06/24/05 Got the new front tires yesterday. Took a closer look at the old fronts and only the left showed any cords (with all of 3,500 miles on it)... So I decided to only replace that one and remount the rest inside-out so the outer edges will now face inwards and take a break from the abuse. Also took out the remaining camber shim on left front. Of course the tread blocks that had been triangulated by previous wear now face the 'wrong' way and I suspected this would make for some squirrely behavior. Sure enough, when I brought the 'Lis out for the afternoon track sessions it was a bit of a handful. Very squirmy under braking, loose but catchable in the turns. I ran a session with the data logger and got some plots to compare the the Box which I ran in the morning. Didn't get any really fast laps, the best being 1:35.30. The stats are max lateral g 1.006, max braking 0.928 g, max acceleration 0.241g. Not too bad for street tires. Track map comes out looking pretty neat, too. An expected but disappointing item is that GPS speeds are considerably lower than those indicated on speedometer, with 120 indicated only registering about 113 on GPS. Oh well. A comparison to the data from the Box is interesting...

The most interesting plot is the lateral g loads, the middle trace. It shows that the Box is nearly a match for the Elise, which considering that both are on nearly-equivalent street tires should not be too surprising, and yet it kind of is - to me anyway. The top plot is speed and the Lotus' power/weight advantage is obvious. Note that speed through many turns is nearly identical though, especially turn 10 (the dip after the second big peak).

There were some issues with Larry's datalogger and we ended up using one borrowed from a gracious fellow Elise owner from Seattle (thanks, Pete!). But then I had to return the toy and just ran some laps for education. The most educational of those were when Larry drove my car. He was a good deal faster through many turns, taking them in long power slides and generous helpings of opposite lock. His line through the chicane was also different and clearly faster, evidenced by earlier upsift on exit. At first my thought was that I wasn't going to try THAT... But then, hey, why not. And so I did. It was the most entertaining session in a long time! I was actually doing the power slides and all. Of course having the tires remounted recently made it easier (and made overall lap times slower) but still... So now I'm driving the Elise like I used to drive the Meanie. Cool. Goes to show that there's always something more to learn! We'll see if I can repeat this next time, with video on and hopefully fully functional data logging. It'll be fun and I'll improve some more :).


07/22/05 Another BMW club trackday. The usual routine - instructing, playing with new lines and ways of getting through corners, etc. Unfortunately the helmetcam has a broken wire (will have to take the thing apart and see if it's fixable) and the GPS logger is blowing fuses so basically I had no way of keeping track of laptimes. This in turn means that all the experimentation was just playing around, with no way of seeing whether a particular approach was better than another one. So real work will have to wait until another time. The only unusual thing about the trackday was two semi-trailerfuls of racing Porsches, uniformed crew and all. The best I can figure they were looking to get some cheap test time before the ALMS race next weekend.

They had signed up to run in every sessions, even Novice, which of course was not very good. I think they got booted out of Novice promptly for passing in all the wrong places, but even in instructor and advanced groups they rattled some nerves by passing way late at the end of straights. I wonder why they didn't just rent the track for a day - it's not all that expensive, certainly not relative to their budgets. Also, there are dedicated test days for racers only - why not do a couple of those? Maybe some logistical issues, I don't know. Oh well, it was entertaining to share the track with current, full-on race machinery.

After the trackday, a much-needed wash and wax. Also tinkered a bit with the passenger-side window. It's now sticking halfway up and something is rattling inside the door. Upon taking things apart it turns out that the forward adjustment screw had fallen out and that's what was loose in the door. So I fished it out with a fridge magnet and string, but reinstalling it would take some disassembly and I didn't feel like messing with that. The stuff that's causing the window to stick is a plastic guide tab hitting a bolt in the door structure at the rear of the window. Why it suddenly started doing that is a mystery, it doesn't seem to be related to the forward adjustment screw issue. I guess I just need to take it back to the dealer and have them fix the thing (or try to). On the plus side I don't have to drive to Seattle for that anymore. Still, it's a pain. At least the car is clean now.


09/02/05 Lotus club day, the 12th and final trackday for the 'Lis - yes, she's for sale (e-mail me if interested). It's been a great and entertaining year together but I really need to focus on other things, so the time has come to part ways...

Lotus days attract some great machinery and provide lots of tracktime and today was no exception. A lot of Elises showed up, along with a number of other Loti and cool vintage racers.

