Wednesday, December 15
A Good Way To Get Fast
There are a few guidelines I like to follow when I’m modifying my car and doing research on it. I’d like to share a few.
Keep your modifications purposeful and straightforward. Don’t do anything extraneous just for looks or to be cool. Spend your money wisely, on things that will really improve your car.
Start with suspension and brakes. It may not be as fun as power mods, but it’s always money well spent. Think about it: if your car is really fast but your brakes are still stock, how are you going to stop when you need to? If you ever take your car to the track, you’ll find out just how important your brakes are. If your brakes suck and you have to get on them real early before a corner, you’re going to spend all your time braking and none of it accelerating! If your brakes are powerful and responsive, you can dive into a corner with lots of speed, quickly get your braking done, and streak through the corner at maximum speed. Most cars only need a good set of track-worthy pads and stainless steel brake lines to be ready for the track.
As you’re streaking through that corner, your car’s suspension is doing a lot of work. If your car has more power than your stock suspension is designed to handle, you’re in for some trouble. You’ve got to make sure that your car’s suspension actually works to keep the car in line at high speeds and while under high loads. If you look at how much money is spent on racecar suspensions, you’ll find that manufacturers spend thousands upon thousands of dollars not only on suspension equipment but the fine-tuning of that equipment. Learn from the pros: be sure to balance or pre-empt any engine mods with adequate suspension upgrades. Again, replacing your shocks with sport shocks from a reputable company like Koni or Tokico and substituting lower and stiffer coil springs will greatly improve handling on most cars. Some benefit from thicker anti-roll bars as well.
Even more important than anything you can put in your car is what you can do with it. As awesome as your car may be, if you can’t take it to its limits and hold it there safely, your ride is going to be a short one. Spend money on track days if you can, as they offer the greatest value in improving your driving. Autocrossing is good too, but it can take a lot of practice to learn how to be fast on a 60-second course. Drifting is pretty fun to do, but it’s challenging not necessarily a good way to learn how to be fast. You might pick up bad habits like yanking the e-brake after turn-in, or feinting the car as you approach the turn. It’s good to know how to control a slide, but being fast on a track is very different from getting sideways on a drift course.
Once you’ve upgraded your suspension and brakes and are starting to feel confident on the track, you’re on the way to having a fast car (and being a fast driver!) At this point you may feel ready to put a bucket seat, harness, and roll bar in the car. If you feel like you’re struggling to hold yourself in your seat while cornering hard, a good supporting bucket seat and five- or six-point harness will do the work for you. When you’re strapped in securely, all you have to worry about is piloting the car as smoothly as possible.
Now that you’ve learned to drive your car fast with a stock engine, you may be ready to add power. Add as much or as little as you feel ready for. If you want to learn how to use the full potential of your engine, stay stock for a while. If you’re ready to increase your power, do so carefully, making sure that the car doesn’t get out of control. You’ve got to be able to control the car before you can make it fast.
On a final note, be careful about what you buy. Research it. Read as much as you can about the product. Read the manual if you can to see what it’s like to install the product. You can often find out a lot about a company or a product just by reading their manual. Call the manufacturer and talk to someone in technical support. Tell them what you want to do and ask them a few questions about the product. How they treat you as a potential customer is a good indicator of how they’ll treat you when you come to them with a problem. Online review sites are often available for different cars, and some forums have sections where they discuss the pros and cons of different products. Use these resources to your advantage.
Follow these steps and it’s almost guaranteed that your car will end up exactly as you wanted it to be. It might take a little longer and require a little more effort, but it’ll be worth it.
The Tuning Process
Ooooh, the itch to modify.
I’m feeling it again.
You know you’ve got it bad when you’re up late cruising the internet every night, searching for exactly the right mod. Before you go to bed you imagine how cool it would be to drive the car with that awesome new part. You agonize over the decision of exactly which one you want, endlessly comparing the details of what’s best and what’s cool.
Even though you know you don’t have the money for it now, you call up the manufacturers and bombard them with questions about the potential upgrade path. Calm down! You haven’t even bought Stage One yet!
So here I am, scouring the internet, searching for my next mod. For the past few months I’ve been lusting over a Bride Exas III bucket seat. I’ve been saving, squirreling my money away, and I know I’ll be ready to buy it next month.
So what am I doing?
Looking for the next project.
That’s how it is with these damn cars. There is always something to change or modify. You have to accept this. Accept it as a project, and treat it as such.
The part of having a project car that I really enjoy is the anticipation of the new thing. I look forward to the fun of learning about and eventually installing some new product. I do think about how it will change the way the car drives, but the emphasis is on the process of “tuning.”
After all, what would the fun be in having a car you didn’t get to mess around with? If it was perfect and you never had to touch it, would that be any fun?
Maybe it would be fun for a while, but wouldn’t you start to ask yourself what you were going to do next? I know I would. Maybe you’re a rare bird who is able to stop when they’ve had “enough.” Good for you. Stop while you can. I’m in it for life.
I know two months ago when I couldn’t get the thought of Bride seats out of my mind, all I could think of was, “If only I had them, that would be so cool. I wouldn’t need anything else.”
But here I am, on the verge of buying them (just a few short weeks away!), and I’m already looking for my next project. They aren’t even in the car! Isn’t it pathetic?
In a way it is, but I’ve come to accept it. I enjoy spending money on my car, tuning it to my tastes, playing with it and turning it into something wholly mine, wholly cool.
