On the Knife's Edge Between Slipping and Sliding!

Mother Nature demands balance.  In many cases, balancing on the edge of losing control.  This is true in many sports, such as skiing or surfing, where a precise balance between the edge of the ski biting into the snow and downhill speed give one the fastest time.  If you hold the line, you finish.  If you push it just a titch to far, you slide out of control and sit in the woods for awhile.  

Incidentally, slipping and sliding are actual vehicle dynamics terms.  Slipping occurs on every hard corner and involves the slow movement of rubber on the pavement.  Sliding happens when all Hell breaks loose and your steering wheel movement no longer has any relationship to the path of the car.

This is also true in life outside of sporting events.  Consider alcohol.  The substance can deliver euphoria and magnify the joy of life.  Up to the point where slipping turns into sliding.  Then you can spend some days in the woods, wondering what the heck happened (since you can't remember).  

But, life is to be lived, and can't be done by keeping safe.  Another example is allergies.  There is mounting evidence (although not certainty.  Science is not in the business of certainty.  It is in the business of eternal skepticism slowly closing in on truth.) that allergies are growing worse because we are exposed to so few allergens.  As a child, I walked through a local swamp repeatedly.  I played in a nursery.  I regularly stepped in dog doo.  I can't remember any allergy symptoms.  Now that  work in an office, I have hay fever.

What does all this introduction lead up to, you may ask?  Just this: by slipping, on the verge of sliding, through the final gate at the last autocross which I managed, BB and I closed in on 0.5 seconds of the average.  The best we've ever done!  I was certain I would wipe out most of the cones of the finish gate, which would mean a DNF (Did Not Finish) but, somehow, I managed to slip on the edge of sliding through those gates and reduce my time by almost a second.  That was crazy fun and continued proof that the new suspension is holding up!  One year, after the new powertrain goes in, I'll start on actual chassis tuning, which is likely the most important knob I can turn.

BB and I are still having fun learning about physics and fabrication and slipping before sliding!  Keep having #funwithcars !

By the way, I credit my performance to having preloaded the sway bar bushings, as they were quite loose upon installation.  I guess they had a right to be, as they are about 55 years old.  In any case, I made some shims to jam them into compliance.

It doesn't look like much but it seems to have helped!

By the way, you may have noticed the term "titch" earlier in this post and, probably, figured out its meaning from the context.  I'll elaborate on titch in a future post.