The weather cooperated nicely, with slight overcast keeping temperatures to a reasonable 75F or so. In all I got 7 sessions resulting in a bit over 140 miles on the track. Lotus club allows passing after the chicane, which was handy for getting by an RX7 that just wouldn't let me pass on the straight... But the day was not entirely without incident, as the video shows..

I just got too sideways and while I kept the car pointed in the right direction I simply ran out of track. Well, no damage done (not even to ego, it's just another learning experience that's all). And yes, I finally got functional video again. The new camera, from ChaseCam, deals a lot better with high-contrast environment of the car and does not wash out to white in bright areas like the previous one did. I was wondering what I was going to do for battery and finally bought a 9.6V RC car battery and charger from Radio Shack - works great. I'll detail my video setup in the ETC section shortly. The video showed a number of 1:33 laps, and later in the day when I got the GPS hooked up the best lap in the final session was 1:33.34. It is interesting to look at the data, especially when comparing it with earlier runs, to see what works and what doesn't. An especially educational display when comparing multiple laps is 'time slip', it clearly shows where I'm gaining or losing time. By looking at the longitudinal/lateral accleration and speed graphs I can then figure out what exactly it is I'm doing that causes the differences. Hopefully I'll be able to play with this in other cars. Seems like a really useful learning tool. Also on the subject of differences, I was able to run some back-to-back sessions, one with passenger then one without. I was amazed at how much 'lighter' the car felt without a passenger. I hadn't previously detected this much of a difference, maybe because I always had at least a half hour between sessions, maybe because I was less 'in tune' with the car. Or both. In terms of lap time the impact of a passenger was minimal however - there were just too many variables. Early in the day I ran some low-1:33s with a passenger, late in the day my best GPS time was recorded solo. Track temperature, ambient temperature, driver fatigue - all play a role in the overall performance equation. At any rate, my last dance with the Elise was a good one and it'll be sad to see her go.


11/18/05 The Elise was away in Vegas for a while playing showgirl, posing in a booth at the SEMA show. Now that it's back, a few upgrades are getting installed by Unichip. The first to go on is a cat-back exhaust and their piggyback ECU. The rest (intake, headers and a sport cat) will be installed in a week or two. With the exhaust on and the ECU dyno-mapped (supposedly about 5 hp gain throughout, I'll post charts in the next update), I decided to pick it up and drive it around some. Keeping in mind this is a work in progress, the initial impressions are largely positive. The exhaust makes a deeper, somewhat louder noise than stock. It's not so loud as to be annoying but does sound more sporty and does a better job of masking the industrial grinding noises from the gearbox. There is also an annoying buzz at just below 4K rpm (which unfortunately is where much street driving takes place so it is heard often) but hopefully this will get fixed when the other bits go on. The power delivery seems smoother than stock, with less of a 'valley' between the two cam peaks which makes the 6.5K rpm transition to the top cam a bit less of a turbo-rush but still noticeable. The car is FUN :) Driving it back-to-back with the M5 is an interesting study in contrast. Basic, light, raw and tactile toy versus substantial, refined but brutal techno-wonder. On the street at least the Bimmer definitely has more shove to it, even only using part throttle and limited RPM. It'll be really interesting to compare the two when all the upgrades are done on the Lotus and the Monster is fully broken-in. Stay tuned :)

Seeing the two side-by-side is amusing. The Monster is twice as heavy, has 2.5 times the power, 2.5 the number of cylinders, carries twice as many people, uses twice the amount of fuel per mile and costs twice as much as the Elise. Both are quite entertaining. Getting into the M5 and firing it up, the seat wraps around you to the preset positions, the steering drops and extends to meet your hands and the iDrive display greets you with a legal disclaimer as the big motor settles into a rumbling idle. Inserting oneself into the Elise is a bit of a contortionist exercise akin to playing Twister. Once inside the stripped-down aluminum interior, the startup is an awkward sequence of pushing the immobilizer button on the keychain, twisting the key all the way to where normally the start postion would be only to be greeted with silence, remembering that starting the engine requires pushing the starter button, fumbling for it with the left hand, accidentally turning on the lights, then finally firing up the motor. The steering wheel is about half the size of the BMW one with no adjustments, buttons or paddles. The only seat adjustments are fore-aft and manually inflatable lumbar support (which requires knowing where to look for the bulb). Definitely very different animals. It's neat to be able to experience both...