It, like me, is constantly evolving and changing. Just accept it. Don’t fight it. Enjoy the process for what it is without feeling guilty or like you should stop.
Wednesday, December 1
What Would Happen If Drifting Went Mainstream?
One view is that drifting will go the way of the “sport compact Honda” market, with parts listed at low-low prices in Super Street and Sport Compact Car, and drift-poseurs on every corner, pretending to be super downhill technicians. First of all, what’s so bad about parts being listed in magazines? That’s only a good thing! The premium that you pay now for Tein coilovers and Bride seats would drop dramatically if mail-order warehouses picked up those lines. Second, there’s no way someone can pretend to be good at drifting. Either you are or you’re not, regardless of whether the car looks like it could. Drifting is all about the driver. I could never see someone being perceived as a drifter just because they have a cool-looking car.
Some alarmists say that once a few idiots crash their 240SXs and die horribly on some mountain road, drifting will get a terrible reputation and all the cops will be out to get us. However, sliding on the street is already illegal; how can they make it more illegal? If my friend Joe Beard was thrown in jail for a month for drifting, how much worse can the cops’ view of drifting get? If you’re worried about being profiled as a drifter, just make sure that your car doesn’t advertise the fact that you drift (no stickers, guys). If you’ve got wheels and an exhaust, you’ll just look like another “tuner” car, and that’s already bad enough. In any case, the only way you’ll be identified as a drifter is by drifting. So don’t worry; just don’t drift on the street. Let me say that again. Don’t drift on the street.
Regardless of whether or not the cops crack down on us, many people worry about how drifting will be perceived by the public. Video games like Need For Speed Underground and various other games already have drifting as an integral part of the game. Will drifting become the next “street race” craze? I doubt it. Any fool trying to drift race on the street will probably hurt themselves. Imagine sliding blindly around corners on the street. Anyone who has spent the time and effort to learn how to drift probably will not engage in street racing. They know the dangers, they know their limits, and they have often spent a lot of their own money on their cars. Would they risk their beautiful cars just for the sake of a foolish street race? I hope not.
Either way, some fools will probably give the sport a bad name. Why worry about that? Is that really different from how it was two years ago when no one knew what drifting was? Or how about now? Some people know about drifting, but most people don’t understand; they think it’s stupid. The idea here is that no one will ever understand. They will either not know, not care, or think the wrong thing. Don’t place too much importance on what people think about your sport. You can’t do anything about it, any more than you can convince Donald Rumsfeld that invading
There are still some people who say that drifting will never become main stream. I disagree. I recently communicated via email with the Washington-DC region SCCA chairman, who said that the SCCA was looking for volunteers in my area to run drift events. Grassroots Motorsports did a feature on the new
My view is that drifting will remain mostly a grassroots movement. The professional circuit will remain popular and may even gain national attention for events such as D1. I can’t see drifting becoming hugely popular. Lots of people want to go fast, but it takes a special type of person to want to go sideways. In addition to wanting to go sideways; you have to spend a lot of time and money practicing it. It’s a highly refined skill, and I can’t see your average Joe Tuner getting into something that actually requires time and effort.
So what will we see in the future? Parts will become more available. Some idiots will wreck their 240SXs on the street attempting to drift. D1 will continue to be the Holy Grail of drifting. And hopefully, Drifting magazine will come back. Somehow, however, I doubt that. Drifting is big, but not that big.
Drifting With Lookout Drift at Virginia Motorsports Park
Mike and I are up at the crack of dawn today, stumbling sleepily towards his 1986 Toyota Corolla. Why are we up so early? And why are there so many tires in the hatch of his car?
We’re going drifting.
The good fellows of Lookout Drift have now begun all-day events at their home course of Virginia Motorsports Park (VMP) in
This also means that we are going to drift all day.
Today we have decided to co-drift the Corolla, because Mike has no license. Otherwise I would have gone alone and drifted my car, but I figured we could go together and switch off drifting his car. Doing this will allow him to get another event in the season even though he cannot drive on the street, and it will allow me to drift his car as much as I want.
(For those of you who don’t know or have not read my “Drifting (A Corolla)” article, Corollas are, in my opinion, one of the finest drift cars ever produced. Even when mostly stock, they are able to drift quite well. Once modified, they can become supreme drift machines.)
We hit the course at
Aside from a break to get some tires mounted at around 3 PM (there’s a shop about half a mile from the track who charged us $8 per tire!) , we drifted from noonish til dark, which was about 8:30. When one of us took a break, the other drifted.
Unfortunately for Lookout but fortunately for us, only about 10 cars showed up (it was near the end of the season anyway and lots of people had school or work). There were several times that we would finish a run and drive around the back edge of the course, only to find ourselves first in line when back at the start gate.
I stopped counting after 20 runs, but I think we each got in the neighborhood of 30. At that point, we couldn’t see the cones any more and the Corolla’s low-fuel light was flashing frantically.
All in all, it was an incredible day. The course was great, the runs were plentiful, and the weather was pretty nice. No one’s car broke, which is also nice.
Thank you, Lookout Drift, for putting on this event. It’s not often you can drive home and say you got enough drifting for that day, but today I could.
The Scorecard:
Atmosphere: Good (the LKT guys are quiet but cool if you talk to them)
Organization: Excellent (great course, lots of runs)
Track Time: 30? (60 between the two of us) runs on a huge cone course
Competition: None – just practice today
Cost: $55 per driver
