The LazyAssGeek’s

This year’s affair was much more traditional, especially when compared to last year’s Perfect Storm. While we prefered the music of LeCompt, those of us amongst the beer drinking crowd were probably better off that this year’s band, however loud & stereotypical, left us… feeling better on Sunday, shall we say.  The food was very good, as always, and the the music pure cliche German oompah.  We did let ourselves down a bit this year by letting the bar tab actually be LESS than the food tab.  I blame all the ladies, who ordered dessert!

This year’s crowd was Joe & Nat, Rich & Debbie, Jack & Katy, Rich & Christina, Rich’s brother Ed, Bill & Debbie and their neighbor Gina and Val & me. It was great to get everybody together and I’ll take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

The Guys end of the table

The Ladies end of the table

The Couples Section

It's my site, so here's a picture of my gorgeous girl.. and you have to look at me too

Requisite Wacky Billy Pic (better than the usual view)

Geek Christmas has come twice so far this year!  Another round of liquidation from my buddy Mike’s closing office.  This time it’s Optiplex desktops and Latitude laptops.  Yes, I know, you’d like a laptop… get in line!

Optiplex Desktops

Latitude Laptops

GX260, 270 & 280's

So my buddy Mike works for a finance company that got taken out in the first wave of the sub-prime collapse.  He’s gotten some very nice retention bonuses to stick around during the dismantling, and today I got one.  He had 12 servers that were removed from regional offices that needed to be liquidated.  Being my father’s son, I can’t pass up on a deal, so when he said $500 for the lot…. done!

After the install of headers on my car it was inevitable I would need a tune. The car has only thrown a code for the rear O2’s one time since I installed the headers but that apparently is hit & miss with the LG headers because of their long primaries and I didn’t want to take the chance on getting tripped up come inspection time.  Since my inspection is due in March I wanted to get it done before the car is put away for its long winter’s nap. The question was of course who to have do it.

I knew of East Coast Supercharging from the Corvette Forum but it’s always hard to commit your precious toy to somebody without having at least a personal reference.  Fortunately my buddy Mike took his ‘08 to them after we had installed a Callaway Honker cold air intake.  He had them install AR headers and tune the car and they did an amazing job.  I’d driven Mike’s car stock and the post-headers & tune difference was amazing.  As hard as that car pulled stock the power after ECS had their hands on it was incredible.  The power came in earlier and the delivery was smooth all the way up through the RPM band. So I exchanged a few e-mails with Chris from ECS and setup an appointment.

Friday 10/24/08 was my turn to see the boys at ECS. Since I already had headers on my car I was having the ECS boys do the “Stage I” package, which is a Vararam cold air intake, a 160F thermostat and a dyno tune. I never got one of those round tuits to install my intended Honker CAI so I figured I’d let the pros take care of it.  Mike did the install on the CAI and t-stat and it’s just amazing how easy things are when you know what you’re doing. Didn’t take him much more than an hour to do both.

Once Mike finished it was Doug’s turn with the car.  He took it out on the street for nearly 1.5 hours with a pair of laptops and an O2 sensor hanging off the back adjusting the air/fuel mixture and timing.  Those who aren’t inflicted with the same mental illness as some of my friends and I are now wondering “why the HELL do you need to do that??”  Well here’s the deal… engines are all managed by computers these days and the programs that run them are designed very conservatively. Engineers can’t count on the fact that you’ll always use the right octane fuel, that you won’t fire the motor and start driving the car before a drop of oil can move up out of the pan and into the drivetrain, etc so they makes tons of compromises for reliability.  This means there is tons of room in the programming to improve performance. So this is what Doug was doing out there with my car, and then he came back to finish it off on the dyno.

ECS uses a Dynapack 4000 chassis dynamometer. There are non-stop arguments about the validity of dyno numbers, the variance from brand-to-brand, the proper corrections. I was told that Dynapack produces generally lower numbers than Mustang dynos that a lot of folks use, but while the number is certainly interesting (and Tim Taylor-like grunt producing) what really matters is how the car performs so I won’t engage in a debate about the numbers.  Doug let me watch the last couple of pulls and I took some video with Joe’s camcorder (still waiting for Joe to pull the vids off for me so I can post!).  It’s a pretty cool process.  With the Dynapack they lift the car and attach the dyno directly to the hubs so it’s inherently safer than running on a cylinder with the car strapped down.  But what you really want to hear about are the results, right?

Click here to read about the results!

Our 3rd and last day started the way the others had, too early!  But the 5:30 alarm gave us time to have some coffee, my continental-influenced (damn Germans!) breakfast of ham & Swiss on toasted sourdough, and check our e-mail during that limited window of opportunity when the office was open and we were accessible.  Then it was back in the car and down Hwy 160 again.

Random Road Shot from Highway 160

Wednesday’s second instructor was Justin, also known as JJ and according to the back of his helmet, J.Man.  When asked what he actually went by he didn’t seem to have a preference. As Jordan had called him JJ to us the previous day that’s what we stuck with.

The day began as the day prior had, with heel-toe shifting practice.  With 3 of us and 2 instructors it gave those of us still not comfortable with it, in other words everyone except Joe, some one-on-one time.  Actually after a few runs I found myself falling into a rhythm and noticed I wasn’t picking my heel up off the floor as I had been.  Not going to argue with it, so I stayed with it and it seemed to work better for me.  As we had the instructors available I asked JJ to hop in and offer some advice.  Overall he thought I was getting the hang of it and would improve with continued practice. I felt much better about the heel-toe shifting by the end of that session and Clown-foot continued merrily along as well.

The next thing was an exercise & self-test to see how our visual scanning technique was coming along.  Jordan had mentioned the previous day that they would put us on a track we’d never seen before. We assumed that he meant the other piece of the track they have there, the 1.5 mile layout.  Well we know how assumptions go, so of course it was something completely different - the same track we’d been running… but in reverse.  They wanted us to keep the speed to 45 mph and just concentrate on spotting apexes and turn-in points.  WOW does the track in reverse look completely different! The turn-in and most of the apex cones they had spotted around the track were useless so we were on our own. With each lap you got a bit more confident, but turns 2 & 4 (numbered running the track the normal way) were the tough ones as the approaches left you a lot of options for turn-in.  I don’t know that I turned in and apexed those corners at the same point any two laps, but I think I was sneaking up on it.  It was a very educational and fun exercise.

We did a debrief on the reverse track discussing some of the cornering techniques and then it was time to brief us on open lapping sessions.  The first new thing was that we’d have to wear helmets.  All the previous sessions had been speed limited because we were following the instructors so helmets weren’t necessary, but since in the open lap sessions we weren’t limited we had to wear helmets.  This would become an issue as the day moved along, but I’ll whine about that later. We were instructed about where passing was allowed and how to go about it.  They would call for the passes on the radio if necessary, but they preferred we keep an eye on our mirrors and move over on the backstretch (preferably) or frontstretch to let the faster car by. If you were the faster car they asked that you be patient if you caught up to the other car before those areas, maintain a 5-6 car length gap and then pass when permitted.  Also sometime during the first session an instructor had to ride with you for a few laps to sign you off to be able to run in the afternoon hot lapping sessions.

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