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August 17, 2007
Highs and lows
I think every hobby has its highs and lows. The highs are when you are really into it. You're dealing with your hobby -- in this case your tuned car -- almost every day and you're involved to the max. The lows are when the interest sort of gets sidetracked or goes away, maybe just for a time, maybe forever. There was a time when I posted at ClubRSX every day and knew just about everything that went on. Then a time when interest sort of went away. I wrote about that in my last post, more than a year ago.
So an update is overdue. After that big win in October of 2006 I was determined to go back to the track and finally run consistent low 13s. In fact, the very next week, late in October of 2006, I put my Hoosiers in the trunk and headed for Sacramento Raceway. Jacked up the car to replaced my street wheels with the Hoosier wheels but, alas, I had forgotten the special key for the locked lugnut that keeps fancy wheels from being stolen. So no Hoosiers. Worse, once racing began I seemed to have forgotten how to shift. I missed third twice, and then, actually managed to shift from second back into first. The engine, of course, howled in protest and things could have gone really bad in a hurry. Fortunately, I instantly jumped on the clutch and so the transmission wasn't blown. Still, I coasted the rest of the way and then did just one other run, scoring a miserable 14.3.
Had I done something to the engine? K-Manager did find an "Engine Over-rev" code. Not good. The car seemed to run fine, but I didn't trust it again. I stopped by Comptech in El Dorado Hills for something, and asked if we could do a leakdown test to see if a valve was bent. That had to be postponed. Ryan told me a new tensioner was about ready and I should stop by the first week of 2007. I forgot.
What happened next was sad. I went back to Comptech in March or so, just to find that the company was in the process of being dismantled. Shad Huntley had left to start his own shop, Driving Ambition, in Gold River, California. Almost everyone else was gone. There were no tensioners.
So my 2004 RSX Type S just sat. I didn't want to race it not knowing if something was wrong with a valve. Eventually I learned that Comptech sort of lived on. The machinery was sold to one company, and one of the Comptech sales staff took over most of the aftermarket inventory and started a new Comptech shop in Rancho Cordova.
I contacted Shad at Driving Ambition to see if he had one of the new tensioners for my supercharger. He had one, but that was spoken for. And that is how things remained for several months. So my car sat in the garage. Then Shad called and said he now had a tensioner. We set up an appointment, the new tensioner was installed and a compression test gave the car a clean bill of health. Yeah!
I went to the track that very day, in the high heat of the summer, and had one of those nights where I was in a zone. My reaction times were on the button every time. No mis-shifts, no wheel spin, everything went perfect. Even my opponents cooperated by either sleeping through their lights or grossly misjudging their dial times, or both. I ran 11 races that night, and ended up braking before I crossed the finish line 10 times. It was boiling hot and I did not want to wear my helmet, so I dialed a 14.0, the cut-off for needing to wear the helmet. Attendance wasn't great due to the heat and so the eliminations proceeded quickly. By 9PM we were done and so the organizers decided to do a "King of the Track" shootout. As the winner of one of the two import categories I raced the other import winner, a Nissan 350Z, and won. The final race was between me and the domestics winner, a Corvette that ran low 12s and had entertained the crowd with fierce burnouts the whole evening. Well, he slept while I nailed another launch, and easily won. The RSX was back, and I had won "King of the Track."
Posted by conradb212 at 2:45 PM