Category: motorsport

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24 Hours of Lemons videos

Test day

Yesterday we had a pretty good test day at Altamont. All of us did a few laps behind the wheel to get a feel for the car and the track. The car ran very fast and we all did 54 sec laps with Jyri doing a best of 52. We did have some tire wear issues with our right front tire due to the long banked turns – we will be doing some emergency camber adjustments to the front to fix that.

Here is a photo of me passing someone on the outside of the banking and a video of Jyri doing some quick laps under lights.… Read the rest

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24 Hours of Lemons

Seat Time

One of the most expensive parts of the Lemons car is the seat – a good fiberglass seat will run you at least $500 dollars and even an aluminium seat will cost $300. Now if you are preping a regular race car thats not a problem, the seat will usually last the lifetime of the car. In our case the car will most probably last only 1 race and it did not make too much sense to spend more than the cost of the car on just one seat. Enter Terry Griffin and Griffin Motorwerke, the west coast Recaro distributor, who offered to lend us a Pole Position seat and the associated mounting hardware.… Read the rest

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24 Hours of Lemons cars

Days 4 and 5 – Its all about the cage

One of the most important pieces of safety equipment for any racecar is the roll cage. Having seen one car flip in July event, we knew that this one part we we had to take very seriously. The official rules for the race only require a 4 point roll bar and a door bar, but we decided to go all the way and get a full roll cage instead. In fact, one of the reasons we went with the E30 was availability of several bolt-in roll cages for the spec E30 market. After looking around for a bit and contacting several companies, we decided that an Autopower roll cage was the way to go.… Read the rest

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24 Hours of Lemons cars videos

Car Prep Day 3 – Its alive

Day three of car prep was all about getting the engine running. At this point we had had the car with us for several months but we hadn’t yet heard the damn thing run.

We started up by tightening up the head bolts and putting in a new timing belt. After that we adjusted the valve spacing (space between camshaft and valve stem) and began reconnecting that various fuel hoses and wires. We decided not to put the cooling system in until the engine was in running condition to give ourselves some work room in case we needed to replace any additional parts.… Read the rest

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autocross cars

3 wheeling GTI

Last weekend Nithya and I took our GTI to the GGLC Autocross at the Marina airport. The performance far exceeded my expectations and at 61.7 seconds I was actually the 3rd fastest driver in very wet morning session (the fastest Elise did a 64.x). Much of this was due to the fact that it had proper wet weather tires on, but the handling was pretty amazing – very predictable with some understeer at the limit. It did of course feel quite a bit heavier than the Elise but the direction changes were quick and chassis was very forgiving. As the track dried out I lost my performance advantage over the elises but as you can see in the photo I did manage to get a wheel off the ground 😀

3 wheeling GTI
Photo by norcalturbo

This was also the first Autcross for Nithya as a driver.… Read the rest