Team Grondul Motorsports: Part 1

For those of you wondering how I spent my Sunday. I have some evidence.

Sunday was the first autocross of the season for the Washington DC Region of the Sports Car Club of America. I'm planning to run the whole season in a new and potentially very entertaining class called Street Touring R.* Zelda is not currently prepared to anywhere near the limit of the rules of STR, but she could get pretty close without extreme effort or expense. The real limiting factor is the driver, especially given my apparent lack of driving talent and the long duration since my last autocross. So, needing practice, I attended this event, which is described as a "practice" autocross, since its results don't count toward the season championship.

Here are a few photos of me on the course. These were taken by locally famous autocrosser and general nice guy, Danny Kao. You'll note the rather extreme body roll in several of those shots. I plan to fix that problem with new dampers and springs in May or so.

Here's a video recorded by Daniel Donohue in Street Touring S during one of his runs on the same course. Just imagine the sliver first-generation Miata replaced by a silver third-gen Miata and dial down the speed just a touch, and you'll have a pretty good idea of what the experience was like for me.

So, how did I do? In a word, poorly. Actually, I would have been pretty happy with my performance in the only car in the class running on stock tires if I hadn't hit the second-to-last cone on my final run--the only cone I hit all day---thus incurring a two-second penalty and turning my fastest run of the day into an uncompetitive** one. Sigh.

* I hope to post up a bit more about SCCA Solo and its classification system at some point in the future.

** Interestingly, STR was won by one of the two drivers sharing a Clown Shoe.

Flame Wars Get Televised

Speed TV, the broadcaster of endless hours of automotive television that doesn't deserve to polish the Stig's helmet, live NASCAR qualifying, and no Formula One whatsoever, is planning to bring one of new media's least estimable features to the small screen. That's right; the flame wars that pervade automotive (and nearly every other) online forums are getting their own series. At least this show offers reality checks for a brand or model's most blindly ardent followers. Do you think your4140-lb Challenger SRT-8 3 is faster in the quarter mile than the other guy's 3870-lb Camaro SS because it has a Hemi in it? Are you of the belief that you can hustle your riced out FG Civic around a track faster than a stock second-gen Boxster S? This show will put your money where your mouth is.

Say it with me: Who ordered that?

Point Dume

The man of a thousand personae, Enver Gjokaj, has taken a page from the book of his Dollhouse castmate, Felicia Day. That's right, he's launched his own web series. The show, Previously on Point Dume, is a parody of soap operas and has a bit of a Twin Peaks feel to it. Check it out.

22/7

for i=1:lenght(geek)

geek(i)

disp('Happy Pi Day!')

end

Famous

Hey look; I'm famous. It's a shame I chose that day to wear a black shirt with navy shorts.

Captain Kirk is Climbing a Mountain

Alison and I saw this...um, music video at Dragon*Con 2009, and we thought you'd enjoy it.

Ow

Ow, my adductors!

Red Day

Guild mistress Felicia Day has been cast in the SyFy channel's original movie Red. The movie is part of SyFy's recent re-imagining of fairy tales as adventure flicks, and it will follow Red (Day), a descendant of Little Red Riding hood and a werewolf hunter. In general, I'm opposed to SyFy's original films, since they are typically craptastict, but Day's presence has my interest piqued. Sadly, I'm expecting that her creativity and acting ability will be wasted in the standard SyFy schlock.

Embarrassing

In other SI news, this image depicting the nations---all 3 of them---that have not adopted the metric system is quiet saddening.

Hella Big

In a move that is either geekily awful or awfully geeky, UC Davis Physics student Austin Sendek has petitioned the powers that be behind the Systeme International d'Unites to make the prefix for 10²⁷ officially "hella." What do I have to say about that? Noice!