The first slush event of the year, “Totally Stoked”, was today at Sanderson Field. I was able to convince my brother to come out with me as a tire warmer, his 2nd autocross ever and his first one was 3 years ago.

I rode with Robby for all 4 of his runs, coaching down his times each run (for the most part). He ended up getting 1st in his class. I ended up pulling out a great 4th run and getting 3rd in ST1, bumping myself into the trophies.

During tech, I also found out that I trophied in ST1 last year, so I was awarded a pretty cool Ogio waterproof duffle bag with a custom inscription.

In honor the occasion, I decided to spend a little time to add the WWSCC Slush series results to the alpha AXED site.

Because I’ve been planning on rearranging our car situation, I’ve been car shopping. I decided I want to get a car that’s seriously competitive in autocross and noticed, while I haven’t been driving very well, the cars I’ve picked thus far just aren’t competitive and simply aren’t used in competition. I grabbed the 2009 Solo results and tried to figure out what cars showed up, which ones won, and why.

I’m not going to provide much analysis, but below is the data for anyone else who wants it. I will say this though, for any class that offers a car with a double wishbone front suspension, you basically eliminate the cars with MacPherson struts from being competitive. Even cars with more torque and better power to weight ratios seem to be out-classed in autocross. The one exception to this seems to be the Chevrolet Cobalt in D Stock, which is touted for it’s excellent stock suspension (and one of the trophies was grabbed up by the very talented Kevin Dietz).

Currently I’m leaning towards the RX8. I like the car’s styling, suicide rear doors, and suspension. However, I’m having a lot of trouble getting behind the rotary engine, which offers a fairly awful power / MPG ratio, all while remaining pretty torqueless. All the other reasonably priced cars in A-D Stock seem be convertibles, which are definitely not my thing.

Tuesday and Wednesday I was at the Evolution Performance Driving School in Packwood, WA. I’ve been waiting a long time to take that school (almost 2 years) and it was totally worth it. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in getting better at autocross.

The school was nothing like what I thought it would be in terms of what you learned. At autocross, you hear people talking all the time about “looking ahead”. During your runs, you’d try and “look ahead” and might not get any faster. This school totally taught me what looking ahead really means and showed me a lot of tools to make sure you’re looking ahead.

I was also nice to be able to ride with some national champions so they could show you what your car is capable of doing. My scoring results sheet showed a huge improvement after one ride with Karl Coleman driving my car through the slalom.

The 2009 WWSCC Understeer and Oversteer events were this Saturday and Sunday. Participation was low so we all got 5 runs per session. The event went very smoothly and the course was very fast. I did pretty poorly on Saturday but improved a bit on Sunday. The key to the course was to get up the courage to just stay on the gas through the back slaloms. I really love these style courses, I’m still just not very confident in the M3 yet or it’s tires.

On the bright side, I got Sean to come out to the event. He took a bunch of pictures with his 5D Mark II and I drove him around the course a couple times, which he seemed to find fun.

Last month, we decided it was probably best to start getting the car ready to match our theme (Bottom Gear, our take on the diesel BMW endurance race episode of Top Gear).

Nick and I drove down to Robby’s place we didn’t there until about 6pm if I recall because we got a super late start. However, before we left, we had to drive all around the Renton/Kent/Auburn area collecting paint and supplies to do the job. While we were doing that, Nick thought it would be important to smash our front lip into a parking curb. While only annoying at first, it turned out to be quite an incident later on while we were driving down the freeway and the lip started to come apart.

We paint-prepared the car Saturday night. I use the term paint-prepared lightly as it is really hard to prep a car in that bad of shape for paint in 4-ish hours. Then we got up super early on Sunday to paint it. The results aren’t half bad and barring some paint sprayer malfunctions we did a good job.

Well, I didn’t trophy on Sunday, but I came agonizingly close. I got nudged out on the last run by the person who was in 5th. The worst part of it was that I just messed up a little bit at the finish pushing wide just enough to cost me the faster time I’m pretty sure I had that run. So, I finished 5th out of 12 on Sunday and 3rd of 7 with a Trophy on Saturday. Overall, a good weekend with mixed weather.

Today I placed 3rd in ST2 (indexed street tire class for WWSCC events) out of 7 competitors, which qualifies me for a trophy! Hooray. The event was at Cheney Stadium. It went well and no one got shot in the face. I don’t know if I’m getting better or the fact that the pavement at Cheney is not very grippy. But it seemed that the AWD cars might have had an advantage over the FWD or RWD cars. I was getting sideways a lot, but I kept it tidy on my 5th run to pull out a mid-37 second run.

