JD was there ever any doubt that I'd beat you? After all I had the good sense to get a Stalkerish chassis and we all know that they are infinitely superior to a Locost and show my good taste and skill level. (inside joke) All the DNFs were just me trying to make it look good and get better odds. I DNF'd 50% of the time!!
Of course all I got was abuse from the monkey section. Every time I came in they wanted to know if I even knowed what the accelerator pedal looked like. I even got my helmet smacked left & right while they forcibly told me to speed it up. Actually it was just good manners as I was trying to be easy on someone else's car.
Chris, knowing the propensity for the Slotus to cough up a few parts I even brought along a lot of baggies to gather and sort all the little things that fell off so that we could do a CSI on it and try to figure out what went wrong once & for all. Fortunately we didn't need any baggies at all. The biggest drama was the temp reaching 250 once and a little smoke as a teeny, tiny, miniscule oil leak put some oil on the header wrap.
Of course you realize JD that this means I probably would have had another 5-6 seconds in me had I not been worried I would break the beast. I didn't want to send you home to your wife with another tall tale about your heroic efforts and hwo the fickle finger of fate picked on you once again, so I was gentle. I'm hoping this time you came home with a smile, I know I did (and it's gotten even bigger just now).
No disrespect for your car or what you've built, but after some constipatin' on the drive I definitely will go with a 4 cylinder. It's not the V8 wasn't fun, but it's the lazy way to get around the track. I was hardly ever pushing the car to it's max which meant the engine was in the wrong part of it's power band. I was using the torque to make it easy on me instead of working to make it fast on the car.
We drove the car mostly in 3rd gear and the course designers had this wicked little 180 degree hand brake turn built into the autocross course. While the Slotus would move under it's own power in 3rd gear, it was working at nowhere near it's potential. While the 180 degree corner was an extreme example it was true of just about every corner out there. It would pull out of the corners, but it could have pulled harder with some shifting.
Shifting is slow on the big 'Mercan transmission as compared to the Honda S2000 transmission. I would have lost time in some places and had more chances to upset the suspension had I been shifting to keep the engine in it's best powerband, but I still think I could have been a lot faster that way. In the Honda all you have to do is just think your gears up or down and they magically go there. Shifting won't upset the car unless you do something monumentally stupid which makes it easy to be your fastest.
BUT to drive the V8 to the engine's potential would have required a lot more expensive rubber and probably some upgraded brakes. The car was being driven no where near it's potential most of the time, except for a couple of times under braking. This makes it quite a bit more expensive to have a weekend of fun.
The Stalker was faster mostly because it had more rubber under it. I believe they had at least 4" more than you did (if only you had a nickle for every time you've heard that you could afford an engineering team for Slotus). They had the automatic transmission with a torque converter which gave them a little more squirt out of the corners and were running expensive Formula Atlantic Goodyear slicks on all 4 corners. That made up for a lot of driver inequities.
They also had about a 12" shorter wheelbase which didn't hurt in some of the tighter corners. I have no idea how stable it was.
Once again thanx for taking the time with me and it was good to get to know you. You helped out a lot, even by your bad examples.
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