SCCA Camaro

December 16^th 2007 was my planned racing debut of the car.  There was a lot to do.  Dad was here with us for the Holidays, so we decided to go together and take the 1968 Camaro as well as my daily driver, the 1998 Z28 convertible.  I was a little concerned the 1968 wouldn’t pass the tech inspection and having the 1998 Camaro there was a little insurance against not being able to run at all.  We had a little work to do even in that regard, as the battery tray in the 1998 Camaro was broken.  So I went to Cutter Chevrolet again and got a coolant reservoir, which doubles as a battery tray in the 4^th generation Camaro and Firebird.  I had also purchased the rear adjustable Koni shocks from DSE because the old shocks on the car didn’t provide much damping—on the highway after dips in the road the rear end of the car was quite pogo-like.  Dad and I put these in and put them at one click off full soft, which is the same setting I had put the front suspension at after I had to adjust the ride height because of RECON.

I had emailed the local SCCA club (www.sccahawaii.org) a little earlier and they had provided me with a link to the SCCA rulebook for 2007.  Trying to figure out the correct car classes was completely overwhelming, especially with only an electronic copy of the rules, so we decided to show up and let them put us in a category.  I read Secrets of Solo Racing by Henry A. Watts.  The main things I took away from the book on first read were hand placement on the wheel, early apex/late apex driving concepts, and an estimate of tire pressure at 38 lbs all of the way around.  I also did some fairly extensive searching for a helmet and reviews of helmets before deciding on getting a HJC AR10 full face helmet from The Helmet Shop.  My helmet arrived the day before race day, we topped off the gasoline, pumped up the tires, torqued the wheels down, and got a good night’s sleep. 

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 15th, 2007 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Race Prep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.