g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.



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Sunday, June 28, 2009
05:57 - Stang Power

(top)
Sorry I've been a bit scarce recently. It's summer, and you know what that means.

Well—maybe not. Long story short, and tiresome hyperbole at the ready: it means I'm doing sixteen things at once instead of the usual nine. One of which is this. What's wrong with this picture?



Hint: a Mustang isn't supposed to be keeping up with a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Especially not when the latter is being driven by a notoriously crazy and seasoned track driver.

Also when the Mustang in question is being driven by me, and in my first time ever driving fast on that particular track, and in my first time driving that particular car at speed on any track.

What can I say? We build some surprising cars, apparently. Sure surprised the hell out of me. Though I'm sure the Gallardo driver was no less confused at being unable to shake a damn Mustang out of the rear-view mirror for a half-hour. Or the Noble driver who couldn't catch me, try as he might.

I'm finding out some interesting things from the first-hand track experience I've been getting as a side effect of our PRI wheeling-and-dealing (as it were). One of which is what exactly "oversteer" and other such glossy-car-magazine terms really mean. It's one thing to read about them and nod sagely as you consider what car to buy for the demanding application of flooring it on a freeway on-ramp; and it's quite another to experience one car's corner properties shortly after another's by taking a decreasing-radius, unbanked track corner at 60 mph and realize how differently you have to approach them depending on what your car does once it's past its limit. Our Elise, for example, oversteers to hell and back. You go into a corner with too much speed and break traction, and the rear end comes swinging wildly out; you have to countersteer just like in Cars in order to aim yourself properly through the bend. But this Mustang, I discovered, has almost perfect balance; it doesn't oversteer even slightly. When you break traction—and I did, quite a bit, as our laps during the 25-minute session grew more and more intense and I became more and more determined to follow the Lambo's line and learn all I could from it, and as the car's 4,000 pounds more and more easily began carrying it sideways on spinning tires through sharp corner apexes—it simply slides on all four wheels, tires whining and smoking, pointing in exactly the same direction. You can gauge how much slide you'll get in a given corner, cut the inside sharply, drift across the tarmac, and by the time you've lost enough speed for the tires to hook up again, you're at the opposite edge and still pointed in the right direction.

(Not that that's an advisable or trustworthy technique, because what if you don't slide just the way you expect, or hook up properly at the outside edge? Plus I could probably have kept just as much speed by slowing down, keeping traction, and powering through the exit where I was sliding during this session. But these things we learn with time.)

The fact that the Lambo was still right in front of me after every corner exit I attribute more to the Mustang's gigantic supercharger than to any great skill on my part through the technical bends. But even so, whether onlookers are impressed by our cars or by our driving, either way it's to our benefit.

I tell you, though: if they hadn't flagged us in when they did, I would have pitted in on my own, because my right leg was cramping up something terrible. That's a long time to stay so constantly on edge.

Anyway, that's the kind of thing I've been up to. And what's more, it's business-related. I guess that's a pretty sweet deal, all things (such as 1200 miles and 15 hours of driving before and after, to ferry four cars down to the track and back, and two hours of sleep before the track day) considered...

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© Brian Tiemann