getting the car ready for Nationals. It is quickly approaching!

To do list:
New front brakes (currently Axxis Ultimates with 45k miles on them and OE rotors with 160k miles.)
Replace brake fluid (2.5 years old) with new ATE Super Blue
Replace radiator
Replace mechanical fan
Replace serpentine belt
Change oil
Replace windshield wipers

That should be about it before Nationals. The car has been working so well we do not want to make any suspension changes before Nationals. We will still be significantly down on power from last year and on the same tires we have been running on all year.

Update: I pulled the radiator out…

Does this look normal?

You can see where it is damaged in several places, but most of the damage is in the center near the bottom.

Thanks fan blades...

The fan is in better shape than I thought. I think I could reuse it… While working on the car, I also found two more fan blades hiding in the engine bay!

Hrmm, I think I could use this as a weapon!

STXBMW takes FTP at the Commonwealth Games in Virginia!

Chris Cline took FTP at the Commonwealth games in Virginia on both days this weekend.

The Commonwealth Games were hosted by Blue Ridge Region SCCA and took place at the Danville Airport. Both days had several crossovers, which I did not like in the initial walk-through, but I ended up really enjoying the courses.

Saturday was on and off rain for most of the day. All of the run groups but third got at least a few runs on a drying course. Unfortunately, I did not make my last run count, when the course was in the best condition we had seen since before the heavy rain of the third run group.

Here is the video from my 4th run, which was FTP by 1.4 seconds:

My 5th run was .8 seconds quicker through the end of the slalom, but I hit a cone in the crossover and gave up on the run. I left a lot of time out there…

Sunday’s course was the Saturdays course in reverse with a few changes. The weather was great on Sunday too! Eric was able to come up for day two and he was the first to go out in the car. His first run was a 51.6 +1 which, at the time, was FTD and FTP even with the cone. Here is the video from his wild first run:

My 2nd run gave me FTP for day two and for the event. Luckily, it help up since I did not get to make my next three runs. 😦 Here is the video from my 2nd run. It was slower than Eric’s scratch time, but it was clean. 😉

The bad news… the car had to be brought home on a trailer. I went out on my 3rd run and the mechanical fan shattered taking out the radiator, serpentine belt and some hoses. The car was leaking coolant everywhere, but it was much better than last year when I blew my engine up at this event.

STXBMW wins the Northern States Championships!

I was fortunate enough to come away with a victory over a class of 11 at the Peru National Tour. I changed the rear swaybar from a 15mm to a 17mm bar before heading to Indiana on Thursday and it worked well. I definitely plan on having a 19 or 20mm bar available for Nationals though since the car was still a bit pushy until I made some tire pressure changes on Sunday.

On Friday at the practice course, the car felt pretty good out of the box, but I realized that I had not checked tire pressures. The rears were 2 lbs low and the fronts were 6 lbs low. I changed to our “normal” pressures and the car got much worse. I figured the stagger in pressures f/r was causing the car to work better before the pressure change, so I went to the front at our normal pressure and the rears 4 lbs higher for my first runs on Saturday. It did not really seem to help the car, it just made the rear harder to control. I continued to let the rear pressures climb over my next 2 runs but could not improve. Luckily my 1st run on Saturday was enough to hold a .5 second lead going into day 2. Good thing, because I needed it…

Day two started with even higher rear pressures to get the car to rotate. I went out on my first run and the car was ok, but nowhere near where I wanted it. I decided to make a massive change an drop 10 lbs of air out of the rear tires. Last year, Eric and i had experimented with lower rear pressures to let the rear rotate more and to make it more controllable. It worked!!! The car felt REALLY good on my 2nd run and great on my 3rd run when I let even more air out of the rear tires.

Unfortunately, I did not put together a decent run. I was 100% certain I could go and drop a full second off of my time on my third run now that I was confident the car was where it needed to be. I went out, nailed the first few turns and then got a little over zealous with the throttle in the slalom. I got late and that cost me tons of time on that run. Luckily, (for me at least) Craig did not improve enough on his final run to take the lead from me and I ended up winning sitting on my 2nd run. No cones all weekend either!

We also made it into the SCCA’s article on the event.

http://www.scca.com/newsarticle.aspx?hub=3&news=3938

STXBMW will make an appearance at the Peru National Tour

Eric will not be there, but I will be making the trip out to Peru for the 2010 Peru National Tour. The car has always sucked on this surface, and I need to try to get some things sorted out in case the car has a similar reaction to the surface in Lincoln. I think I am going to put a bigger rear sway bar on before I even head out there. With that said, I have never driven the car there with the current setup, but it has always been significantly tighter at Peru than anywhere else I have been. It should be a fun weekend!

STX Civic at the Blytheville Pro?

I decided to go to the Blytheville Pro at the last minute and drive an 89′ Honda Civic Si. The car had just been put together and this was only its 3rd event. My sponsors are messed up on SCCA’s website, but I was in Dave O’Maley’s Race Technology/ASR/Koni sponsored civic. The car was a ton of fun, but it took me some time to get used to. I ended up third over all, but the car definitely had the potential to win. I could not get the finish on either course right in the civic.

Chris driving Dumpty 3.0 at the Blytheville Pro

I started getting the hang of the car on Sunday, but it was a little too late. I think I needed a few more runs in it. My first left side run on Sunday morning (which I will post video of in a minute) was the fastest left side run in STX at the time. James Wilson ended up going faster on the left on his last run.

The civic has an awesome data acquisition and video setup on it from Race Technology. The DL1 data logger links directly with the Dash 2 and the Video 4 camera setup. It produces awesome videos with easy to access data in very little time. Here is a video from my first left side run on Sunday. It was a pretty good run except for getting really late through the finish. The DL1 shows that I left .4 seconds in the finish on this run. I will try to get some High Def video up soon!