Fairly soon, you’re going to start seeing those same tired old articles about how to make sure your car “makes it” through the winter: Change your wiper blades. Use a gasoline additive. Put a shovel and blankets in your trunk (evidently so you don’t freeze when your car breaks down even after following the tips that are supposed to prevent breakdowns). These articles, which for the most part simply suggest that you perform the basic maintenance that any car requires (like replacing your wiper blades when they get old), are worthless. Here is what you actually need to do if you want your car to serve you well throughout a snowy winter.
Buy snow tires:
That’s really about it. You can keep reading the rest of my tips and suggestions if you want, but this is about 90% of the game. Snow tires make the biggest difference in your car’s ability to manage snowy or icy conditions. Regardless of what you drive—a truck, a FWD sedan, a RWD sports car, something AWD—the proper tire has the greatest effect on your vehicle’s limits. A top-level snow tire like a Blizzak WS-60 gives your car enough grip that you can drive fairly normally in all but the worst snow and ice. In my Protégé, for example, I find that I can brake about as hard in the snow with WS-60s as I do in normal dry driving. I have enough grip that I need to force myself to brake earlier than is reasonable so that the driver behind me, who probably doesn’t have snow tires, doesn’t hit me.
Track season is winding down. The last week of October, I’m going to Watkins Glen for 2 days and to Lime Rock for 1. Then the season ends, and with it ends the Protégé’s tenure as my primary track car. It’s given me 2 relatively trouble-free years. But it’s old, it’s tired, and it’s time for me to move on. Before I do, I thought I’d look back on my first track car, a 1994 Mazda Protégé.
The Protégé was never meant to be a track car. I bought it from a woman whose last name was Schmuck for a thousand bucks. It had 143,000 miles on it when I got it. It has 263,000 now. Even for a beater, it was slow in a straight line, and my friends deemed it the most innocuous car ever.
Even now, in “track” form, it’s pretty inept. It has the 125hp DOHC engine and rear disc brakes out of a ’93 Protégé LX instead of the original 102hp SOHC engine and rear drums. It has the mildest possible shock/spring upgrade, large sway bars, a full exhaust, racing brake pads, and Spec Miata-legal wheels and tires.
Misfortune and joblessness brought the Protégé to the track for the first time. In May of 2007, I took my VR-4 to Watkins Glen, where I proceeded to boil the rear brakes, destroy the tires, and bend 2 wheels (not from spinning, but from bombing through the bus stop and over curbing). Shortly after, I was laid off and in no position to resurrect the VR-4.
Enter the Protégé. For the first few track days it still had the rear drums—meaning that it had no rear brakes at all. I discovered this to be the case during the first track day after installing the rear discs, when I trail-braked into the bowl at NHMS with working rears and pitched the car off the track.
By that time, the Protégé had already established itself as a sort of track-day oddity. It was by far the “slowest” and the worst car at every event. In a sea of Lotuses, Porsches, BMWs, and Miatas—all blending together—the Protégé was as blatant on the track as it was innocuous off of it. And it was fast, much faster than I expected and much faster than other people could believe.
I’ll be at Lime Rock Park today for another SCDA track day. I haven’t been to LRP since they resurfaced the track, so it should be interesting. Pictures and video will be up shortly after the event (provided the Protege behaves), and you can also follow along with me throughout the day on Twitter (@Clint47). If you don’t see me update for a while, either the Protege has failed or I’ve had a misfortune too complicated to express in 140 characters.
Those of you who are replacing front wheel bearings on your Mazda may find this information useful—particularly if you road race, auto-x or generally drive you car very hard.
There is a noticeable difference in design between the Timken replacement wheel bearing that you can buy at any Autozone, NAPA, or VIP Auto Parts, and the factory Mazda bearing available from the dealer.
The Timken bearing has a rubber-coated grease seal on both sides, and the inner race can move quite a bit, even with a new unit straight out of the box.
The factory Mazda bearing, however, is sided. What Mazda specifies as the “inner” side has a beefy, non-rubberized ring between the outer and inner race. (Yes, the bearing comes with a small sheet that explains the correct orientation and installation.) The inner race itself seems thicker, and there is much less initial play. Side by side with the Timken unit, the factory Mazda bearing feels heftier and better built.
My hope is that the better quality bearing will solve the premature failure issue I’ve been having:
My Protégé has been failing wheel bearings at an alarming rate this summer. This bearing—the Mazda one—will be my third. Because the track that I visit most often (NHMS) is a left-hand track, the right front of the Protégé is subjected to high and sometimes jarring loads.
The mode of failure is always the same. A typical wiggle test shows no play, but when I remove the knuckle from the car, I can produce the slightest amount of axial play. There is never any radial play. Now that I’ve seen the reinforced inside of the Mazda bearing, my suspicion is that perhaps the design of the Timken unit causes the inner race to be easily damaged during installation. It’s also possible that the design allows the inner race to move under load during hard driving. Without some testing, it’s impossible to know for sure.
5 track days remain this season. That should be enough to put the new Mazda bearing to the test.
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.
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.
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.
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.
