11/09/03 Visited another enthusiast's garage yesterday. Jeremy is a Mini fanatic, mostly tinkering with all flavors of the original Mini. Naturally he has a new Cooper S for a daily driver.

It's certainly easier to fit a bunch of cars in your shop if all of them are tiny! I love the Gulf paint scheme on the Moke. Apparently it's a very fast car with a hot motor. I'll have to get a ride one day.

12/13/03 A winter track day at ThunderHill in California, the fifth for the MINI. After the completion of this trip the car has 3,600 miles on it, 700 of which was on the track - not bad for a daily driver ;). The track day was fun but getting there and back turned out to be more of a challenge and adventure...

ThunderHill is exactly 500 miles south of Portland on I-5. I've made the trip several times, completing it in just a bit over 6 hours in the M Coupe and 8 hours towing the Elise. This time I got a late start, leaving Portland around 2:30 pm. The forecast called for solid rain both on the way and for the track day itself. But it was one of the pre-scheduled, pre-paid events so I decided to try it anyway. The drive to Medford, around halfway down, was uneventful with intermittent rain. It got dark quickly. After refueling I headed for the mountain passes of southern Oregon and northern California. The outside temperature gauge read 45F leaving Medford. Ten minutes later it showed 32F and the MINI was seeing its first snow ever. In another 5 minutes I was following three snowplows in pitch dark, heavy snowfall and rapid accumulation on the road. Gotta love mountain weather. Fortunately no chains were required and on the other side of the pass snow turned to rain. The rest of the drive was dark, wet, tiring but relatively uneventful. The wind noise in this car changes with position of the windshield wipers so my entire trip was spent listening to an almost eerie whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the air rushing past (I never listen to radio in cars because I find it annoying). I rolled in to Willows after 7.5 hours on the road. It was still raining.

In the morning at 7 am met with a few friends also staying at the same hotel. We headed off to a gas station to fill up and then to the track a couple miles away. The ground was wet but it wasn't raining which gave us a glimmer of hope... But the gas station attendant claimed that steady rain was in the forecast for the day.

At the track, after the usual preliminaries, my run group was the first out. Track surface was still wet and I had to take it pretty easy through some corners. Fortunately the rain stayed away for the rest of the day and subsequent sessions were on dry pavement and quite fun, as the video highlight shows (6.3M file). Once up to speed I ran consistent 2:25 laps with a single 2:24. This is 3 seconds better than my first M Coupe outing at this track two and a half years ago, so I guess the driver got a bit better :) Interestingly, having a passenger made no difference which basically means I'm not getting everything that I could out of the car. Just as well - I have a 500 mile drive home at the end of the day. At lunchtime the sun peeks out and I get to wear my sunglasses for half-hour or so. I also get to have a fun 'battle' with a Mazda 6 on R tires... We're pretty evenly matched in terms of lap times and run nose-to-tail for a while (thanks to Val for the pictures).

Around 3 pm, after a bit over 2 hours and 140-some miles of track time, I pack up and head north. The weather holds out for a bit and I make the most of it, pretending I-5 is the A5 autobahn. Rain is intermittent, and the part that I was most worried about - the mountain pass through southern Oregon - is completely dry and ten degrees warmer than it was the night before. I run the sweeping curves at rather elevated velocities :) The closing speed on the trucks creeping uphill is quite entertaining and the fact that it's dark makes the sensation of speed even more of a thrill. By the time I drive past Medford on the other side of the pass I'm invigorated, alert, grinning from ear to ear and looking forward to making good time for the remainder of the trip, having covered 250 miles through the mountains in less than 3 hours. A quick refuel, then onward... Only to see the outside temp drop precipitously. Followed by actual precipitation. Within minutes I'm driving through a wall of huge wet snowflakes that reflect the headlights and reduce visibility to only a few feet. The snow is accumulating rapidly both on the ground and on the car. I pull out the camera from my pocket and take a couple no-flash pics..

The view out of the windshield remains like this for the next two hours. Except sometimes there are no cars ahead and it's just pitch black with an endless starwars-like stream of snowflakes coming at me. I'm called upon to practice some long-forgotten night snowstorm driving skills. Like figuring out where the road goes when you can't see any of it. Have to look for clues like tracks, oncoming headlights (if any), armco and reflectors on the sides... I nearly get stuck once, tires spinning helplessly as I try to make my way up a snow-covered incline. Traction control is of no use. Wide, half-worn performance tires just don't work too well in the snow. But eventually I do make it up over the crest by waiting for a truck to pass and following in its tracks. The rest of the trip is stressful and tiring, but I'm finally relieved to see snow change to rain about 70 miles south of Portland. The pile of snow on my hood eventually melts and ventilation can draw air in again, so I don't have to keep windows cracked open anymore. And I can actually SEE what's ahead. Fancy that. Despite the snow the trip is concluded after a reasonable 8 hours on the road. It's a lot of driving for a day and a half. Next track day I do will be local.

