{"id":1007,"date":"2011-12-11T03:52:55","date_gmt":"2011-12-11T03:52:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.specr53.com\/blog\/?p=1007"},"modified":"2011-12-11T03:52:55","modified_gmt":"2011-12-11T03:52:55","slug":"last-motoring-event-of-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/hpde\/last-motoring-event-of-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Motoring Event of 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7165\/6501635265_77043a42ce_z.jpg\" alt=\"Summit Point Winter\" width=\"550\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Saturday brought the last motoring event of the year for GeorgeCo.  It was a very nice late Autumn day of sliding and sloshing on the skidpad at Summit Point with the other instructors from the local BMW club.  GeorgeCo got a chance to test out the Red MINI&#8217;s new suspension and even got to drive a friend&#8217;s 911.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7148\/6488329927_e1426373e6_z.jpg\" alt=\"Red and 911\" width=\"550\"\/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve instructed in a Porsche a couple of times and really enjoyed the opportunity to drive it on the skidpad.  I&#8217;d like to say I instantly mastered oversteer, but that would be not true.  It&#8217;s a very different experience to feel the car rotating around you at a point somewhere in the middle of the rear seats.  Most of my MINI tricks didn&#8217;t work (ie more power in oversteer) and the balance just feels wrong.  It wasn&#8217;t until later in the session that I finally figured out to ease up on the wheel, let the wheels straighten and keep steady power and it sorts itself out.  You can&#8217;t lift suddenly and more power just speeds up the spin, but steady power seems to do the trick.  That was fun.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7171\/6488489317_9257b59f72_z.jpg\" alt=\"Red waiting\" width=\"550\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The new suspension on Red MINI proved to be a good choice.  The middle setting on the Alta rear swaybar took out most of the understeer, but didn&#8217;t make the car tail happy so as to induce oversteer on sudden throttle lift.  It&#8217;s very neutral with a slight bias to understeer which is the way I like it.  We set up some cones and got a chance to practice a little <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scandinavian_flick\">scandinavian flick <\/a>action.  The IE fixed camber plates provide a much less harsh ride than the adjustable plates in the Blue MINI.  I think I&#8217;m going to like this set-up.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7027\/6488315221_648aa97e56_z.jpg\" alt=\"Zen Garden\" width=\"550\"\/><\/p>\n<p>The track was quiet all day.  I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve been here before when there wasn&#8217;t some sort of event going on.  The run-off area in turn one had a certain zen garden quality to it.  Be the curve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saturday brought the last motoring event of the year for GeorgeCo. It was a very nice late Autumn day of sliding and sloshing on the skidpad at Summit Point with the other instructors from the local BMW club. GeorgeCo got a chance to test out the Red MINI&#8217;s new suspension and even got to drive &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/hpde\/last-motoring-event-of-2011\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Last Motoring Event of 2011&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,14],"tags":[47,253],"class_list":["post-1007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hpde","category-mini","tag-bmw","tag-skidpad"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1007"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1007\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gcomotorsports.com\/specr53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}