I am excited to announce that BimmerWorld has decided to step onboard as a sponsor for my racing efforts for 2009. Many thanks to James Clay (CEO) who made this possible.
About BimmerWorld
BimmerWorld is a racer-owned, racer-staffed BMW performance center, providing technical expertise and race proven products to make anyone’s racing program a front-runner. Staff expertise ranges from street upgrades to full professional racing and covers BMW platforms from 1984 through new models.
The 3.5 hours of driving time that you get at the ProFormance lapping days are a great opportunity to review your past material and push yourself slowly and steadily. I was still on stock tires and brake pads as I didn’t have the budget to upgrade these critical parts but plans are in progress.
I started with reviewing the lessons I learned from the race school and found that I was consistently on line. My instructor wanted me to focus more on being smooth and linking the throttle, brakes, and steering so that they add up to 100%. On a more personal side, I also focused on being smooth with the shifting and found that I had definitely improved quite a bit from the last session.
As the day progressed and I gained more speed through the corners, and unfortunately ran into a little incident at T5a. As I was letting go off the clutch while adding throttle and steering, I realized that the clutch hadn’t fully engaged yet. I felt the chirp in the rear and braced myself for trouble. Looking straight far ahead, I keep the throttle down while the car tank slapped around a bit. Unfortunately, the turn in the road combined with my proximity to the edge to start with led me into the gravel where jumped on the clutch and the brake before hitting the tire wall. I was lucky and managed to get out with just a dent in the rear quarter pannel (which I bent back into shape by kicking from the inside). It may have been a lot worse if I hadn’t started taking evasive action right when I felt the glitch.
After taking a break and calming myself down, I was out on track again to see what I had done wrong and how to fix it. Folks were saying that it may have been because of the tires but since I was stuck with them, I changed my brake and shift zone to be a bit littler earlier than before for T5a and that seemed to do the trick. 2 more hours of practice later, it was time to quit and recall the days events to plan for the next event. Despite the little incident, I learned a lot from the process and looking forward to the lapping session next month.
Wow, what an amazing weekend! The ground school on Friday evening covered the basics and we reviewed the safety information as well as the flags. Then I drove back up to Seattle only to get 6 hours of sleep before heading right back to Pacific Raceways early next morning.
It was overcast so I wasn’t sure how adventurous we would be getting but putting that aside, we headed out for a track walk led by the Hill brothers. Lot of useful dos and donts but the one thing that stuck in my mind was how steep it was from T2 to T3a and T3b. The videos online don’t reveal the real horror awaiting you when you see it in person. But don’t worry, when you are in your car it goes by so fast, your fear of heights is replaced by fear of fading brakes.
With street tires and stock Mintex brake pads, it wasn’t long before I was pushing the car beyond its limits. Though glad that these were the only problems that surfaced as this was the first time ever the Red Beast made an appearance at a track. Luckily, there were several items on the agenda that I could practice at slower speeds as coincidentally this was also my first time on track with a manual car. I was put in Group 2 and we ran about 4 sessions of which the first one was in rain, second one in light snow, and sessions 3 and 4 under a beautiful sunny sky. The changes in weather along with a great instructor, taught me a lot of valuable lessons and I used every opportunity I got to improve myself. Result: my speed steadily increased approaching T2 from session to session and being lapped by fewer and fewer cars and starting to lap others.
No one should be in race car without a HANS device and if you do some basic research you find out pretty quickly why its such a good idea. So I went ahead and ordered mine esp. b/c my 2″ inch shoulder harness requires the HANS to be present.
After a month and half worth of delays, UPS finally delivered the Sparco 383 Steering Wheel, Sparco Hub Adapter and the NRG Thin Quick Release to my door! Installation was easy once I figured out how the quick release adapter worked. This one is a bit different than the normal non-slim versions in that the lock stays in place on the steering column instead of coming apart with the steering wheel. Not bad though, it saves over 1.5 inches compared to its fatter siblings.
The seat was looking rather dull sitting in my living room by itself so I decided to go buy a 6 point Sparco Harness (HANS) for it. They are both now living in holy matrimony..
December 23rd, 2008
Shawn
picked up a Sparco seat today from Eric B. for a very darn good price. Much thanks to him for helping me out in such tough times 
November 19th, 2008
Shawn
In order to take full advantage of the Ground Control camber plates in the E30 series, you need to cut parts of the strut tower. Though it was a bit nerve wrecking at first to think about, the task was very easy to accomplish with the Dremel tools. As far as the paint goes, I chose to cover a thin strip around the cut with matching paint. This makes it look as if the paint job was done for the reason of modifying the strut tower. I have no intention of making it look as if that’s how it came stock. It’s a race car after all Thanks to Zach and Mike who helped me out on this. Here are some photos from the op:
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