Reviewed: 2015 Mark 7 GTI 6-Speed - Comfy Canyon Carver
Peter Nelson
Making the most out of a less-than-24-hour trip to Los Angeles in a 2015 GTI from Turo.
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Atlanta
Making the most out of a less-than-24-hour trip to Los Angeles in a 2015 GTI from Turo.
Read MoreYeah, we know we're late to the party. It's been a busy year. Wanna fight about it? See what we're thankful for at TrackTuned.com
Read MoreEpisode 107 - Emilio Cervantes from 949 Racing returns and brings Dan Howard and Sonny Watanasirisuk on the show. These guys live and breathe racing. Listen as we talk about the history of their SuperMiata series, Dan's recent NASA PTE and TTE Western States regional championship, how to make miatas go fast, and how the 949 Team has become so dominant in nearly every series they have run.
Read MoreEpisode 106 - We are again joined by 2016 Pirelli World Challenge TCB Champion, Tom O'Gorman to hear about how the season ended for him, what in store for 2017, and learn more about the guy who has recently taken the sports car racing world by storm. We talk SCCA Track Night in America, Stock Cars, 24 Hour Kart races, and more.
Read MoreEpisode 105 - In a episode that was nearly lost to the depths of time, Austin is joined by Chris Thompson of Alpinestars to talk about safety equipment, various forms of racing, and to hear how the leader of one of one of the biggest names in motorsports safety equipment got into the industry.
Read MoreEpisode 104 - Professional Driver Robert Thorne joins us at #Gridlife Special Stage to talk about Rocket Anti-Lag, SCCA Solo Nationals, World Challenge, and a whole host of other things. Robert towed all the way from Colorado to Michigan for our silly time attack event..and brought one the of most bada$$ cars we've ever seen.
Read More103 - Brad Adams joins us on the mic for some rainy day coverage at #Gridlife Special Stage at Gingerman Raceway.
Read MoreWhat better way to spend Halloween than with coverage of and event from one of the only racing organizations that embraces costumes? Peter Nelson takes us to Buttonwillow Raceway for the LeMons race a few weeks ago.
Read MoreEpisode 102 - Austin and Adam are live during #GRIDLIFE Special Stage announcing one of the afternoon sessions. James Houghton hops on to talk about his session in the Time Attack Type R, and Austin and Adam tortue the crowd with an average #slipangle show of babbling.
Read MorePeter got into autocross heavily this year, and he capped it off by driving an old Honda halfway across the country to the National Championships.
Read MoreEpisode 101 or so - We're back at Gingerman Raceway from #Gridlife Special Stage with NASA Buddies Bill Griffin, Nolan Feathers, and Brad Adams. Bill recently ventured into motor sports headfirst building a Spec E46, Nolan hated #Gridlife but came to an event anyways and surprisingly had a good time, and Brad is....Brad.
Read MoreEpisode 100? Maybe? We are at Gridlife Special Stage with Abe Schmucker to talk about One Lap of America and Evos. Adam finds Arnold quotes, and Austin makes more crappy jokes. It was midnight, what do you expect?
Read MoreEpisode 99 - Rick Hoback and his team of newbie Lemons Racers gets on the mic after day of of their first Lemons race at Buttonwillow a few weeks ago. Most of these guys have never been on track before but they have one hell of an experienced driver acting as crew chief. See how the team made out on their first day.
Read MoreAdam and Jay are still on the way back from Mid Ohio, and talk about shocks, cars, racing, etc. Its 100% an acceptable thing to put into your ears for your commute home. We promise.
Read MoreEpisode 97 - Adam cruised to and from SCCA Runoffs with his good buddy Jay Haire, organizer of the ITRexpo events, and they recorded on the way home. They talked about all sorts of stuff, and not even all of it was Honda/Acura crap. Shocking....
Read MoreAdam and some idiot buddies (former guest of the show Scott Giles, one of the creators of Honda Challenge , and Bowie Gray) do live commentary and generally yammer on for 40 minutes during the STL race, and afterwards, Adam interviews more former show guests, Mike Taylor and Eric Kutil, about their race.
Read MoreEpisode 95 - Austin flew into town for the Gridlife Blackhawk Farms event, and stopped at Adam's for a late night hangout. The microphones came out and nearly 2 hours of randomnesss flowed.
