Time Attack 60 + 61 -- OnGrid @ Ridge Motorsports Park -- New PB, lots of maintenance, saftey, and now comms!

After the previous event at ORP the C5 was confirmed to be pretty happy and functional, but a few critical came up that needed to be addressed before the event.

The largest issue was that a wheel stud had snapped on the rear of my C5 Corvette. I knew this was a potential weak point on my car and had already swapped all of the other wheels over to ARP studs, but I hadn't gotten around to it yet on this wheel, and it finally bit me in the butt.

Fortunately for me, I own a shop press, and while it's not a tool that I need often, when I need it nothing else will do. So in went a fresh set of 5 ARP wheel studs, and none to soon as another stud turned to taffy on wheel removal. I was on borrowed time!

Next up was comms. I've been having fun messing around with ham radio a buch this past year, and also found I enjoyed having comms on our lemons car. I also had a situation at the previous event where the track had gone all red due to an incident on track and I wasn't able to report in to my folks that I was indeed okay. Thus, it was time to get a radio in my C5 Corvette. I grabbed a simple Btech UV-25x2 25w mobile radio, which is VERY compact radio, and with some mild installation effort was in business. A few connectors and other bits later... and I had a ready to go in helmet radio setup!

One thing I needed to figure out was an antenna. Generally you don't want to mount antennas inside of a car... but when youre car is made of fiberglass it seems to matter a fair bit less. Here's the little UHF specific antenna I designed a roll cage mount for, nothing terribly fancy but for me it was pretty cool to be able to deisgn and print my own solution.

Speaking of wiring in a radio, one situation I'd been struggling with was power. I'd originally just started grabing power from whatever factory sources happened to still be present at the center console, but that was quickly becoming not enough. Thus I grabbed a little Blue Seas 6 Fuse Block and ran a dedicated run of power into the car. This will make installing anything needing power up front that much easier going forward!

Speaking of power... I got rid of my particularly rough DIY battery box and replaced it with a 3d printed box made of PCTG. This box wasn't exactly super light at 500g or so, but it's far more robust and non-conductive unlike my previous aluminum made box. This was an upgrade in a few categories and looks clean so I'm stoked.

The last area I spent some time was on improving my fire safety systems. While I already had the fire suppression system in my car from before, there were a few minor headaches, the biggest one being I couldn't get the disarming pin back in. So I fixed the minor headaches on the fire suppression system, and then finally got around to mounting up an extinguisher incase I needed it. Now I've got fire suppression, a fire extinguisher, and a fire safety stick, which I highly recommend as an easy solution to fire concerns.

The other thing I tackled was figuring out the HPtuners MPVI4 for my C5 Corvette. I needed to get it anyways to solve some problems on the Dead to Shred corvette, and I wanted better data logging as well, so it was the time to pick it up.I also have had long standing issues with the Time Attack C5 and idling, and honestly wasn't getting much help from some of the most established local tuners... so I took to trying some things myself and working with ChatGPT and making slow and controlled steps with pre determined risk assesments before I adjusted anything... and I simply got to working. Now the car is much happier to start and idle and stay running, whereas before it would really struggle. I also yet again know more about my car, so I highly advocate you dig into this yourself if you're even a little bit handy and tech capable. You can dip your ties in and tackle the small stuff, working your way up to the big ticket items as you go.

With all of the details wrapped up on the car, I headed north with my wife to stay with my friend Andy and his wife at an Airbnb not far from the track. It's an exceptional place with one heck of a view. At first I was a bit skeptical of the wisdom of spending the money on an Airbnb... but boy has it been nice staying there!

Day 1 Of the Event

Day 1 of the event started off great. We had secured a great garage space and were all setup. I tooke car for a quick test drive around the local area to get some temp into the tires and then it was time for the first session. Conditions were optimal in my opinion, with low 60 degree weather, some sun, mild breeze... things were looking good.

Sure enough, my first session out once I got the tires warmed up and feeling good I laid down a 1:47.63, an improvement of .2 seconds over my previous best. This had me feeling good, but I couldn't get too cocky, as a competitor had showed up and had put down a 1:51.1 seconds, which put them within a half second of my time and it was just their first session out on new to them tires. As the day progressed temperatures rose and times generally fell across the board for everyone, so I was in a pretty secure spot for the day.

I ran into this dude who is also with Podium wheels. Nice dude who shreds it drifting! Looking forward to catching him at a drift event and seeing what he's up to with Podium wheels!

Also of note, but somewhat cheesy... my car turned 60 events old at this event, so I celebrated with a small cake and a very very cheesy pose.

Day 2 & Time Attack Results

So don't let my picture of the event fool you... in the AM the track was socked in with fog and light sprinkles. Consequently ambient temps were in the low 50's, there was no sun to be had, and the track temps were cold.

The first two sessions of the day we all struggled to get temperature into our tires, and the track itselff was cold. Most folks were down .25 to .5 seconds in the top 10, though a few folks found some headroom in their setups.

Session #2 though is where my car shined. I was late to grid as I had gotten distracted chatting with folks and forgotten to gas up. Fortunately thanks to having comms and friends in the pits I was able to get gassed up and get out on track, I just had to go to the back of the grid as I'd missed the grid lineup requirement. No problem though... I'd just give everyone a gap and then send it, and send it I did! I ran a 1:47.31, a new personal best.

Time Attack Results

Leading up to the finals I wasn't quite sure I'd won. While my closest competitor had dropped a tenth of a second from his previous best the day before, the times were still not posted from the final afternoon session, and somebody jumping a half second as they figure tires out wouldn't have been unheard of... but lucky me they didn't and I was able to hold onto my lead and secure another podium finish!

Here's me and my wife and her hairy weiner posing with the award!

Next up for the Time Attack C5 Corvette

Now that the event is done I can take a deep breath and plan on what to do for future improvements. I felt the car still had some understeer, and I definitely felt the car was leaving some grip on the table. Thanks to having comms I was able to get tire temperatures for my car, and here's what I saw.

To me this says I need to pull a bit of camber out of all of the corners, but the fronts especially so with their significant jump from inside to outside. I plan on pulling 0.3 degrees of camber or so out of the tires, which in theory should help even the temperatures out a bit and perhaps improve grip and help out with some of the other issues I've had.

Outside of that though... I don't have any other gains in mind for the Time Attack C5. It's pretty dialed in. A local tuner is getting up and going and he specializes in tuning LS's supposedly and also prefers to work with folks to help them tune versus do the tuning for them... which is exactly what I am up to! So I may pop by with the car to visit this dude and get some stuff figured out.

Oh and speaking of tuning... the MPVI4 did not succesfully data log for me, which is a bummer. Having that data would really help.

I also really need to rebuild the rear differential and swap in a freshly rebuild one... but finding the time along with navigating ensuring I've got everything I need... oh man that's not proving so easy!