Steamboat 98

["Lawson, Dave" <dlawson@ball.com>]

Haven't seen anyone mention the Steamboat adventure so I thought I would
start. As usual Saturday was the drivers school and Sunday was the open
track lapping. Saturday night was the SCCA ice autocross and it was
pretty popular this year. Somewhere between 35 and 40 cars entered and I
hear the local SCCA region wasn't to thrilled when a certain quattro
pilot from the windy city claimed FTD and won the event outright. The
prize for this achievement, a trophy with a camaro on top.

Sunday was just a beautiful day, blue sky and sunshine and it warmed up
nicely.
Lots listers were in attendance, The NE region was represented by Chris
Semple, Stott Hare, and their friend Jim. They trailered out a 4kq as
the vehicle of choice. The PNW was there in force with 3 or 4 cars and a
number of drivers. Ned and Marnie had the 4kq and there was a nice pearl
90 coupe which was performing some great oversteer slides. The Midwest
sent out 3 drivers and a couple of cars. There was also a VR6 corrado
from PA. The local CO group of ice track junkies were there for our
annual fix. Lots of 5kTQ/200 cars, a few 4kqs and 1 ur-q. I drove my
1990 200 TQW fitted with the RDLDD (rear diff lock disable disable)
switch and am starting to understand it's handling. 

The track was very slick and the snow banks were softer this year. We
all made good use of a little nudge here and there to get fresh snow
down on the track and to help slow the car down. There were a couple of
times people needed to get pulled out of the bank and all the cars fared
pretty well with no real damage. I tagged a snow bank on the inside of
turn 5 doing about 5 mph and got black flagged. It turns out I lost the
passenger side bumper bolt and my front valence was hanging down.  A
quick fix with some zip ties and the car was good as new. Chris and
Stott had a great line through some corners as they were really getting
into it, in preparation for some future rallies. I got a few good photos
of some great full on press stage power slides. And they even kept this
years car in 1 piece. 

I ran with the ABS switched off and then locked the rear diff. My pat
pend mod (install a switch in the white/blue wire going to the rear diff
servo unit) then allowed the diff to stay locked at all speeds. I didn't
notice driveline binding or massive understeer as the track is just so
slick. My baseline was to run with the rear locked all the time. It
would be ideal to lock up the rear on straight line accel but I didn't
get a chance to have a co-driver run the switch and I was too busy
driving to play with it. I did notice that when it was locked up, the
car would just take off when tires found traction. I did notice the rear
would unlock every now and then, and I think it was due to the engine
stalling under hard threshold/lockup braking. In this case I would just
push the button again and everything would lock back up even at speed. 

The Torsen center diff is an interesting setup. I feel much better about
driving this car under adverse conditions after spending a day playing
with it. It seems pretty easy to induce oversteer and get the back end
out and if you keep the rear end within, say, 30 degrees to the
direction of travel, everything is fine. A couple of times I had the car
way beyond 30 and I could sense something different was happening. The
car didn't respond to normal corrective maneuvers. I didn't give it a
whole lot of time and then steered into the spin and let the car loop. I
did catch it once and got into a serious tail wagging session.
 
This event is just so much fun. I really enjoyed getting the wagon to
rotate through the corners using the countersteer technique. Tap the
brakes to unload the rear of the car, steer away from the corner  which
gets the car rotating in the direction opposite and then steer into the
corner, the car then rotates back around and points in the direction you
want to go. When running counterclockwise, 90 degree turn 6 is the
perfect corner for this, before the turn I would get the car rotated 90
degrees to the direction of travel and then when time is right, get on
the gas and accel right in the direction you want to go. Having this
much fun in a car should be illegal. And rally drivers get to do this
more than once a year? Where do we all sign up. 

I am sure some other listers will add some input from their
perspectives. Back to dreaming about next years power slides.
-
Dave Lawson