Thursday, March 10, 2011

Drumrole, please





So where do I begin? After dodging the stalk for 40 plus years, my time has come; Yup, I’m going to be a dad! My little dude will be arriving on May 21st of this year and I can’t wait. With that good news, I’ve come to the realization that a two seater sports car may not be in the cards. So I’m going to have to bid adieu to my project Z and find a ride with similar sporting attributions but with a back seat and user friendly, make that infant friendly, trunk. The options are wide open; I could stick to a tried and tested Nissan product and purchase a 4-seater version of a Z; the G35 coupe, a very capable machine if rather portly or go back to rotary power and find myself in the great handling, albeit somewhat anemic RX-8. Then there’s my favorite front-wheel drive classic, the VW GTI and the track/street standard, the BMW 3-series. I’ve also seen some rather good deals on Audi S4s but the cost of ownership as well as a rather thirsty V8 has me on the sidelines. Well the hunt is on for the next track/street toy; target day somewhere before the holidays so I’m in no immediate hurry as we are focusing on the wife’s car first; she has to give up her convertible Saab 9-3, moving to a Saab 9-3 Sportscombi…she is far from happy…. Hey it looks cool, right?

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Autocross with Speed Ventures

Yup an amazing day awaited me for my first ever autocross event.

I had a blast and all for $80.00! I had multiple runs on the tight cone laden course, loosing control a few times and eating some cones. Oh and the Z is a pig; all power with very little finesse. The lack a of a limited slip diff and narrow old tires really hampered my efforts; spinning my tires on every exit as I tried to accelerate smoothly following the slow-in, fast-out formula.


The 235 tires in the rear tried to hook up but the old and close to slick fronts just wanted to plow. I dropped the front tire pressure to get some more bite but just could not break 44 seconds. The V6 pulled really well but by comparison the fastest Z was at 40 seconds and a race prepped G35 coupe with gutted interior and Cosworth heads was hitting 38.2. I focused on my technique as best I could and tried to gingerly move the car through the cones, concentrating on the line as opposed to time but as soon my confidence would rise and I would try to coax the car a little faster, either the rear end or front would let go, real fun stuff, I loved it. Overall an amazing day of driving and meeting some really good folks from Rare JDM. The competition we had was a lot of fun with Zack from Rare JDM laying down the bench-mark in his Redline Time Attack G35, very impressive. The Z performed as well as it could considering what it had to contend with; a rookie driver. As they say the best modification to go faster is seat time at a track.







I’m also glad I took the time to slowly prepare for my first event as it gave me the confidence to push the vehicle without any worries. The engine revved nicely thanks to the light flywheel and stopped very confidently. As mentioned, I changed the engine oil prior to the event but also did some other upgrades too. I wanted to address the ping I heard on occasion so I replaced the JWT pop-charger and went back to the stock air box. I did some looking around on the web and a slight ping between 2500-3500rpm appears to be a frequent issue with the VQ35DE engine. Now with the stock air box and ECU rest procedure it looks like the issue has been resolved. On a plus side a few months ago I purchased a Megan Racing Y-pipe as well as an SR*S (can you say NISMO copy) exhaust system. Matching these two separate units equals a single cat-back exhaust with a 3” diameter. The system utilizes all the stock hangers, is a good deal lighter than the stock system it replaces and supposedly adds 15 horsepower of which I’ll believe when I see the numbers on the dyno report. The sound is amazing, really waking up the sporting nature of the car.
I doubt these slight changes added any hard numbers to the Z but more importantly they added confidence and further communicated to me the vehicle's abilities. So stay tuned for further adventures as I have an important announcement to make.