My First Experience Auto-X'ing the Ur-q

[Sonar465@aol.com]

Well, I ran my Ur-q in my first Auto-X this past Sunday.  And this is how it 
went.  

- Staging for the first run I was sitting in line and all of a sudden I 
notice that there is steam coming out from the hood.  I pull off the staging 
line and open the hood.  Fluid is pouring out of the cap on the expansion 
tank.  I let it cool and start to look around.  After checking the relay, and 
finding it was OK, I did some more looking around and find that one of the 
wires from the Temp. sensor at the radiator was broken.  Fixed that and low 
and behold the fan worked and no more over heating.  

-First run- Car felt OK but there was a miss as soon as the boost came in, I 
broke a spark plug cap when I was working on finding the over heat prob, so I 
hope that is the cause of the miss.  I was off course in the first run.  Went 
a bit to fast into a chicane and totally missed a gate.

-Second run-I made it through the course pretty well.  I have to say that the 
car is a very easy car to drive in a Auto-X situation. But it does under 
steer a bit (Slow in , Fast out)  I kind of expected this though.  The timing 
equipment had a fault so there was no time for me on this run.  

-Third run- Again I got a clean run and this time the timing equipment 
worked.  My time on this run was 65.702sec which was not even close to being 
competitive.  Still having the miss and the car is quite down on power.  I 
was running in C Street Prepared with both E30 M3 and E36 M3  and the MX-5's 
both new and old.  The Miatas are hard to beat,  I remember that from my days 
of Auto-xing 6-7 years ago when I had my '85 MR-2.  The guy in the E36 M3 did 
not really know how to drive and I was right in the middle of the E30 M3's.  
I woke up a little late so I did not get a chance to change over to the worn 
225/50/15 So I was useing my brand new P-zero's 225/45/16 on 8" wheels and 
every one else in the class had some sort of race rubber.

-Fourth and final run- Still have the miss but I improved my time by a little 
over a second down to 64.428.  The tires are not happy and there is a bit of 
chunking on the right front.  

All in all I had a good time.  I have not Auto-X'ed in over 7 years so I was 
a bit rusty.  I also need to get some race rubber on the original 8" R8's.  I 
don't think the Ur-q will ever be competitive with the MX-5's but I was 
pretty happy with how I did against the M3's.  What was really cool was the 
intrust in the Ur-q.  I must have talked to 20 different people about the 
car.  And everyone was saying how they have never seen one in real life.  
Aside from driving the car the fact that it is such a rare car is really 
neat.  Next time lets see if we can't get some more NY area listers to make 
it for the fun.

Cheers,
Jim Hahn