Read MoreBuilding a FIAT Drift Car - the Pursuit of Lunacy
By Micheal "Ballin' " Beck
Part II
The morning of my inaugural drift event, I didn’t even want to get in the truck to drive to the track. All I could think about was the colossal idiot I was going to look like trying to drift an old FIAT. Why hadn’t I just kept my mouth shut on the podcast? If I hadn’t blabbed to the world I could back out of this and pretend like it never happened, maintaining some shred of dignity........but I didn’t do that. I had not only gabbed about it on my own podcast, I had done it on at least one, if not two others. So I was sort of committed. Podcast problems.
The two-hour drive to Raceway Park of the Midlands was remarkably short. So short in fact, when we arrived I looked for excuses not to open the trailer. “I have to use the restroom on the other side of the park.” “Is this trailer tire low, we should probably address this first.” But it was no use delaying the inevitable: I had to get the car out the trailer to be teched and swap tires.
Our trailer has large side doors which the salesman would like you to believe allow the driver’s door of the racecar to swing open past the threshold of the trailer, allowing you to enter or exit the car more easily. That’s a lie. Well, I suppose it’s not a lie if you own a lifted Jeep or an BMW Isetta. Basically the door isn’t low enough for the car door to open fully so you to stumble very ungracefully out the side of the trailer and face plant on the ground. Also, they do a marginable job of showing off the trailer’s contents. By merely opening the side door I could see people standing in the paddock, peering inside with a puzzled look. It’s going to be a long day. I pulled the car out and parked it on the other side of the trailer and changed to the 175 General Tires I had bought on Craigslist earlier in the week. I think I was feeling a bit ambitious while prepping the car thinking the puny Twin Cam would spin the dry-rotted Toyo RA1s at full chat. With the car sitting in the paddock looking about as out of place as Richard Branson at a soup kitchen, I was surprised when someone approached me and called the 43-year-old 124 “dope”.
“This is dope!”
“What’s dope?” “This is dope?”
“Yeah dude this FIAT is dope.”
“Wait… you know this is a FIAT?”
“Yeah, I think this is sick dude, I can’t believe you’re going to skid this. Good luck today man, have fun”
Apparently I had grossly underestimated the drifting community’s penchant for style. To give further credit, the attendees of the O Drift Collective event actually knew what a FIAT was, which is more credit than I can give to many other racing associations’ attendees. “What FIAT is this?” was the most common question I got, followed by “are you going to slide this? Dude, that is sick.” My fears turned out to be completely irrational.
The driver’s meeting was quite quick. Basically they just showed us the sections of the track we were allowed to drift in the morning and in the afternoon. Due to what I assume to be insurance reasons, we were only allowed to drift two sections of the track at a given time, with the sections changing after a break for lunch. The sections consisted of two or three corners with cones to mark the start and finish. You drift the first section and then you taxi to the next. Really the whole drivers’ meeting was quite refreshing: here is where you drift, here is where you don’t, don’t run over anyone and you’ll be fine. Good enough.
I was oddly calm as I approached the first section. I had been out on the track before with a gentleman named Luke who had been on our show earlier in the year. I kind of got the gist of how these things were supposed to work and the speeds at which you have to enter corners. If you’re considering trying drifting for the first time, I think the most important step you can take to prepare yourself is go to an event WITHOUT your car and get some ride-alongs. You’d be surprised the speeds at which you have to take some corners. As I’m preparing to start my section, I look back and see a white WRX behind me. “Is that a camera car?” I say to the starter. “No he pulled the front axles out apparently, he’s here to drift.” Yet another example of the endless style and joie de vivre of drifters.
“I guess we’re seeing how long of a burnout everyone can do. So hit it when you’re ready.” Hit it I did. I was able to get the FIAT to do a burnout through first gear and into part of second with the skinny 175 section tires. After that short lived distraction, I quickly realized my first corner was approaching. I don’t have a 5/10ths switch. I don’t do sighting laps, as dangerous and childish as that may be. So I was hammering towards the first corner as quickly as the little Twin Cam would allow, knowing based on my laps with Luke that I’d probably make it through the corner without understeering off.
Something I quickly realized after a couple laps of the track was I was on the wrong line. Even autocrossers or occasional track day enthusiasts will have a general idea of where the fast line is in the corner. If you are anywhere near that line, you’re in the wrong spot. I wasn’t staying wide enough entering a corner and my drift initiation consisted of turning slightly sharper than I normally would on a grip line and mashing the throttle. The car will do a slight skid in this case, but it’s not the correct way to set up a proper drift, I learned.
