Do any of you use Twitter? If you do, and you want to keep up with some of the smaller behind-the-scenes goings-on at PansyPatrol, you can follow me: @Clint47.
You should also check out the people from Atlanta who are using it to find cheap gas. Plenty of Twitter users comment on where to find cheap gas, but as of 4 days ago or so Atlanta users have begun tagging their posts with #atlgas to make the posts easily searchable. If you want to check it out (or if you live in Atlanta and need gas) go to search.twitter.com and search for #atlgas.
As reported by wired.com, the German Supertuner RUF is developing an electric version of the Porsche Cayman. The car will likely produce 201 bhp and 479 ft-lbs of torque, with a top speed of 125 mph and a range of around 175 miles. There is no definitive word yet on the final weight of the car, or what is acceleration figures will look like.
This car will compete with the Tesla electric roadster. Although it has less horsepower, it has significantly more torque, which may put it in and around 4 seconds for the 0-60 mph sprint.
The car will officially be announced in about a month, and hopefully more details will be forthcoming at that time.
Thunderbolt Raceway is a fast 2.2-mile course with moderate elevation change, several high-speed right-hand corners, a challenging right-left sequence (known as the Octopus), and plenty of runoff. NJMP claims 14 corners, though in reality there are 10 or 11 distinct corners and a further three slight curves. There are two alternate chicanes and, technically, four different configurations, though these chicanes change the course very little. The track is new, having opened earlier this summer. The asphalt, with a few exceptions, is fresh, smooth, and unpatched. Grip is very consistent throughout the course. Curbing is wide and usable in most corners, though the combination of paint and sand (the soil of the track site is very loose and dusty) can make the curbing too slippery in isolated places. It has parallels to Lime Rock and Watkins Glen; if you’ve been to either of those tracks you’ll be well-prepared to learn Thunderbolt.
The Governator has signed a bill that will ban text messaging while driving. The law comes into effect on January 1, 2009. It specifically bans the reading, writing, and sending of text messages while operating a motor vehicle. First time offenders will be fined $20, which will ratchet up to $50 for subsequent offense.
As with most feel-good safety laws to this effect, this law sounds solid on its face, but I foresee a number of issue of actually putting it into effect. The first question has to do with enforcement. How will the Police actually enforce the texting ban? Will it be a primary offense, or a secondary offense (i.e., can you be pulled over specifically for texting, or do you need to be pulled for something else, and then they can cite you for texting). Either way, there is the very real issue of how a police officer can actually tell if you someone is texting or not. Does looking down count as probable cause? Can the officer demand to see your phone and check your texting history without a warrant?
Then there is the “sending” part of the law. Reading and writing text messages I can understand as being problematic, but sending? All you do is press “Send” and then the PHONE deals with everything else. So what part of “sending” a text message exactly is illegal?
I imagine that this law will mostly come into play where someone was texting and then is in an accident, rather than being targeted as a primary offense (short of swerving randomly because you were focused on texting). But even then, there will still be the 4th Amendment issues of search and seizure, and whether an officer requires a warrant.
Here’s a clip of a few of my better laps from this past Monday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. I manage to get by a supercharged Mustang Cobra, an E36 M3, a Spec Miata, and a Jaguar E-type. This was probably the best the Protege has done at NHMS, and these are some very solid laps. You can see, for example, that some of the drivers I get by take an ineffective line through the complex of turns off the main straight. This allows me to make up a lot of ground.
Also, we’ve added a little music to our video for the first time. Normally that isn’t our thing at the Pansy Patrol, but when you cut a quick video and it happens to be exactly as long as the song from the Porsche scene in SuperTroopers…well, how can we resist?
When it comes to the Protege (or any other really low-powered car), getting killed on the straights by high-powered cars is just a matter of course. This RX7 was putting down 463whp (yes, that’s to the wheels) and had some very big slicks. He does a pretty good job of making me look slow, and later in this session, he lapped me. But he was lapping everything–even Elises. With more than four times the power of the Protege, I guess that, for this RX7, lapping slow cars like me is just a matter of course.
