Catching up.

It's been a while since I've scratched the blog itch. A lot has happened to me personally (and all of it was good), just haven't made much progress in the motorsports arena. The car is finally reliable (as a hammer!) and I’ve had the chance to autocross several times since last I posted. One was with my brother as co-driver (I'll post the video below), and another with a local hotshoe as co-driver. I've really enjoyed having someone else show up and drive the car with me, both for the social aspect, and in Ian's case having a competitive driver drive while I sat in the passenger seat. That alone has helped improve my driving as much as anything. To a lesser exstent, riding shotgun is also an excellent way to memorize the course, which at my level is another competitive advantage.

In the case of riding with my most recent co-driver, I learnt a few things that are worth passing on:
1. Smooth may be good, but it's also okay to make abrupt steering inputs, and it didn't seem to upset the car (which was surprising).
2. The shortest route around the course is generally the fastest, but in the case of a low horsepower car (such as mine), maintaining momentum is crucial and at times this means taking a wider path around corners for the sake of maintaining speed.
3. There is no substitute for looking ahead.
My driving has improved quite a bit this year, inspite of having lapses as much as 2 months between events. I’ve moved my car up from somewhere near the bottom to somewhere near the middle in terms of time. And that’s satisfying.
We are out of town at present, I'll hopefully be able to front for one of the two local autocross days that are coming up on October 18th and 19th. Meantime I'm still working on finishing my latest Megasquirt install - this one has some added circuitry. I now have a shift light, electronic boost controller, ability to switch fuel and spark tables on the fly, EGT monitoring, knock sensing, water injection control and a few other things (I can't remember them all). I have an hour’s worth of soldering to complete (and it’s with tiny strands of fine gauge wires, which I hate), a connector to place on the end of the case and a few other bits and then I need to wire up a harness for the new accoutrements. I'm also building a fuse and relay board to support all the changes. Should be electrifying! I'd like to test it on the bench before I install it in the car, still wrestling with the simplest way to do this. I have a new version of the Megasquirt stimulator (“ Jim Stim” ), it has 6 ADC (analog – digital circuits) outputs that can trigger an LED, I need to find out how to use them. Failing that, I’ll hook it up to my multimeter. Which I just fixed with a paper clip and duct tape  . My next project will probably be building a car completely out of paper clips, duct tape and crazy glue – I seem to use all three a lot.
Oh, and I have a 16 valve engine in the basement. I had to get on the wrong end of a 12 gauge shottie to retrieve it. I'll share that story at a later time.

Anyway, here's a sample video from May: