The Cart Before the Horse: Spec 3 Build

[Senor_Taylor]

Had the week off from work and did a sunroof delete and an AC delete. The AC delete was fairly straight forward. Disconnect the AC lines from the firewall, pull the front clip of the car off and disconnect the lines to the condenser. Remove the condenser, unbolt the compressor, and pull those items as well. Also deleted the horns and the washer fluid. The sunroof delete involved unbolting the entire cassette, measuring, cutting and drilling pieces of metal to hold the sunroof panel into the roof skin, and then sealing with caulk and taping the top of the roof to keep water out. The whole process took probably 6-8 hours for both things.

Towed the car to Pitt Race and was met with rain the first morning so I switched to my RA1 rain tires. I ended up leaving those on all weekend as I didn't feel I was being help back by tire at all. DE2 with Great Lakes is a lot different and consisted of almost 2 hour classroom sessions, drills in every other session, and passing anywhere except braking zones. I've been solo for a while now, but apparently that is not a thing with this region and even DE3 has instructors. Picked up a lot of speed as I learned the track on the first day and ran at 2:14. Race pace for Spec 3 seemed to be 2:04-2:06 so I had a long way to go, but I was gaining confidence. Near the end of the day I started working on left foot braking as I got the line down and really enjoyed the smoothness it added. This video here is from the reverse gridding drill where the "faster" people were gridded in the rear and slower people were in the front to encourage passing. I ended up being second from the back and struggled more than I expected since my car lacked the straight line speed of most of the cars, but absolutely ate them up in the turns. The car ended up developing a miss down low due to a valve cover gasket failure flooding my spark plug wells with oil, so that's another thing to work on before VIR.