Around lunch time, Luke joined me on the track for a little instruction. Luke opened up my line and fixed my initiation. The key to starting a good skid, especially in a low powered car, is to do what you’ve probably heard of as a “Scandinavian flick”, or quickly turning away from the corner and immediately flicking the car the other way and applying throttle. This “flick” upsets the chassis and makes the car oversteer much more easily. Once I got a feel for the correct initiation, we started working on transitions. A transition is starting a drift in one direction, getting the car to grip, and then initiating a drift in the other direction in two (or more) subsequent turns, such as a chicane. This is extremely difficult. The Fiat, despite its skinny tires and 205 Toyo RA-1s on the front, kept wanting to grip in the rear and push the car off the track when I tried to transition from the first drift to the second. In a car with more power, this would be less of an issue. Luke taught me a handy technique called clutch kicking (which is exactly what it sounds like) can send abrupt power to the rear wheels and mitigate some of the tendency for the rear tires to bite. It’s quite good fun, but, again, my seven years of grip racing experience was hard to overcome: hovering my foot over the clutch in preparation to kick it was a hard habit to begin to form.
I wish I could say after a day on the track that I had a breakthrough moment and was able to effortlessly shred the Generals to bits, white smoke billowing, enveloping myself and the standing crowd in a haze symbolizing my driving prowess. But I was only able to do a few half-decent skids, nothing overly flashy, but quite satisfying. The FIAT had done it, despite all odds against it and my own reservations. While we were waiting in one of the staging lanes, Luke told me the car felt quite a bit like a KA 240SX, which I took as high praise. It was just after 3pm when I put the car back in the trailer, despite having 2 hours of track time still available. The car had been thrashed at its absolute limit for the past 5 hours and I decided not to push my luck any longer. It performed flawlessly.
Though I had an absolutely fantastic time, I think the inaugural FIAT drifting event will be the car’s last. I may decide to attend one more event in October, but I feel the car deserves to be converted back to a grip car and the RX7 can take the reigns as the Ten Tenths Drift Missile.
Michael Beck lives in a world of automotive lunacy. In 2009 when he decided to start autocrossing, he passed on buying a Miata or a CRX and bought an old FIAT 124 with a stuck engine. After somehow successfully turning the old FIAT into a car nearly as fast as a Miata, he decided to build a track day car. Naturally, he bought an old RX7 out of someone’s backyard and through some shady craigslist dealings, acquired a nearly-free LT1 from a police car. Michael is co-host of Ten Tenths Podcast.
Photos by Luis Villalobos, Mikey Bryzzzzinskiski, and my Adam's phone
Around 13 or 14 months ago, Chris Stewart, founder of Gridlife, and myself, Motorsports Director, flew down to Road Atlanta to see what that place was about... because they asked us to potentially do a Gridlife Festival there. I rapidly became obsessed with the track, traveling across the country a couple times in the last year to race there, and hopping airplanes too many times to do things to prepare for this event. All in all, it was a pretty successful first Road Atlanta event for the ever-growing, ever-evolving company we call Gridlife, and we think it built a pretty good audience for a first year thing. Amazing time attack sessions happened with our TrackBattle series , the third and final round of the year for us. Full sessions of beginner, intermediate, and advanced/instructor groups spent 3 days lapping the amazing facility (with almost NO incidents....maybe they really listened in my drivers meetings, and paid attention to the advice of the workers in grid!), and the drifters put on some of the best shows we've ever seen. This was the first time drifters (including some of the top pros in the world) were ever allowed to drift the full course, and if you haven't seen the videos, check them out. Weeks later my Facebook feed is still clogged up with videos of them and the incredible spectacle they put on.
One of the best parts of each Road Atlanta trip this year , for me, has been getting to spend it with a different group of buddies. This trip, Rambler's Racing Team, a bunch of my closest track friends , piled in trucks and left from my house in Chicago. We bombed south all night, and arrived the next day around noon. Long nights on road trips are almost impossible to forget, yet I'm glad we had some legitimate photographers with us to take weird and random pictures. Instead of a million pictures of the cars, and smokey drift party, etc, here is a sampling of the completely sleep depriving and unique week we had, being a part of Gridlife South. This was a really special week in my life, and I keep hearing people say similar things. That, to me, is the mark of a successful event. You should probably go on a road trip with your buddies soon. Start setting it up right now.
a Dil Vid!
Episode 93 - Tom O'Gorman is almost certainly a better driver than you. He's also interesting and wears cool sunglasses. And he did turn one at Road Atlanta at 97 mph with no aero...in a car he had never driven before. Listen to Tom. Be like Tom.
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