continued from above
That once-a-year street car shootout has been televised on Speed for a while and that was the goal: get an invite. They had warned us that the invitees were more about the "spirit of the event" and not necessarily the fastest cars, but we held out hope.
Left: one of my on-camera interviews with Goldberg, "I don't know what to do with my hands..." Right: After the Top Ten Shootout
They rattled off the top 3 finishers in each category, with the Speed Stop winner (Todd's EVO), Track day winner (Louis' ZR1), the design competition winner (Rodney Moore's beautiful 1970 440-six pack Cuda), then they rattled off the autocross winners... I wasn't third, I wasn't second, then they rattled off "with a time of 30.5".. hey, didn't I run that time? "Terry Fair". Whu.. hey, that is me?! I was completely FLOORED, as I thought all along I had done no better than 3rd place in the cone carving. On stage they asked me, "How did you get through that tight course so fast?" I said something like "I tried to make the car as narrow as I could!" Did I mention that cameras make me stupid? I probably looked like
Ricky Bobby in this clip for every TV interview I did. "I felt like I was in a space ship..."
After they did the complicated math for the 5 scored categories, the overall placings were: Todd's EVO in first, L3w1z' ZR1 in second, and my Mustang + Brian Finch's Camaro tied for third. The two invitees to the "big show" in November ended up being two excited entrants with interesting stories (both of whom did the "Long Haul" for HOT ROD's Power Tour) that weren't too terribly close to the top of the time sheets in any given event. Again, "spirit of the event" and all. Heck, after finding out that I placed 1st in the autocross and 3rd overall I was so relieved that I didn't care about not getting an Optima Ultimate Street Car Shootout invitation. Not much, anyway.
The Optima Qualifier Events - Should You Enter?
It's hard to describe how insanely fun and different this event was. The same mega-trailers that were at QuikTrip Park were relocated to the top of the hill at ECR in the early hours of the morning, again - I had never seen an autocross or track event of this magnitude, with this level of sponsorship support and camera coverage, especially at our little club track! The various crews of Optima series folks outdid themselves on Saturday with big man lifts and cranes out on course with manned TV cameras covering 90% of the 2.5 mile road course. They had AMB transponders; portable lipstick cameras on several cars in each session; multiple radio channels for TV crew, race control and corner workers; and the SCCA corner workers did an excellent job flagging, as usual. Lunch was delicious catered Bar-B-Q, free to all entrants, and the TV hosts + Optima folks + race control crew were all super friendly and professional all weekend.
Left: Our crew getting the car ready between sessions. Right: The plague of grasshoppers did a number on the cars!
This Optima series is run like nothing I have ever seen in the SCCA, NASA, or any HPDE group. Even pro level road racing series don't have crews that work like this. Amazing, slick, punctual, professional and well worth every penny of my meager entry fee. I got
so much track time, tons of autocross and speed stop runs, a cool T-shirt, free food, an unforgettable experience, and we might even see the little red Mustang on TV if we're lucky. Not bad for 230 bucks! After reading this, if you thought this sounds like fun, and you have an
Optima Qualifier event near you - by all means, do it! Sure, running on 200 treadwear street tires can be a buzz kill, but everyone is on the same type of tires (here's a hint: use the Michelin PSS!). Yes, there are some tuner shops' crazy cars and a few semi-professional drivers that are regulars in the series - but as you can see, three local NASA regulars did pretty well in the overall results at this one.
Just be prepared for a little more emphasis on the TV show aspects than the straight forward competition events you may be used to, but it was still very competitive. Not knowing the standings from each event in real time was frustrating, but all part of the show! Go in with the right mind-set and you will have a blast. And who knows - you just might end up on TV (they will be filming at several Optima Qualifiers and making a series of shows leading up to the November shootout; I'll post up when we know when/if this event's show goes to air).
What's Next?
Man, its been a week and a half since this event and I'm still smarting from the poor placings in the Speed Stop and Track portions. I will look back, remember all of the things wrong with the car, and just shake my head. There was nothing we can do about the steering rack for the past few months (short of pulling one from a wrecked 2011+ car), but the brake booster issues, crappy tires, spring rate/set-up problems, and unscrubbed tires and brake pads were all bone-head mistakes that could have been avoided. I didn't take this event serious enough to do any testing on the NT-05s, where we could have made some adjustments. Knowing how much TV coverage this event got I wish I could go back and do some things differently. Hindsight is 20:20...
It's hard to follow that crazy event with a lowly track day or autocross, but that's what we've got planned. Luckily we had two weeks and a weekend off of any sort of racing, to recover. Ryan has already rebuilt the Mustang's front calipers (dust seals, hardware, new brake line, new fluid, etc), swapped out to the softer springs, and fixed a number of little things that plagued the Mustang over the Optima weekend - I'll cover this in my next thread update. The Mustang has a
few more track events to attend this year before we move it to a more dedicated ESP-autocross-only preparation plan for the remainder of 2012. We're taking it back to ECR again for an HPDE "fun track day" Saturday, June 23rd. For details on how to sign up,
click here ($150, unstructured track day - join us!). We'll run the 315 Kumho V710s, the "old" (softer) spring set-up on the Motons, and I will play with rear aero Angle Of Attack (AOA) at this event (we started to tweak this at the end of the Optima event).
Hopefully with these fixes and real R compounds the Mustang can crack the 2 minute mark (I ran 1:57s back in 2008 with a junkyard 5.7L in the E36, having
zero track experience at ECR). The American Iron track record is 2:00 flat, so beating that is the goal. Amy is bringing our E46 330 "TTD" car (shown above) for some laps on fresh 285/30/18 Hoosier R6s to try to outrun our existing TTD track record, which was a 2:12.9 (set by Paul Costas in our BMW 330, 2 years ago, on crapped-out Yokohamas). This car has been getting worked on lately, and is now streetable again (new high flow cat). Sunday I will swap out the rear wing for the spoiler and Amy and I will run the Mustang at an SCCA autocross at Texas Motor Speedway, testing the spring set-up changes on a known site and the known-good Kumhos. After that we have a 2 week break we will try to use to design and build some new rear suspension bits.
We've also started to finally attack another in-house project car, specifically with the goal to be able to enter these "wide open" street car type track events, like the Optima Challenge, TX2K, OLOA, UTCC, and more. This is using our white E46 BMW 330Ci chassis, a big nasty LS motor, with goals of light weight, lots of tire, and some custom aero. Check our
BMW E46 330 LS1 "Alpha" build thread soon for more details. We couldn't ever really find a good racing class to build this E46 LS1 swap mule for - everything we came up with had some goofy limitation or classing restriction. Building the E46 Alpha for these unlimited street car events let's us show some more of our race prep
services, tests our production E46 LSx swap parts, and yet keeping it streetable (working windows, wipers, lights, defrost, ABS) helps us relate to more of our customer's needs. It also lets us enter a variety of street car competition events with it. We've begun tearing into this car this week for a full-on "track terror / still streetable / no rules" build. Because if I do another Optima event,
I'm not going to take a knife to a gun fight again! 
Cheers,