Subaru Focus Day

Motor Sports Ranch, March 15, 2003

[Videos] | [Pictures]

First off, feel free to skip to the bottom. I'm a bit wordy at times. That is where the pictures and video are.

Second, I would like to thank Steve Harvey for putting this event on, finding the 100s of sponsors to give us stuff and for just generally being a bad a**. Also, thanks to all the sponsors that gave stuff away.

This is the 3rd focus track day I have done at Motor-sports Ranch and the first with other all wheel drive vehicles. Ivan and myself left Houston at 4:00AM Saturday, heading for DFW airport. Once there, Ivan rented the POS Ford Mustang LX. Webster has a picture of this thing for "slow." It is sad that it is even sold as a sports car.

After picking up the mustang for Ivan to drive, we headed to the track and arrived at about 10:00 AM. There was already a small crowd gathering. We prepped the cars and began to hurry up and wait for the main event to start.

I was driving my 02 black wagon (#01). I have made several subtle changes since last time I tracked the car. First, I have swapped the rear sway bar to a sedan rear sway bar (slightly stiffer), I have switched to stainless steel bake lines and I have had the car aligned. The combination of the stiffer sway bar in the rear and the alignment has rebalanced the car slightly on the over steer side (the way I like it). However, the car now has very bad turning characteristics in coast. Under power or even braking it cuts corners great, but while coasting, the back end slides around. Oh well. You can't have everything.

For the lead follow sessions, I was lucky enough to be in the line with Jack Farr (owner of MSR) leading. I learned a great deal by watching his line, particularly where he did NOT come all the way to the apex. After the mandatory 2 lead follow sessions we started the hot sessions. My first session wasn't the greatest. I was over driving the car, and going accordingly slow. The changes mentioned earlier hurt me in Rattle Snake where it took almost the entire first session to figure out how to get slowed down coming off the front straight (about 105 mph) and into 2nd gear so I could be under power at turn in. On the other side of the coin, I got much faster in ricochet (now I go through at WOT in 3rd without only a momentary partial lift at turn in). I also figured out how to do the back 3 turns as 1 long sweeper and was driving them under 50-100% throttle in 3rd so that I was at red line in 3rd at the exit. Not bad.

The second sessions was better as a whole. I got into a rhythm and began to improve through rattle snake and at the end of the back straight. Towards the end of the session, I was pushing very hard. More than once I put a wheel or 3 off (I actually got 3 wheels off at one point, only keeping the inside front on track). Several times, I went into big bend to fast and got the car into a 4 wheel drift. The last time, the car spun hard. Oh well. It had to happen sometime. At least it was at the end of the session.

After the hot sessions, we had the door prize drawing, where everyone but Ivan won at least 1 thing (no really, almost everyone got something - there were 100s of prizes and most people had left). I won a front strut brace.

Video

Andrew's in car video:
Hot Session 1: [hi-res(103mb)] |[lo-res(33mb)]
Hot Session 2: [hi-res(85mb)] | [lo-res(28mb)]
I have in car video from the lead follow sessions if any one wants it. Just email me. It isn't very interesting though.

Lightbringer's Video: [Video 1] |[Video 2] |[Video 3] |[Video 4] |[Video 5]

Photo Albums Pages

• Pictures taken with the "community" digital camera by Alex, Ivan and Andrew. - 31 images
• Torch's Pictures - 48 images
• kovalov's Pictures - 17 images