The LazyAssGeek’s

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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Day 2 dawned dark & early, though we more or less were keeping ourselves on Eastern time. It made that 5:30 alarm a heck of a lot easier to deal with when your body thinks it’s 8:30. THIS time I remembered my camera, and even the extra batteries. Aren’t you proud? Gee, thanks. So back to Highway 160 we went and off into the mountains for the run down to Pahrump. Here are a couple of shots to try to give you an idea of how it looks, brings to mind a description our Dad relayed to us a long while back about parts of the West of Ireland – “terrible beauty.”

Heading West on Highway 160 on the Vegas side

How's that for a desert road, Biggi?

We got settled into the common area with cups of coffee, chatting with Renee and her husband Bill as well as our instructor Jordan.  We were supposed to have a 4th student and were waiting, and waiting, and then a radio call came in to Jordan that he would not be joining us. He had been struggling to get the car going with the clutch on Monday as it had been a long time since he’d driven a manual and I guess he decided it was just too frustrating. It was really a shame he gave up, because that is the perfect environment to practice.  The C6 is tough to get moving SMOOTHLY because of the torque so it can easily frustrate you, but the torque is actually your friend in getting the car moving.  On the first day the instructors demonstrated this by having us get the cars moving on a level surface by simply letting out the clutch without touching the gas. If you go nice & easy at the grab-point the car will just glide forward. But apparently the frustration factor was too high for this gentleman to deal with and enjoy himself, so we moved on without him.

That left Jordan, and Tuesday’s instructor du jour Barry(that’s a joke you guys, having a different second instructor each day was actually pretty cool as it gave you additional perspectives, even if Barry is a Tony hater) to deal with just Renee, Joe and me.  It was practically private instruction and made for a relaxed environment to learn in. You’ll be relieved to learn, dear reader, that the postings for the next two days aren’t likely to be as long as the post from Day 1, but that’s not because we did any less, it’s just because we would be learning fewer new skills and therefore fewer exercises to describe.  Instead we would be mostly applying those previous lessons and trying to improve on those skills by doing laps, mostly in Lead/Follow sessions on this day.

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After a drive across the desert on Highway 160 (last gas for 40 miles!) that had gorgeous scenery we arrived at Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch.  Wouldn’t it have been cool if that picture had been taken just as we arrived? Well since I forgot my camera back at the time share that wasn’t possible (ok, you done now? Good, let’s move on).  You cross the front straight as you pull into the facility, which is kinda strange the first time when you haven’t seen how they work their gate system.  We parked out front and headed inside to sign our lives away, pretty much literally, and acknowledge the $8000 damage deductible on the insurance included with the school package. You can pony up another $200 to take care of most of that, but we were feeling confident so opted against that.  The course we were taking is the Level 1 3-Day Corvette Program.

After meeting the group, 7 of us on the first day, our instructor Jordan gave us an overview of what we’d be doing over the 3 days.  2 of the folks in the group were there for only the 1 day “Corvette Performance Highlights” class.  One guy (Sal) had been riding a motorcyle at a track day there over the weekend and since he was thinking about buying a Vette decided to hang around and take the 1 day.  The other 1 day guy (Danny) was in Vegas with his wife and while she was at a conference he decided to head on down to Pahrump. An employee of the facility, Mitch, was also taking the 1 day because he had some projects coming up for the company and needed some first hand experience.

After that introduction it was right to the cars! My first ride was a silver Z06, though for the upcoming exercise I really didn’t get to take advantage of the differences between it and a standard C6, that would come on Wednesday(cue the dramatic music) and frankly at that moment I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the differences anyway. If I remember correctly Joe got a yellow C6. They took us over to the skid pad where they had a braking exercise setup. They start you off with the ABS fuse pulled, which disables ALL of the computer assists so we had raw, 430-505hp rides under us. The first exercise was to get the car to 35mph and when you got to a pair of cones hit the brakes and bring the car to a stop.  Here’s where it gets interesting though – the skid pad has a special, very slippery sealer on it, and they were standing there with a fire hose and had wet down the braking zone. The idea was to “threshold” brake, get the wheels up to lock and then release, modulating them to keep them as close to lock as you could but not keep them locked and bring the car to a halt. OK, so we did that a couple of times, and then they wanted us to come down at 35 again and this time just pound on the brakes and lock ‘em up, trying to get a 4-wheel lock immediately.  Joe got it first time, took me a second try as instinct kept me from really hammering on them the first time.  Even on a wet, slippery surface with the wheels locked down the Vettes come to a stop very quickly. I took this lousy cell phone camera pic while waiting my turn, since I neglected to bring along the real thing(would you PLEASE let it go).

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