My trophy was a mini RC car. It’s a 2006 Dodge Charger ROLLIN’ PHAT ON SUM DUBZ, YO! w00t.

There’s another event tomorrow at the same place. We’ll see how that goes.

* Technically I trophied when I was a novice, but that doesn’t really count (even though I beat like 45 people)

Well, after the last track event I evaluated my car’s consumable situation. I checked my brake pads, rotors, and tires and, well, everything was dead.

My tires were the worst offender, they were shot. So I ordered up some wider tires and from a different manufacturer, Dunlop Direzza Z1 star specs. I wanted to return to a stiffer sidewall than the RE-01R offered, more width, and more grip. The Z1’s offered all that, so I picked them up. Since the tires were coming off, I took the opportunity to get minor curb rash repaired on my wheels as well. So, far, the tires feel great but I only have limited amount of miles on them and they were over inflated at the time.

My front rotors were also toast and my rears weren’t in the best shape ever either. So, I got lighter 2-piece rotors up front (Gyrodics). My front EBC reds had 30% life left in them, but I was unhappy with the performance. So I spent the $5 to upgrade to the package deal from AMS Performance and get the PFC 97 series compound front pads. My EBC Reds in the rear are still OK, so I’m reusing them in the rear. In the rear, I went with some Powerslot rotors, they were cheap and the rears don’t see a ton of heat. I think they will be adequate. My only concern is that the slotting in the rears goes all the way to the edge of rotor, which could induce cracking. Hopefully the lack of real heat in the rear will keep that from happening.

Also, my new Tarmac 2 coilover suspension came right before all this stuff arrived too. I got those put on just before my new tires got here. Now all I have left to do is get the car aligned. I’m pretty excited to see how these, coupled with the new Dunlop’s work at autocross. Buuuuuuuuuuuut, now I’m broke.

So, I wanted to get a real V-Limited lip for a long time. Mostly for the aerodynamic benefits, but I really think the lip completes the look of the car’s front end. Also, since my car is already dropped about an inch (actually a bit more than that in the front because of all my additional camber from my camber plates), I don’t have a lot of clearance. I figured it would be a waste of a nice $450 V-Limited lip if I got one for the streets.

In order to save some money and frustration, I got a polyurethane lip for $175. They look like crap out of the mold, so I went to Home Depot and grabbed some 600 grit sand paper and then to Schuck’s to grab some Duplicolor plastic adhesion promoter and then some flat black bumper paint.

I then wet sanded down the lip with the sandpaper, wiped it clean and then looked for imperfections. There were a lot of cracks and scratches in the lip so I gave them a college try but couldn’t get most of them out; none of them are too serious though. I cleaned the lip again and then sprayed on about 3-coats of the adhesion promoter. I let that dry about 10 minutes. Finally, I applied about 6 coats of bumper paint. Lighter, faster arm-movement coats and then the later coats were slower and thicker. I think it turned out really well.

Friday night I headed down to Ocean Shores in the BMW, broken wheel bearings singing the whole way. The goal for Saturday didn’t seem very ambitious but, in retrospect, turns out to be insane. We wanted to replace both rear wheel bearings (really important), replace the torn CV boot, change the transmission fluid, mount the fire extinguisher, and maybe have time for a few extra fun things. We got started around 11:15 and our pain became obvious quickly.

We got the wheel, brake, and emergency brake off quickly. Then we had to take out the rear axle and CV joint assembly. There are 6 bolts that hold the assembly to the differential (black round bolts with a hex head key hole). 5 of them came off with no problem, however the 6th one decided it would round out the hex. It took about 10 minutes and attempts with several tools but eventually Robby used his hulk like strength and gigantic vice-grips to break it free. Good for now, but now we were short a bolt. With the axle assembly out, it was time to remove the axle-stub and then the wheel bearing, we would worry about the CV bolt later.

Robby pounded on various parts with a BFH (big fucking hammer) and a brass punch for, I don’t know, a hour and we just could not get the axle-stub or wheel bearing to come out. Robby looked around and saw that behind the axle-stub, there was a C-shaped pressure spring/ring. We decided we needed to try and take that out before pounding anything else out. Robby’s tools for removing that pressure ring were meant to be used on something that wasn’t so obscured behind a part (e.g. straight on or at a slight angle).

