Alright, so the other night me and Peej slept over Rich's house in Bordentown (for those of you who don't know, Rich is one of our good friends from the Jersey J's car club, who owns his own house and is kind enough to always leave the door open for us). So this morning we all wake up (amazingly, PJ is the first one up) and head to ATCO Raceway. Rich just installed a few new parts on the car that allow us to tweak its state of tune with a laptop, so we're trying to dial some stuff in.
At first, I wasn't going to run my car, because it's had this horrendous noise at low rpms in gear, under load, and i hadn't for the life of me been able to figure out what it was... Sounded like a broken motor mount or something. Well, I said @!#$ it, I'll go, I'll run, and if the noise is a part thats partially broken or about to break, it will break when i launch and at least I'll know what it is. Well, sure enough, three hard runs later, the noise has DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY... WTF?? Lol, I'm not complaining... Although I did say to the guys that I thought the noise must have been the car's way of telling me to stop driving it like an old lady and get it to the track and drive it like it deserves to be driven.
Anyway, there were a buttload of wicked fast cars there... too bad there were more fast cars than there were competent drivers... There was an 11 second street-driven Audi S4, about half a dozen EVO 8's, a Lancer Ralliart (which look incredibly hot in person... I dare say they LOOK better than the EVO, but they're slow), and probably another 6-7 SRT-4's.
Me and Rich ran over to watch some of the EVO's run, and were sorely disappointed. Its sad that the only people with money enough to buy that car couldn't drive it if their lives depended on it. It should be a 13.5 second car at the least with a competent driver. Only two of them were faster than that, the rest were well over 14's... ICK!! It's AWD for christ's sakes, rev that sucker up to 6 grand and @!#$in go!! Its not like you're going to spin FOUR high performance tires.... Arg...
The SRT4's proved to have just as many, if not more incompetent drivers in their ranks. These cars have limited slip differentials and really good tires... I have an open diff, less power, and way @!#$tier tires.... AND I WAS GETTING BETTER SIXTY FOOT TIMES!!! WTF??? I wanted to go up to the one guy and just tell him to turn in his keys cuz he doesn't deserve a car that fast. Then, to make matters worse, we were checking out their cars in staging, and two of them had boost controllers really obviously mounted in the engine compartment.... I don't know why, since the srt4 wastegate is ADJUSTABLE, but regardless, if you can't drive at 14.5 psi, you sure as hell can't drive at anything over that....
THEN there was the female SRT4 driver, who although cute, apparently knew nothing about cars that her boyfriend hadn't told her, and he obviously didn't know much. She was running so inconsistently it boggles the mind. Mind you, and SRT4 should run between a 14.0 and a 14.5 with an average driver. She hadn't broken into 14's all day... 15.5, 16, EWWW what are you doing in that car??? Anyway, we were talking to her, because she was cute and cute girls with fast cars are that much more attractive (not as attractive as girls who can ACTUALLY DRIVE their fast car though). Well, we were giving her advice like the kindhearted gentleman (read: dirty minded perverts hoping to score) we are, and after a while she asks if we're on any forums online. I tell her "Yeah, we're on J-Body.org and VWVortex". So she asks me what i drive and I tell her the beetle over there, and she gives me the standard "awww thats cute... what's it run?" To which i respond 15.5. Then she asks what J-Body is, and I tell her its a cavalier forum, and she now realizes that Rich is the owner of the blue cavalier she had seen earlier. So she chuckles a bit and asks him what it runs. To which Rich replies, "oh, its not that fast, but my best so far is a 14.1". Her jaw hit the asphalt and her eyes got wide enough to mount a set of 18" wheels in the sockets. I wish we had gotten the look on her face on video... PRICELESS. Then she makes a fatal error...
"I thought that car was just some riceboy running 18's" Rich forced a smile even though he wanted to throttle her and proceeded to go back to his car and hook up the juice
. SHe should know her engine was designed in collaboration with Mitsubishi, whereas Rich's motor was designed by europeans, making her Dodge more "rice" then his Chevy. Beyond that she had those gay ass APC retro taillights, and nothing is more rice than that.
To make the story even funnier, her next run, she misses second gear... THREE TIMES in the same run, and runs..... an 18.... who's the ricer running 18's now?!
So despite Rich almost blowing a nitrous bottle out the backside of his car when his bottle heater malfunctioned, causing dangerously high pressure levels, which luckily was caught before he made a run, it was a good day. A lot was learned, a good time had by all, and I helped a few fellow Vee-Dubbers out by giving them launch and shift point advice.
Oooo I forgot... My last run of the day, this kid with a new Jetta 1.8T comes up to me, wants to race claiming he doesn't "have anything special". So i'm like, hell i'll run ya, whatever. Well, I smoked him off the line and halfway down the track until he finally caught up (the turbo in those cars is slightly better in the top end than in my car) and passed me. He ran a 15.1 and I had screwed up and run a 15.9. Well, here's the gutbuster... His car was CHIPPED. At least $500 right there and he couldn't even break 14's. Meanwhile, my best time is only 4 tenths slower than him, and i'm running stock boost, stock exhaust, stock turbo.... This just goes to show you that a fast driver is more important than a fast car...
Well, that was our adventure for this week, tune in next week when mandy of the jersey j's comes along to try out her new 04 eco cav. Anyone else who wants to join the fun meet us at ATCO at 10 am.
Arrival Blue 04 LS Sport
Eco
Turbo
Megasquirt
'Nuff said
...I got the bottle pressure to around 1400 psi and said F@#* it and ran anyway. Ooh yea i forgot to say that i found out about this little malfunction as i was getting ready to stage, so you can imagine how much i was scrambling to get things straightened out!!!
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