03/28/03 BMW club day. I am now an offical club instructor and as before I keep learning things while teaching - which is great. Also, so far I've been lucky to have excellent students who picked things up quickly, and have had both the skills and the attitude necessary to make things go smoothly.

And of course I had much fun driving the Coupe (pictures courtesy of David Paris)

One of the things I wanted to accomplish in this outing is to test the new brake setup. And did I ever. As the first session was nearing the end, I got the 'mechanical malfunction' flag and pulled into the pits. They told me my brakes were ON FIRE. We're talking FLAMES (wish someone had gotten a picture of that!). Fortunately it was just paint on the pads burning off. On the unfortunate side, while the pads did retain stopping power much better than stock ones, they were also 1/2 gone by the end of the day - after only 98 miles on the track. At least the pads are cheap. They seem to have smeared themselves on the rotors - so now the brakes don't look nearly as pretty anymore. Oh well. I suppose as much as I drive, what's left will last a few months on the street.

The car is really a lot of fun on the track. It could use a lower-geared diff, of course, but the power is still very satisfying. In fact there were couple people who came up to ask me what I'd done to the motor and were suprized to hear it was totally stock. The cheap street tires (Kumho 712) and marginal brakes do limit the overall pace, but I ran consistent 1:36 laps with a couple 1:35s, according to my video and a passenger's stopwatch. Not too bad for a strictly street setup. With R tires and bigger brakes it would be a faster car than the Elise.

There are more and more M Coupes showing up to track days, which really speaks for the enthusiasm of their owners. Out of 75 or so cars there, 8 were coupes. Quite impressive considering there are only about 2500 of these cars in the entire country. Roy Lewis, a good friend who unfortunately is without a Coupe at the moment having destroyed his on the track last year, suggested that we do a mini photo-shoot and even took the pictures. Came out pretty neat!

Additional thanks go to the PIR weather gods, who once again arranged a day of sunshine after two solid weeks of rain. Much coolness.

05/30/03 Another BMW club day. Was mostly treating this day as instructing duty and running a few laps as a 'bonus'. It's been sunny all week but this morning we got rain. Took the Coupe out on the first lap and spun it halfway through (the third spin of my multi-year track 'career'). I get almost zero traction in the wet. The tail wants to take the lead at 40 mph. So I park it after a couple more laps and wait for the track to dry which later it does. Got a variety of students throughout the day, most of whom did OK. Nobody scared me or themselves which was good. Later in the day got a few decent sessions in and completely destroyed the brake pads...

There are chunks of pad falling off and the rotors are fully coated with pad material. No major brake-related scares but did have to back off quite a bit towards the end. Now I need to figure out which pads to try next. MetalMasters are just not cutting it.

A special treat towards the end of the day - one of the local car guys dropped by with his new Enzo. There are only 349 of these in the world, and the car costs somewhere close to $1M. Also, they don't sell them to just anybody... Yep, Portland is a car town - two of these will live here.

A truly amazing machine. The sound is awesome too. I'll have to try and get a ride on the track...

06/03/03 In anticipation of the Mini's arrival I washed and waxed the M Coupe and moved it into storage. I guess I'll just swap the two cars occasionally, when the mood strikes.

On the way to the storage place one of the brake pads started making a horrible screeching noise. So perhaps it's just as well that the car will be stored for a while - I'll have to get a new set of pads for it before it's really roadworthy again.