We headed to our local (kind of) auto parts store to replace the stripped boot screw, get right-angled spring clip removers, and possibly find a CV boot. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention we found out the CV boot kit that came in the mail was meant for the inside boot, not the outside; so we needed a CV Boot too. The local store didn’t have anything we needed. So, off to Aberdeen we went. We stopped at Schuck’s and got the tool we needed. Then we drove all the way to end entrance of Aberdeen (pretty much as far as you can go and not be in Central Park) to Ace Hardware only to discover that Ace didn’t have a bolt that matched up. There was something close, but it wouldn’t work because the bolt was too long and the blank part of the shaft was too long. Fortunately, I brought my tap and die set, so we bought 3 of them and prayed I could make it work. Back to the bat cave (no CV boots anywhere)!

When we got back to the shop, we tried to get the clip out of the hole but, that’s right, there was a problem. The tool couldn’t open wide enough to get to both tools. I looked at the tool a bit and suggested to Robby that we grind out the center part of the tool so it could open further, he agreed, we did, and it worked. We got the spring clip out and then started pounding with the BFG and brass rod some more. It wouldn’t budge.

We gave up on being nice and decided to get the assembly red-hot. However, even torching it, it wouldn’t come out. We went online and found a guide but the guide just made it seem like the half-shaft could be pulled out with ease and then you could simply take off the pressure ring (Robby had the tool for that) with the axle-stub out. However, there was no steps for removing the axle-stub, just simply “now take the half shaft out and set it on the ground” — very funny. In frustration, I took a rubber mallet and started smacking the axle stub from the bottom at the same time Robby would hit it from behind with the punch. It moved! So, we just timed our strikes right and I swung harder and it came off smoking hot in 10 hits or so, pulling the existing wheel bearing in half. The inner ring was positively stuck to the axle-stub.

Then we had to get the rest of the wheel bearing out of the hole. Lots of heat, pounding, and blood (well, Robby’s blood) later, the wheel bearing came out. Then using the press we got the left over bearing off the axle-stub, cleaned it up and pressed the bearing on. Robby had the new bearing half way back into the car when I stopped him. We forgot to put the retainer spring back on before we pressed the wheel bearing onto the axle-stub. Some pressing, swearing, and whatnot later, we separated the axle-stub from the new wheel bearing and the new wheel bearing from itself — yeah, we thought we broke it, the seal got pretty bent. Well, we had to press on, so we got the other new wheel bearing out of the box, put the retainer spring on, then pressed the bearing on, and pounded the assembly into the car. Don’t worry, things didn’t go smoothly yet, we then realized we forgot to put the dust boot back onto the suspension arm. On some cars you can take these off with no problem, but BMW decided this would be a good place to hook the emergency brake spring to. Well, we didn’t have any more wheel bearings, so we cut the dust boot in half bolted it on and then we tack-welded it back together. Yay!

Now, we had to take care of the CV boots. After a long time searching online to figure out how to get axle apart and only finding guides telling us to replace the whole unit (dumb and expensive) we found a guide showing that we could just take off the inside shaft caps. We came up with the idea to use the boot kit to replace the part that it was supposed to even though it was broken and then take the rubber boot and use it to fix outer boot (the broken one). Anyway, this story is getting too long, so let me summarize. We were able to create a properly sized bolt, get the boots fixed, and get the assembly back together.

While we put the emergency brake on, Robby realized he didn’t remember exactly how it went back together. No problem, I just took the other wheel and rotor off. Robby looked at it and got everything put back together properly. While I was trying to get the caliper open, I popped open the bleeder to release the pressure and make it easy to pull back. No fluid came out and we then we found the brakes didn’t work properly. To make a long story short, we found out that the rubber brake line was blocked and the caliper was completely blocked as well (like 25 psi of air wouldn’t go through it blocked). We fixed it with some brute force and air pressure. Then we bled the brakes and they work now, hooray.

With the car all back together, after a quick test drive (revealing that we fixed the quieter of the two wheel bearings) we decided to do something fun. Being that it was already midnight, why not? Robby showed me some aluminum grain-stamped extremely thin aluminum siding. He then used his hemming tool to hem the aluminum on the top and bottom edges to make it a little bit stronger (though it was clear it wouldn’t be strong enough). We put the smooth side out, bolted it on, flared out the edges by the tires and painted it black. Interestingly enough, I got noticeably better gas mileage on the way home.

It flexes at speeds above 40 MPH, but we kind of figured it would. It’s just kind of a proof of concept. I think when we make the real one we’ll flare the bottom out more and we’ll get it closer to the ground. Also, the final product will have a splitter.

Oh, and for one last thing before I left, finally, we got the fire extinguisher mounted.