I should probably update this now.
Right then, Nationals. It's the most important event of the year, and going into it, I had to make sure that I was getting the most out of the car. A couple of weeks beforehand, Sam and I installed a Perrin CAI, Perrin resonated catback exhaust, an FA20Club equal-length catless header, and a retune from Mike @ Moto-East. These were the last critical components in the build, and I wanted to squeeze them in before it mattered.
And I have to say, the results were pretty staggering - the car was completely transformed with the EL header + E85. It was significantly faster in the mid-range and had a lot more torque - enough that power-down was becoming an issue for the first time all year, even on Lincoln concrete. This was first apparent at the ProSolo Finale.
But at least I got to start out running with J-Rho's Camaro, which was cool.
Anyway, the Pro was fairly tough. I suck at ProSolos, and there was a particular element in each course that I had a hard time seeing correctly. Despite having the day 1 lead, I ended up giving it away to Bryan Heitkotter by having to chase the tail of the car so much. Still, there's no shame in losing to Bryan, and in the end, I still won the overall ProSolo Championship for STX. But there was still a long way to go to get the car settled down for the main event.
After the Pro, I mounted up a fresh set of RS3s and spent a lot of time on the test course during the next week. It was fairly obvious from the Pro that the setup that was perfect during Spring Nationals was going to need some tweaking. And tweak we did.
By the end of the week, with plenty of knob-turning and choice advice from Sam, the car was just about perfect. Sam is absolutely the most knowledgeable and practical person I know when it comes to setting up a car, and he knows more about what I want a car to do than *I* do. If I tell him I want the car to do X, or that the car *isn't* doing Y, he has always made the right suggestion on what to change to get the car working. This time was no different, and I went into Day 1 pretty confident in the car.
We started on the East course, which was designed by Sam. And it was the hardest autocross course I've ever driven. It's pretty typical for Sam to design courses that make you think, and he gives you plenty of places to hang yourself. This time, you would hang yourself if you didn't know how to slow the car down. Nationals courses of the past years have traditionally been fairly fast and transition-heavy, and Sam's course was the exact opposite - there were places where you had to *slow down* and you had to slow down a lot. The people who mastered would be the fastest - go slow to go fast, as they say.
Thankfully, that person turned out to be me - I led STX on Day 1 by about half a second. It would all go wrong on Day 2, however.
The West course was much more traditional - higher-speed, transitional, and very straight-forward in its design. It should have favored the smaller and more nimble FRS over the other cars in the class. In fact, a lot of things were in my favor. But I got nervous - very nervous.
Up until Nationals, I had only hit one cone in the car all year - a few weeks earlier at the Wilmington Tour. On run 1 of Day 2, I hit *three*. This put me outside of my comfort zone, and I had to fight to get back the confidence in myself to drive well. That moment never came, and I ended up finishing 2nd by two tenths of a second. The car was *absolutely* faster than that - but at that moment, on that day, it wasn't happening.
It is what it is. I walked away disappointed, but I couldn't be happier with how the rest of the year went.
At least I've never come back from Nationals without a trophy yet.
As of last week, I've sold the car outright to a close friend of mine, and he will continue to campaign the car next year in STX. I had a lot of fun with the car, but I have a 60-mile roundtrip commute to work now, and a prepped STX car was starting to wear on me as a daily driver.
So, I bought a Focus ST. I'll be codriving a C5 Z06 next year in SS, so I figured a nice hatchback with some torque and heated leather seats would be a nicer every-day kind of car.
Also, I have to thank Stranoparts again for all the support this year. It wouldn't have been possible without a *lot* of late nights with Sam, working on and tweaking the car. He put just as much (if not more) time into the car than I did, and Sam is absolutely the reason that the year went so well. I'm thankful for the friendship we've put together through this project, and I look forward to having his support (and vice-versa) in all my future autocross endeavors.
