SONEAT at Speed...
Gayle Hastings Memorial Autocross
March 11, 2001
Blue Ridge Region Sports Car Club of America (SCCA)
Central Virginia Community College, Lynchburg, VA
Environmental
March in my area of Virginia makes me think that Murphy (of "Murphy's Law" fame) might have been a meteorologist. I took the snow tires off my cars and had to rush them back on... twice. I scheduled a new set of Kumho Ectsa Supra 712s for my Saab 900T on the first day of spring, and it snowed in Blacksburg! Considering March's penchant for madness in the atmosphere over the mountains of Virginia, I felt fantastically lucky to have great weather for the first autocross of the season.
New Racecar , Old Racecar to New Towcar
For the past couple of years I've been running my '86 900 Turbo in autocrosses. As a G-stock class car it has good power and grip, but it's too heavy and softly sprung for the tight and twisty courses favored by the local club. So I was thrilled to have SONEAT as my mount for this season. The 900 Turbo has been reassigned to tow-car duties.
Setup
SONEAT, for those who haven't been introduced before, is a 1968 Saab Sonett V4 that my father restored in 1984-85. The roof and rear bodywork have been modified and now the only protection from the weather is the windshield. The engine is heavily modded and my best guess on the horsepower is somewhere around 110hp. It still rides on the stock suspension but it rolls on minilite style wheels from a 1980 Saab model 96. Stretched over those wheels is some serious autocross rubber, Yokohoma 008 RS II tires, 225-50-15 in front and 205-50-15 in the rear.
ETA
It is a two-hour tow from my home in Blacksburg to the event lot in Lynchburg. My caravan (me and a buddy with a Saturn) leaves at 7:30 in the morning - half an hour late already. When we arrive I roll the Sonett off the trailer, raise the idle a bit (for autocross driveability), and then go register... $15 bucks, let's hear it for cheap thrills!
Walkabout
The course is already set up so I take a walk. Actually, I take 8 walks! I walk around the course to get an idea of what I'll be trying to drive in about an hour. There are no practice runs, so every walk around the course helps to burn it into memory for later, when it will be whizzing by like my puppy after my cat.
By The Way
At 11 o'clock the first runs start and so do I. I hop in SONEAT and roll off down the street to warm up the engine and transmission. Why do I need to warm up the transmission you ask? Well, understand that this is a Sonett and it still has the functioning freewheel in the transmission. I've found that if I don't warm up the transmission, I'm in danger of, at some point, ending up sitting on the course like I have no transmission at all, all vroom, no zoom, and no forward motion.
Please sir, may I have some more?
So it is my time to run... the start line is on an uphill slope so my start is a mess of spinning and spitting front tires... rubber and asphalt having a spectacular disagreement. When I finally get some forward motion, it's forward motion in a big way! Shift to second gear, up through a bus-stop chicane flat out and then turn right and head across the parking lot. This leads me into a very narrow left hand turn with no room for mistakes. No problem this time through (that would change later). Downhill into the tightest turn on the course, an off-camber-decreasing-radius-left (see picture)... hard on the brakes to make SONEAT stand on her head, toss her left, shift down to first (here's why I leave the freewheeling engaged) and scrabble through the turn. Use full "welly" to climb out of the turn, shift to second and get ready to flick right-left into a 180-degree left. Get through that and go back the way I came. Back through the tight off-camber-decreasing-radius-left that is now a tight increasing radius right...for which I shift down to first gear again and once again, I thank Saab for the freewheeling transmission. Roll onto the throttle and take off up the hill with all I've got. Now, instead of going back the way I came, I drive through a 4-cone slalom with progressively-decreasing-spacing. This was a disaster! I don't hit any cones but it isn't very pretty. While trying to catch a slide and still make the gate I wallop my elbow on the door... OW! Ignore the pain... ignore the pain... man that HURTS! But it's okay because the lap is almost over. I only have one more gate before the finish... I dive through it and haul on the binders to slow down to walking pace. I drive past the timing trailer to check my time. The whole rigamoroo only took a hair over 42 seconds.
Result?
I get 3 more runs at the course, eventually bringing my time down to 40.862 seconds. I push hard and almost "lose it" once (see picture), but at the end of the day I finish second in my class, 0.873 seconds behind the first place Honda CRX. I am satisfied with that result, considering the CRX's level of preparedness and the highly skilled driver racing it. 2nd to that pairing is probably the best I could have expected.
Low Points?
Without a doubt, a day of bad autocrossing is still better than the best day of work. So, there isn't much that I'd complain about but I want to mention a couple of interesting car problems that challenged me.
* One, the car tends to "bounce and weave" through some turns some of the time. I think this is shock related. I will have to ask my dad what the deal is with the shocks on the car and see about replacing them.
* Two, the car has an engine "hiccup" when braking and turning hard to the left. It wants to stall and appears to be starved for fuel. I can generally feather it through until it picks back up but this is not optimal for fast lap times. I'll be looking into some carburetor modifications to see what I can do about this.
Some statistics on the event:
* I finished 2nd in C- Street Prepared.
* My time was the 7th fastest time overall.
* That time was also 25th in the PAX (handicap time).
* The CSP class had 6 cars representing 3 manufacturers. (2 Hondas - a CRX Si and a Civic Si, 3 Mazda Miatas, and my lone Saab Sonett)
* There were 75 drivers entered in total.You can see the complete results from this event online at the Blue Ridge Region of SCCA website http://www.brr-scca.org/.
You can see all the pictures I've got from this event online at http://www.at-speed.goof.com/galleries/autox/03-11-01_lynchburg/index.html.
-STEFAN Vapaa