A Day at the Races

It was time for BB's debutante ball: the North East Ohio SCCA Solo II event August 27th.  Solo II is a precision driving competition involving navigating the car as smoothly and quickly as possible through a winding course marked with orange cones in a large unused parking lot.  You don't get much over 20mph but your constantly spinning wheels and sliding.  You can see the course we drove here:

In one sense, BB was born for this.  Handling performance was the main point of the driving experience offered by a roadster.  On the other and, it's been 50 years for BB.  There are a few aging pieces of the steering gear:

Also, she lacks today's tech.  The shocks are really poorly performing even new and she has no anti-sway bars front or rear.  She also seems to be sitting too high in the back.  In any case, I wanted to get a baseline so I can add some chassis tech over the winter and measure the improvement.  So away we went.

And it went pretty well.  She was the oldest car by 20 years but had the most charm and got the most compliments.  Many couldn't believe she was up to it.  We made 6 runs each.  You can see how we improved our time each run.

We were however, 5 to 10 seconds slower than the field.  Really inspiring body roll. In this case, inspiring meaning that it causes you to draw in a deep breath in terror! 

But no parts fell off and she got me to the rib BBQ on my parent's deck:

Can't wait to post about the upgrades!