12/30/03 Decided to give Meanie its New Year's present - a new blacked-out grille. Occasionally I thought the car looked a little goofy with its chrome mouth so I thought the new grille would look more in character with the car's nickname. There are two pieces to the grille - one goes in the hood and one in the bumper. Went and picked them up at the dealer. Surprisingly inexpensive at about $85 for both. The upper portion went in without much difficulty, but then the lower one had me stumped. For a moment I considered leaving the lower grille chrome. It looked OK in the garage... But when I pulled the car out into daylight it just didn't look right.

So after a quick online inquiry (thank you Bruce for the helpful link) I set to work. The front bumper cover had to come off - not too bad a task...

Then came the hard part. First, pulling the old grille off was a chore. Part of it is attached with adhesive tape and it took a lot of effort to get the tape removed. Of course later I ended up having to cut away the part the tape was stuck to, so I could have saved myself the trouble. The new grille is made for a different optional bumper and has to be cut extensively in order to fit the stock one. Quite a bit of time was spent with the Dremel tool.

Then the part was cleaned up, bumper cover cut with new slots to fit the tabs on the grille, and a test fit revealed the need for more cutting. After some four hours total the grille is finally in!

The picture is not too great because it's dark now. I'll take a better one tomorrow. In the meantime, the Meanie is right at home in my currently all-British garage. Turned out neat :)

UPDATE: pulled the car out into daylight the next day for a better picture. Cool.

02/02/04 Ooops. Hit a nasty pothole on the freeway, in the middle of a turn, at 80 mph. It didn't look like much so I opted to go over it rather than try to maneuver in the middle of a fast, bumpy curve. I guess it had a very sharp edge because it sounded bad. But the car seemed to continue on OK. I quickly checked alignment by seeing if it pulls to either side and that was fine too. So I kept going and checked it when I had a chance to stop. Ouch.

The pictures were actually taken after I got home. I had hammered the wheel rim back as much as I could for the return trip to help prevent the tire from popping off. The bent portion was originally sticking out more than twice as far. It is incredible that the tire did not lose pressure. Upon getting home I pondered my options and decided to order two new wheels with new tires mounted. Less hassle, and this way I end up with a fullsize spare I can take on longer trips since the Mini lacks any spare at all. The Kumhos were getting pretty worn out anyway after 5 track days, and the fronts wear more than the rears so if I mount the new ones on the front I should be good through the end of summer (figure 6-8 track days). At that point I'll probably try the Goodyear F1 GS3 for the winter since they're supposed to be great in the wet. So I guess I can look on the bright side of having to spend $975....

03/01/04 The Meanie hasn't enjoyed very good luck lately, with road hazard encounter of the week being a rock flung by a car on the freeway. This one resulted in having to replace the windshield. Got the ECU software updated and some attempted rattle fixes done at the same time. Picked the car up today. The windshield is good (some $350 later), the rattles are at least diminished and the stumble on acceleration in first seems to have been cured by the new software. So maybe I won't have to turn ASC off as often (until now I've been turning it off on every drive). Speaking of road hazards, the Oregon DOT fixed the wheel-munching pothole within a week of me reporting it - not bad. It remains to be seen whether they'll pay out on my claim for the damage, but at least they did something which is gratifying.

Also I finally got tired of the red reflective tape on the back bumper and pulled it off. So with new glass, wheels, front tires and software the Meanie is ready for spring, with only 4,100 miles on its clock. Of course when I was washing it I noticed that the paint has TONS of surface scratches from washing the dust and road grime off. So now I'll have to try and polish those out. Sigh...

03/26/04 A very rainy BMW club track day.

I mostly attended to instruct but did run three sessions. The first one was particularly slippery and the corners that are normally 60-65 mph were right on the edge at 40. Three people went off, one slightly scraping the wall. I took the opportunity to practice some weight transfer techniques, try different lines and even a slide recovery (successfully ;). The next session was not as bad since the track was starting to dry out so the changing surface gave some more opportunities for experiments. The third session was completely dry and I was able to actually push it a bit which was fun. In between my runs (in advanced group) I also instructed in novice and intermediate run groups. That's a whole lot of time in various cars. By 2 pm I was pretty tired so when it started raining again I just headed home. Once again though, it was gratifying to be able to help people progress and as always I learned just a bit more myself.

A number of MINIs were there but they all ran in intermediate and novice. Still, it's good to see the car being more and more popular at track days. It's quite a capable machine - sometimes to the surprise and even mild annoyance of drivers of more powerful cars ;)