F-Body Europe

Hello All,

For those not in the know I blew out of Germany in late March under the cover of smoke grenades popping off in 360' formation.

Anyhow - I arrived at my new home in Fort Drum, NY late last month after a whirlwind tour of the US. I called it my reunification tour, 5000 miles in 2 weeks. Well deserved and needed after 6yrs abroad. The tour was quite enjoyable especially in my new BMW 335xi. (6sp, sport package, winter package, AWD).

Sitting in my new office (2BCT, 10ID) last week I determined that I had no immediate plans for the weekend so I began to google some options and found out that there was an SCCA event scheduled in Albany, NY. I emailed the event organizer and prepared to attend.

I was nervous in that I had heard (maybe from some of you all) that the events were much more regimented and pretty strict in their conduct. Bottom line up front, I found the group and the feel of the event to be as similiar to the Bitburg crew and nearly as fun (no TLF & dinner crews though)

Anyhow a few items of note for yall that I found interesting. I'll try posting some pictures later this week.

- Timing lights have been fabbed and mounted into milk crates to ensure ease of lining up the lights. (pictures to follow)

- Parking lot was 1/2 the useable space in bitburg. Laps were running around 30 seconds on average for both days. Parking lot had to be torn down and packed up at night (high theft area - no security)

- Start and Finish were two different locations - though this is product of technical ability and this isn't necessarily a comment on what is better - just merely an observation.

- Vehicles were as ecclectic as at bitburg - the fastest was a mean old wabbit with plexiglass windows.

- Vehicles were allowed to run with drivers window down

- Vehicles were inspected and if they were a full club & regional member - they received a valid inspection for the year.

- The course was "chalked" to show lines through the course. They used a line barrow and instead of chalk used bags of lime. I've since read that flour is cheaper even still...

There were more items of interest but at the moment I've been trying to author and publish this posting since lunch (it's 1700hrs now) - too much work and too little time.

Next weekend there's an SCCA event closer to home in Syracuse. So after that, I'll have a nice comparative between two different clubs / regions. More to follow

Hope all is well in everyone else's world.

-Ryan

Hey Ryan,

It's good to hear from you. I'm glad you're getting into the SCCA scene back home. You should see the supercharged GTO one of my NCOs drives. He needs a new clutch... Also, a '69 Firebird moved in just down the street from your old house. I told him about the forum and Bitburg, but he said he wasn't really into racing. I will continue to ping him from time to time. He obviously loves his car. He fiddles on it just about daily.

Oh yeah - that's chuck. He's lived there the whole while ...just picked up the car though. I helped guide him through the whole process as he was looking and getting ready to purchase.

Hey Ryan good to hear form you. Your buddy from Lux finally got the truck back together and did a run in April, blew a o-ring at the filter block off and sprayed the track. It pulled a 1002ps on a dyno 2 weeks before Bitburg. 2 years to put the Typoon back together to have it cook on the first run of the track.

He seems to do that on a semi-regular basis...or is it an annual basis now?

Well here are my results:

http://home.earthlink.net/~ejhonda/2008season.html

DS class...look at my times improving throughout the day. I was just too damned timid trying not to look like a fool in front of the diehard SCCA guys.

One thing that I found interesting was that there was the same number of diehard guys that would assist in the setup and teardown / packup ...and there was a number of people that shirked / avoided assisting in this critical moment.

I got some good props from a few guys for as much help as I provided. Of course they had their own way of doing things but I paid attn and was able to start figuring somethings out.

Good times.

Cool btw why haven't you answered my emails?

Did you send them to AKO?

ok. I will try to remember it all.