I’ve often heard drivers at all levels opine that in order to really push the limits of your car, you have to spin occasionally. I reject this philosophy. While it will certainly show you that you have exceeded the limits of your car when you spin, there is more to flirting with the limit than simply spinning it. In fact, depending on how violently you spin, you may not even gain any definitive knowledge of where the limit is or how to play around with it. If you enter a 60 mph corner at 80 mph and spin, for example, at best, all you’ve demonstrated is that there is no way you can make it through a corner 30% too fast. At worst, you just wrecked your car.
The key to finding and pushing the limits of any car in any corner is to do so gradually. You start slow, say 6/10, and gradually increase your entry speed and see what happens. This approach is important because it keeps you in control of your car, which keeps you out of trouble. Say you enter that same 60 mph corner at 62 mph. You should quickly realize that you are too hot - the car may push or it may be harder than normal to rotate the car in and hit the apex. The difference is that at 62 mph you only have a couple mph to bleed off to keep yourself out of trouble, whereas if you were way too fast, you might not be able to recover.
Of course, people that say you should spin occasionally aren’t talking about going into a 60 mph corner at 80 mph, but I would argue that the same logic applies. In practice, where the limit is 10/10, you can push the car to 10.5/10 or so without necessarily having a catastrophic crash. You simply need to take evasive action to bleed off speed and keep your car on the road, which usually results in you being slower overall. My point is simply that if instead you keep the car between 9.5/10 and 10/10, you are still flirting with the limit, but you are flirting with it on the safe side of the edge. All spinning in a corner tells you is that you can’t do whatever you just did in that corner. But so does having to get on the gas later and more gently so that you don’t fly off the track. Or having difficulty hitting the apex. But these allow you to keep the car in control without putting yourself and others at risk.
It’s no secret that a well-designed exhaust is an important piece of any performance car. In designing an exhaust for my Stealth turbo, I outlined several characteristics which I considered to be essential: a turbo exhaust should be free-flowing, reasonably quiet, lightweight, and robust. A deficiency in any of these categories is unacceptable when performance is the goal, so I set out to design and build the best possible exhaust system.
Below is a video of a few laps of Thunderbolt Raceway in my ‘94 Mazda Protege. Nothing fancy here, just some good clean laps with no traffic. If you’re looking for fancy passes or crazy spins, you won’t find them here–but they’re coming, trust me. This video will give you a good sense of the course layout and how the corners can be approached. Warning: as this is pretty much just raw footage, the audio isn’t particularly good. Be prepared for a lot of wind noise.
We’ll have more on this later (including video), but I wanted to give just a few first impressions of Thunderbolt at New Jersey Motorsports Park.
I drove the track for the first time today, in the Protege. It’s a 2.25-mile course. NJMP’s people say it has 14 corners, but a couple of those are slight corners that really become just slight swerves. In reality, it’s more like 11 or 12 corners.
The course is very fast–so fast that I saw 104 at the end of the main straight, the highest speed I’ve ever seen on track in the Protege. At Watkins Glen I see 101 on a good day, and at NHMS I can’t even break 90. There isn’t much elevation change, but what change there is is great fun. Corner two is a high-speed uphill right with a blind track-out point. Think the uphill at Lime Rock, but shorter and faster.
The later part of the course, before the esses that lead on to the main straight, is a complex of interesting turns that are very tough for the Protege because it’s not stiffly sprung. A sweeping right becomes a tighter right that can be double-apexed. This follows immediately into a long slow left-hander called “the octopus”. Getting the car settled going in is critical, and compromising the end to set up the esses–a la corner 2 at Watkins Glen–is even more important.
A more detailed track report and quite a bit of video are coming. All in all, Thunderbolt is a fantastic course and would probably be even more fun in a car that had 250hp instead of my Protege’s paltry 130.
